Wow, the text generator that doesn’t actually understand what it’s “writing” is making mistakes? Who could have seen that coming?
I once asked one to write a basic 50-line Python program (just to flesh things out), and it made so many basic errors that any first-year CS student could catch. Nobody should trust LLMs with anything related to security, FFS.
Nobody should trust LLMs with anything
ftfy
also any inputs are probably scrapped and used for training, and none of these people get GDPR
Eh, I’d say mostly.
I have one right now that looks at data and says “Hey, this is weird, here are related things that are different when this weird thing happened. Seems like that may be the cause.”
Which is pretty well within what they are good at, especially if you are doing the training yourself.
My experience with ChatGPT goes like this:
- Write me a block of code that makes x thing
- Certainly, here’s your code
- Me: This is wrong.
- You’re right, this is the correct version
- Me: This is wrong again.
- You’re right, this is the correct version
- Me: Wrong again, you piece of junk.
- I’m sorry, this is the correct version.
- (even more useless code) … and so on.
That sums up my experience too, but I have found it good for discussing functions for SQL and Powershell. Sometimes, it’ll throw something into its garbage code and I’ll be like “what does this do?” It’ll explain how it’s supposed to work, I’ll then work out its correct usage and solve my problem. Weirdly, it’s almost MORE helpful than if it just gave me functional code, because I have to learn how to properly use it rather than just copy/paste what it gives me.
All the while it gets further and further from the requirements. So you open five more conversations, give them the same prompt, and try pick which one is least wrong.
All the while realising you did this to save time but at this point coding from scratch would have been faster.
I interviewed someone who used AI (CoPilot, I think), and while it somewhat worked, it gave the wrong implementation of a basic algorithm. We pointed out the mistake, the developer fixed it (we had to provide the basic algorithm, which was fine), and then they refactored and AI spat out the same mistake, which the developer again didn’t notice.
AI is fine if you know what you’re doing and can correct the mistakes it makes (i.e. use it as fancy code completion), but you really do need to know what you’re doing. I recommend new developers avoid AI like the plague until they can use it to cut out the mundane stuff instead of filling in their knowledge gaps. It’ll do a decent job at certain prompts (i.e. generate me a function/class that…), but you’re going to need to go through line-by-line and make sure it’s actually doing the right thing. I find writing code to be much faster than reading and correcting code so I don’t bother w/ AI, but YMMV.
An area where it’s probably ideal is finding stuff in documentation. Some projects are huge and their search sucks, so being able to say, “find the docs for a function in library X that does…” I know what I want, I just may not remember the name or the module, and I certainly don’t remember the argument order.
AI is fine if you know what you’re doing and can correct the mistakes it makes (i.e. use it as fancy code completion)
I’m not a developer and i havent touched code for over 10 yrs, but when i heard about my company pushing AI tools on the devs, i thought exactly what you said. It should be a tool for experienced devs who already know what they’re doing…
Lo and behold they did the opposite… They fired all the senior people and pushed AI on the interns and new grads… and then expected AI to suddenly make the jr devs work like the expensive Sr devs they just fired…
Wtf
I wish we could say the students will figure it out, but I’ve had interns ask for help and then I’ve watched them try to solve problems by repeatedly asking ChatGPT. It’s the scariest thing - “Ok, let’s try to think about this problem for a moment before we - ok, you’re asking ChatGPT to think for a moment. FFS.”
Has critical thinking ever been taught? Feel like it’s just something you have or you don’t.
I had a chat w/ my sibling about the future of various careers, and my argument was basically that I wouldn’t recommend CS to new students. There was a huge need for SW engineers a few years ago, so everyone and their dog seems to be jumping on the bandwagon, and the quality of the applicants I’ve had has been absolutely terrible. It used to be that you could land a decent SW job without having much skill (basically a pulse and a basic understanding of scripting), but I think that time has passed.
I absolutely think SW engineering is going to be a great career long-term, I just can’t encourage everyone to do it because the expectations for ability are going to go up as AI gets better. If you’re passionate about it, you’re going to ignore whatever I say anyway, and you’ll succeed. But if my recommendation changes your mind, then you probably aren’t passionate enough about it to succeed in a world where AI can write somewhat passable code and will keep getting (slowly) better.
I’m not worried at all about my job or anyone on my team, I’m worried for the next batch of CS grads who chatGPT’d their way through their degree. “Cs get degrees” isn’t going to land you a job anymore, passion about the subject matter will.
Outsourcing killed a lot of the junior and even mid-level career level opportunities in CS and AI seems on track to do the same.
The downside is that going into CS now (and having gone into CS in the last decade or so, especially in English-speaking countries) was basically the career equivalent of just out of the starting line running full speed into a brick wall.
The upside is that for anybody who now is a senior techie things have never been this good because there are significantly fewer people at that level than there is need for such people, since in the last decade or so a lot of people haven’t had the chance to progress in their careers to that point.
Whilst personally this benefits me, I’m totally against this shit and what it has done to the kids entering my career.
And that’s not even getting into how flooded the sector is with the hundreds of thousands being laid off for the past few years
Altering the prompt will certainly give a different output, though. Ok, maybe “think about this problem for a moment” is a weird prompt; I see how it actually doesn’t make much sense.
However, including something along the lines of “think through the problem step-by-step” in the prompt really makes a difference, in my experience. The LLM will then, to a higher degree, include sections of “reasoning”, thereby arriving at an output that’s more correct or of higher quality.
This, to me, seems like a simple precursor to the way a model like the new o1 from OpenAI (partly) works; It “thinks” about the prompt behind the scenes, presenting only the resulting output and a hidden (by default) generated summary of the secret raw “thinking” to the user.
Of course, it’s unnecessary - maybe even stupid - to include nonsense or smalltalk in LLM prompts (unless it has proven to actually enhance the output you want), but since (some) LLMs happen to be lazy by design, telling them what to do (like reasoning) can definitely make a great difference.
What llm did you use, and how long ago was it? Claude sonnet usually writes pretty good python for smaller scripts (a few hundred lines)
It was ChatGPT from earlier this year. It wasn’t a huge deal for me that it made mistakes, because I had a very specific use case and just wanted to save some time; I knew I’d have to troubleshoot grafting it into my function, but even after I pointed out that it was using depreciated syntax (and how to correct it), it just spat out the code again with even more errors and still using depreciated syntax.
All LLMs will fail like this in some way, because they don’t actually understand what they’re generating (i.e. they have no mechanism for self-evaluating the veracity of their statements).
This is a very simple one, but someone lower down apparently had issue with a script like this:
https://i.imgur.com/wD9XXYt.png
I tested the code, it works. If I was gonna change anything, probably move matplotlib import to after else so it’s only imported when needed to display the image.
I have a lot more complex generations in my history, but all of them have personal or business details, and have much more back and forth. But try it yourself, claude have a free tier. Just try to be clear in the prompt what you want. It might surprise you.