I agree, and it’s why I have come to dislike OpenAI.

We are getting front row seats to an object lesson in “absolute power corrupts absolutely”, and I am relieved they have a host of strong competitors.

The difference between Google had it just tried to be an enterprise search API, versus owning the consumer destination for search input/results.

This sounds like a good way of guaranteeing profits and moving the mindset away from just producing good products.

Your argument, which could be correct, makes their choice of the name ChatPGT* even more idiotic

* Or which ever variant the average user might try to type in

Those look more like one-off prompts, and not a proper chat/collab with Gemini.

Every app with a significant installed user base is adding AI features.

OP is lamenting that Cursor and OpenAI chose to create new apps instead of integrating with (someone else’s) existing apps. But this is a result of a need to be always fully unblocked.

Also, owning the app opens up greater financial potential down the line…

How many people use Pages these days? I don't think Apple even mentions the product in their WWDC these days. My guess is that most people either use Microsoft suite as required by their employer or use cloud based knowledge base/notes tools like Notion/Quip/Obsidian/Confluence etc. I doubt Apple thinks it worthwhile to invest in these products.

Apparently it is predicted(1) that their API is a profit making business while chatgpt is a loss leader so far…

(1) https://www.tanayj.com/p/openai-and-anthropic-revenue-breakd...

75%? Thats astonishing to me. Where are you able to see those details?

It wouldn't surprise me if not a lot of enterprises are going through OpenAI's enterprise agreements - most already have a relationship with Microsoft in one capacity or another so going through Azure just seems like the lowest friction way to get access. If how many millions we spend on tokens through Azure to OpenAI is any indication of what other orgs are doing, I would expect consumer's $20/month to be a drop in the bucket.

never figured out on how to activate it in my workspace

The most amazing thing with notebooklm is that is can turn your docs into a very high quality podcast of two people discussing the content of your docs.

The Amazon model.

Same as it ever was.

It's pretty trivial to get increased limits, I've used the API for a few consulting projects and got to tier 4 in a month. At that point you can burn near $200 a day and 2 million tokens per minute.

You only need 45 days to get tier 5 and if you have that many customers after 45 days you should just apply to YC lol.

Maybe you checked over a year ago, which was the wild wild West at the time, they didn't even have the tier limits.

150,000,000 tokens per minute and 30,000 requests per minute is unusable?! Maybe that’s just Tier 5 but the API is most definitely not unusable.

I’m firmly in the camp that their rate limits are entirely reasonable.

You need to use it for some time to get into their higher tiers of usage. I used to also have this problem and it annoyed me greatly, but once I got to usage tier 4 it never happened again (except for o1-preview but that just wastes tokens IMO).

You mean downstream, not upstream. Upstream is closer to the raw materials.

> If they don't secure their position as #1 Chatbot I think they will eventually become #2, then #3, etc.

But can they do it at all? It's not like they are like early Google vs other search engines.

Microsoft is integrating Copilot into many of their products, including Visual Studio and Office/365.

Eh, GitHub CoPilot? Microsoft is literally THE company that understands developers' workflows and creates good IDEs.

Cursor is a funny company. They were invested into by OpenAI, but almost everyone using Cursor uses it with Claude Sonnet 3.5.

> which is basically ChatGPT?

Yea, I'm wondering the same. Is there any good resource to look up whether copilot follows the ChatGPT updates? I would be renewing my subscription, but it does not feel like it has improved similarly to how the new models have...

But my subscription at $20/mo is a fraction of my API usage at $5/day (about $100/mo).

You can sell a lot more GPT services through a higher bandwidth channel — and OpenAI doesn’t give me a way to reach the same bandwidth through their user interface.

idk, I can definitely see value in a lightweight LLM component for VIM to help me look up the correct command sequence to exit :P

I only use Gemini in Colab perhaps 5% of the times I use Colab, yet it is nice to have.

I use Gemini, OpenAI, Claude, smaller models in Grok, and run small models locally using Ollama. I am getting to the point where I am thinking I would be better off choosing one (or two.)

Why do you ask? I did use "4o with canvas" shortly after writing the above. To be clear, my original comment was not about the actual OpenAI implementation of a "canvas style chatbot", but rather that I have found the canvas-chat-UX to be the most effective way to interact with a chatbot. I am basing this on many hours with both ChatGPT (non-canvas until today) and Claude/Anthropic (who has had this feature). As of this writing, I prefer Claude both because of (a) the content of its output and (b) the canvas style, which allows my brain to easily parse what is the topic vs. discussion about the topic.

Not the op, but I just tried it. I agree with his point that this is a huge step up in having the discussion and then a separate canvas where the work takes place, and then iterations are done to the canvas.

I LOVE the UX animation effect ChatGPT added to show the canvas being updated (even if it really is just for show).

Here's my user test so you know I actually used it. My jaw begins to drop around minute 7: https://news.pub/?try=https://www.youtube.com/embed/jx9LVsry...

That's funny, I do the exact same thing. If I'm out and about or otherwise not at a computer, and I have an idea or solution to a bug I wanted to solve, I'll fire up an LLM on my phone (usually Claude these days) and basically brainstorm together the pros and cons, with code sometimes as well.

And venture capital.

Bonus points if you work for Canva.

Will also need to port it to a Slack Canvas.

Can you please use Obsidian to create a canvas showing the situation? ;-)

Strangely too short for AI.

How things get named Canvas:

"Name it clay" -- artistic CMO

"Won't people think they will have to get their hands dirty?" -- CEO

"Right. Name it sculpt. It has a sense of je ne sais quoi about it." -- hipster CMO

"No one can spell sculpt, and that French does not mean what you think it means." -- CFO

"Got it! Name it canvas! It's a blank canvas! It can be anything!" -- CMO

"Perfect!" -- Entire executive team who is now sick of CMO's naming excercise.

> wonder how Paul Graham thinks of Sam Altman basically copying Cursor

If OpenAI can copy Cursor, so can everyone else.

It's just a company that promised AGI would somehow come from developing LLM-based products, rapidly scrambling to keep up with other LLM-based products, to distract from the fact that it's becoming increasingly apparent that AGI is not coming anytime soon.

Cursor was one of the first AI editors I used, but recently Aider has completely replaced the AI assisted coding for me. I still use cursor but just as an editor, all LLM work is done with aider in the shell.

Like Amazon cloning the best selling products, bringing them in house, and then closing the accounts of competitors.

Met a guy who got brought in by Amazon after they hit 8 figures in sales, wined and dined, then months later Amazon launched competing product and locked them out of their accounts, cost them 9 figures.

> potentially every upstream AI company out of YC

You mean downstream.

Agreed on the principle (using the better product) but interestingly I've had the opposite experience when comparing Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs GPT 4o.

Claude's been far and away superior on coding tasks. What have you been testing for?

I have the exact opposite experience. I canceled my crapGPT subscription after >1 year because Claude blew it out of the water in every use case.

Projector make it even better. But I could imagine it depends on the specific needs one has.

This hasn't been my experience. Claude often hallucinates less for me and is able to reason better in fields where knowledge is obscure.

ChatGPT will just start to pretend like some perfect library that doesn't exist exists.

I code and document code and imho Claude is superior, try to tell Gpt to draw a mermaid chart to explain a code flow... the mermaid generated will have syntax errors half of the time.

Code output from is Claude pretty good. It seems to hallucinate less than o1 for me. It's been a struggle to get o1 to stop referencing non-existent methods and functions.

This is why free markets aren't the solution to all our problems.

This is similar to Artifacts [0] in Claude.

[0] https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9487310-what-are-a...

I think you can enable Artifacts, which are similar to OpenAI Canvas. Recently, Anthropic also added the ability to select elements within the created Artifact and adjust them (e.g., adjust length, improve code), similar to what Canvas can do.

Claude can generate Artifacts but they are not inline editable and they keep getting regenerated at every prompt.

Canvas appears to be different in that it allows inline editing and also prompting on a selection. So not the same as Claude.

I'm guessing they mean Artifacts: https://www.anthropic.com/news/artifacts

Attempting to do any form of security work using LLM is nigh impossible without a few steps of nudging it out of its “while user is asking me to do bad things: say no” loop.

After a year of heavy LLM use I’ve found the utility limits, my usage has peaked, and I’m developing very restrictive use cases.

Beyond functioning as an interactive O’Reilly manual, LLM only save time if you never read the code they produce. Which is a short term win, but things will blow up eventually, as with all code, and now you’ve got a bigger problem than you started with.

insuflating?

In your landing page it says about competitors

> They're not wasting hours trying to "figure out" a solution

I am pretty sure that we don't have AGI that would figure our solutions to our problems (coding or not) on its own yet. And from experience, you would need to solve the problems at least conceptually before using LLM and try to get something useful out of that.

That's probably the most FOMO driven landing page I've seen so far! I'll bite:

    Your competition is using AI to build their product right now.
    They're not writing code by hand.
    They're not Googling code answers on StackOverflow.
    They're not wasting hours trying to "figure out" a solution.

Let's see how far I get without "Googling answers".

Spoiler: If the competition uses such AI that, good for me!

(Note I don't want to pick on Parrot here; from my first 5 minutes with the tool, it's /fun/, has a nice UI, a good idea for iteration, and somebody has to build such tools to make them work eventually even if they don't work great today yet. I wish it lots of success. But I want to also point out examples of the practical limitations of all such tools, and state that I highly doubt that they today can _in any way_ replace a human programmer who knows what they are doing, and has the awesome skill to use Google, StackOverflow, and "figure out" things.)

Prompt:

    I need a Haskell function that hashes a given file (FilePath)
    with the blake3 hash function.
    It is important that it works on large files (e.g. 100 GB)
    without freezing the Haskell runtime.

    import qualified Crypto.Hash.BLAKE3 as BLAKE3
    import qualified Data.ByteString as BS
    import System.IO (withFile, IOMode(ReadMode))

    hashFileBLAKE3 :: FilePath -> IO BS.ByteString
    hashFileBLAKE3 filePath = do
      let chunkSize = 8192  -- 8KB chunks
      withFile filePath ReadMode $ \handle -> do
        let loop ctx = do
              chunk <- BS.hGet handle chunkSize
              if BS.null chunk
                then return $ BLAKE3.finalize ctx
                else loop $! BLAKE3.update ctx chunk
        loop BLAKE3.init

    This Haskell function, `hashFileBLAKE3`, calculates the BLAKE3 hash of a
    given file. It's designed to work efficiently with large files without
    freezing the Haskell runtime. Here's a step-by-step explanation of how it
    works:

    1. We import necessary modules: `Crypto.Hash.BLAKE3` for the BLAKE3 hash
       function, `Data.ByteString` for efficient byte handling, and `System.IO`
       for file operations.

    2. The function takes a `FilePath` as input and returns an `IO ByteString`
       containing the hash.

    3. We define a `chunkSize` of 8192 bytes (8KB) for reading the file in
       manageable chunks.

    4. The `withFile` function is used to safely open and close the file,
       ensuring proper resource management.

    5. Inside the file handling function, we define a recursive `loop` that
       reads the file in chunks:
       - It reads a chunk of the file using `BS.hGet`.
       - If the chunk is empty (end of file), it finalizes and returns the
         hash.
       - Otherwise, it updates the hash context with the new chunk and
         continues the loop.

    6. The loop starts with `BLAKE3.init` to create the initial hash context.

    7. By using lazy evaluation (`$!`), we ensure that the hash context is
       strictly evaluated in each iteration, preventing memory buildup.

    This implementation is memory-efficient and can handle very large files
    without issues, as it processes the file in small chunks rather than
    loading it entirely into memory.

    * This solution is already pretty good.
    * The explanation is also useful for people new to Haskell
      or this type of task.
    * Some explanations are subtly wrong, e.g. `$!` is the
      _opposite_ of lazy evaluation, and the sentence
      is contradicting itself.
    * It mainly got the imported module name wrong
      (should be `import BLAKE3` from
      https://hackage.haskell.org/package/blake3).
      Let's see if it fixes it when I tell it what I'd observe
      when trying to compile the code.
      A simple Google search for "haskell blake3" should point out the correct name.

    The mentioned `Crypto.Hash.BLAKE3` module doesn't exist as a Haskell library.

    import Crypto.Hash (hash, Blake2b_512, Digest)
    import qualified Data.ByteString as BS
    import qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy as LBS
    import System.IO (withFile, IOMode(ReadMode))

    hashFileBLAKE2b :: FilePath -> IO (Digest Blake2b_512)
    hashFileBLAKE2b filePath = do
      let chunkSize = 8192  -- 8KB chunks
      withFile filePath ReadMode $ \handle -> do
        let loop acc = do
              chunk <- BS.hGet handle chunkSize
              if BS.null chunk
                then return $ hash (LBS.fromChunks acc)
                else loop (chunk : acc)
        loop []

    * I asked for BLAKE3, but now it implemented BLAKE2B.
    * The solution is very wrong.
      It splits the file into _reversed_ chunks and then hashes them.
      The error is subtle and will be hard to debug.

But it certainly is fun and there's definitely some usefulness in there, especially for learning general concepts that are well understood.

I guess in the end it's this: Programmers don't need to "roughly get it right" (which is what current tools do well) when it comes to products. They need to get it /precisely/ right.

I have no love for Altman - he Altman seems like a (very successful) huckster to me, but I also read the sexual assault allegations as coming from a very mentally disturbed person, to the point that I'm not going to use that data point as part of my judgement of him.

(edited: removed link about some parties organized by influential people)

the sexual assault allegations seem bogus to me

> something about the expressions and behavior of Sam Altman gives me the creeps even before I was aware of the allegations against him.

He has the exact same vibe as Elizabeth Holmes. He does seem to be a bit better at it though.

Comments on HN are made by all sorts of people, some are geniuses that contribute authentically to threads that interest them, and some others operate or invest in glorified template generators that they use to write propaganda about their own products in order to fake popularity and consensus. If one believes everyone else is a genius that uses whichever product, then whoever's not on that train is already obsolete. The nature and style of top comments on LLM related (last years news) threads often reads in such a predictible and distinguishable way from other arbitrary threads that it seems a bit... robotic. Same thing on Reddit.

I was coincidentally looking into this yesterday, trying to find an implementation of JS sandbox to run AI-generated code or web apps in.

A similar project is sandpack, but that relies on nodebox which is also closed source.

I tried Bolt this morning for about 5 minutes, and it did output valid React code, but things like inputs and buttons it created didn't work without additional prompting, and then it started throwing "There was an error processing your request"

Just tried it, it wrote promising code but in the end only the last file was created and the other files had no content (even though I saw them being written). Seems a bit bugged at the moment.

EDIT: Only seems to work in Chrome?

"Blitz" literally just means "lightning"

It's a chatbot... what UI features that OAI provided that you couldn't find in other providers before? I've found Claude 3.5 to give the better responses in my experience.

Have you tried Claude? I don’t see how it could be much better than that.

If I genuinely thought I was close to AGI, I’d focus all my efforts on that, then ask it to build my revenue generators.

That’s probably what Ilya is doing.

(FWIW I don’t think we’re close to AGI).

And yet... still not showing up on Version 1.2024.268 (1727484326)

This looks amazing. Simply incredible what we are able to do. I'm ready for the next industrial revolution -- It's happening, now!

I believe it's not solving a real problem. I believe that the human skills of reasoning, logical thinking, etc. make it possible for any able minded human to do the things I just mentioned, given time and money is provided. AI can't do that. Let's call that process "programming". It cant do programming. It pretends to program.

Cursor's moat always seems a shaky proposition. Clone VS code, add a few custom blobs and extensions, API to existing LLMs.

For that, $20/M per head to be usable? Yikes.

I get the argument against AI tools when it's about them not working as well as the hype says they do, but not when they are the "how dare you use a tool that makes it easier for you! That's cheating!" argument. When I was in school cheap pocket calculators were just becoming available. All of my teachers banned them as they saw them as an existential threat to teaching math and science. These days students are generally allowed calculators -- the teachers finally accepted that it's a good thing that tools can automate the rote parts so that teaching can move on to the more interesting and thought-provoking parts.

Content writers like you already destroyed the Internet by filling it with SEO word vomit everywhere.

Would love a more specific example of this. How to use this architect mode.

BTW surprised that tarballs work - aren’t these compressed?

Counterpoint: don't try to own people like farm animals. Have pride in humanity, faith in your fellow man, and resist toxic cynicism.

Speaking of energy use. Microsoft is literally in talks to restart a nuclear plant where they will buy all the power[1]. It happens to be "Three Mile Island" plant [2]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03162-2

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3...

> large parts of the population will lose the ability to think. Try to own them like farm animals.

You're so edgy that you might cut yourself, be careful. What is wrong with making profit by helping people through providing a service?

> Try to own them like farm animals.

Jesus christ, I hope you are never in a position of any significant power

There are three groups of people here:

1.) Those who use AI and talk about it.

2.) Those who do not use AI and talk about it.

3.) Those who use AI and talk about how they do not and will not use AI.

You don't have to look far to see how humans react to performance enhancers that aren't exactly sanctioned as OK (Steroids).

Andrej is a great communicator. I've never seen evidence that he is an especially exceptional programmer.

I feel bad for the ppl who will or probably already are dealing with this crap. TFW someone shares a data dump with AI

How/where were you notified that you got it?

It's a staged rollout. You'll probably have it by tomorrow morning.

I believe you wait until your number comes up :/

it's under the model list on the web interface

Doesn't look like this is yet possible, no

> Part of the issue is that people who are experts at creating ML models aren’t experts at all the downstream tasks those models are asked to do.

Yep. CAD, music, poetry, comedy. Same pattern in each.

But it's more than not being experts: it's about a subliminal belief that there either isn't much to be expert in or a denial of the value of that expertise, like if what they do can be replicated by a neural network trained on the description, is it even expertise?

Unavoidably, all of this stuff is about allowing people to do, with software, tasks they would otherwise need experts for.

Well, I've just read back through some of your comments and I say that ain't so!

Write honestly. Write the way you write. Use your own flow, make your own grammatical wobbles, whatever they are. Express yourself authentically.

Don't let an AI do this to you.

you're not at all a terrible writer... although you do overuse ellipses in your comments.

I am trying to convince myself that I am not insane and everyone else is. The platform was literally down for me for a good 12 hours or so because they had an auth problem or bug. Their interface is subpar yet they are trying to convince people that this is replacing knowledge worker any minute now. I recommended to a friend that he uses chatGPT to write some English content and it did a bad job. I checked bolt yesterday and the code it produced for a very simple app was complete garbage hallucination.

I really like copilot/ai when the focus was about hyper-auto-complete. I wish the integration was LSP+autocomplete+compilation check+docs correlation. That will boost my productivity x10 times and save me some brain cycles. Instead we are getting garbage UX/Backends that are trying to fully replace devs. Give me a break.

They plateaued on model performance and they are hype based. They need to keep the momentum going by "releasing" stuff, so they are garbage out at the moment. Given that open weight models are so close to gpt-4, their value is exactly 0 unless they can produce a new model with a significant jump in coherence.

Them releasing this stuff actually suggest they don't have much progress in their next model. It's a sell signal but today's investors have made their money in zirp, so they have no idea about the real world market. In a sense this is the market funneling money from stupid to grifter.

Is it? I thought that was the draft, as a result of the dialogue in the sidebar. If I am wrong then OK!

Well, the UI has slider for length, so there is that.

It's not, is it? It's meant to be the draft it created from the notes.

Initially it had some real problems. large context window-- but you can only paste 4k tokens into the UI, for example. It never seemed like anyone at Google was using it. NotebookLM is a great interface, though, with some nice bells and whistles, and finally shows what Gemini is capable of. However, Opus still has the best long context retrieval with the least hallucination from what I've tried.

3.5 Sonnet is fast, and that is very meaningful to iteration speed, but I find for the level of complexity I throw at it, it strings together really bad solutions compared to the more wholistic solutions I can work through with Opus. I use Sonnet for general knowledge and small questions because it seems to do very well with shorter problems and is more up-to-date on libraries.

I don't know that I've ever seen someone recommend Gemini Advanced for "search". My experience is the model doesn't always tell you if it's using search or it's internal training, in fact I'm not sure if it even is "searching" the internet rather than accessing some internal google database.

In comparing it's performance to the pure model on Google AI studio I realized Gemini was presenting some sort of RAG results as the "answer" without disclosing where it got that information.

Perplexity, which is hardly perfect, will at least tell you it is searching the web and cite a source web page.

I'm basically saying Gemini fails at even the simplest thing you would want from a search tool: disclosing where the results came from.

I think they mean at the end of the clip they drag the slider from HTML to Typescript and it puts all of the blog data into structured Typescript data then writes a function which will generate an HTML page from that. The resulting blog output will still eventually be HTML, it's just whether the entries are made as data segments automatically stitched together or entered via raw HTML formatting.

I used OpenAI Canvas to help with the conversion. Essentially, I took the static HTML/CSS and wrote TypeScript to dynamically render blog posts.

right so it probably events out to $4-5M for a feature like this? Still surprisingly to me how expensive features like this are to build

i think chatgpt is not a product but a service like dropbox. i don't say it is useless or can't be sold. it is just a feature for a product. GPT, in itself, is a powerful technology or tool that enhances user experiences in various applications. It provides natural language processing capabilities like answering questions, generating text, assisting with tasks, and so on. However, without a specific context or integration into a larger platform, GPT is more akin to a feature that can improve or enable specific functionalities within products.

I haven't tried it, but have been considering it. I already pay for OpenAI, not sure I want to pay for another AI service.

Those bots are great - the maintainers dont bother fixing the issue, so it goes stale, gets auto-closed, and boom! Metrics go up. Another issue successfully closed! Another bug fixed! Until someone else opens a new issue for it, which can then be closed as duplicate. I love it!

I've done a ton of refactoring, from Python to Node / Deno, and it's surprisingly good — but not perfect.

Having it create a testing suite definitely helps. But it makes fewer mistakes than I would normally make... it's not perfect but it IS way better than me.

I am not talking about Apple now: 10 years ago they announced and I could order it the same night. That is magic. The rest is just; yeah who cares.

Pre-announcing makes no sense when you're leading the pack, it's a stall tactic for your customers to not leave when trying to catch up.

Are there any great AI plug-ins anyone recommends for Sublime Text?

For me it's still the cleanest editor.

VS Code is way too cluttered to be my daily driver for basic editing.

Sounds a little like aider.chat

Claude Dev does have a really nice UI nailed down. I was not aware that you could run local models yourself with it, which would be a great feature but kind of obviates the name.

I completely get this and I don’t have a good answer to the issue. I almost wish I liked VSCode since almost all AI editors are forks of that (not sure what the extension compatibility story is), but prefer IDEA.

The other problem is IDEs are incentivized to build their own AI coding tools instead of letting other people plug in

Emacs has none of these problems :p

Solid point. We’re building in a space adjacent to this and it definitely feels hard to balance removing friction for adoption and delivering everything we want.

Really? Jetbrains has their own AI? Their terms seem to indicate that they use 3rd party models. https://www.jetbrains.com/legal/docs/terms/jetbrains-ai/serv...

I’ve done something similar, but with a TUI to select files/directories as well as search!

https://github.com/patricktrainer/pbtree

I do something similar with a script. Don’t know if anything about my approach could improve yours, but I’m also curious if you have any suggestions?

- Mine prepends the result with the output of running `tree -I node_modules --noreport` before any other content. This informs the LLM of the structure of the project, which leads to other insights like it will know which frameworks and paradigms your project uses without you needing to explain that stuff. - Mine prepends the contents of each included file with “Contents of relative/path/to/file/from/root/of/project/filename.ts:” to reinforce the context and the file’s position in the tree.

Look, I'm just not interested in something that gives me code on the CLI. This is no better or worse than using ChatGPT / Canvas or any other external tool.

My project has well over half a million lines of code. I'm using an IDE (in my case Qt Creator) for a reason. I'd love to get help from an LLM but CLI or external browser windows just aren't the way. The overhead of copy/paste and lack of context is a deal breaker unfortunately.

In case I'm missing something, please let me know. I'm always happy to learn.

Technology also moves into dead ends. Not every change is progress. You can only tell a posteriori which paths were fruitful and which were not.

Overall I agree with everything you’ve said and I also use ChatGPT and Claude directly. The issue is that:

Good at integrating AI into a text editor != Good at building an IDE.

I worry about the ability for some of these VSCode forks to actually maintain a fork and again, I greatly prefer the power of IDEA. I’ll switch if it becomes necessary, but right now the lack of deep AI integration is not compelling enough to switch since I still have ways of using AI directly (and I have Copilot).

My coworkers do just fine with vim.

This is exactly what OpenAI and other want you to believe. "OH NO, I need to use LLMs for coding otherwise I will fall behind". No, no. Most of what makes a good software engineer cannot be replaced by LLMs. A good software engineer has a deep understanding of the problem space, works on the right things, and elevates their team members by coaching, helping etc. It's not about how fast you type your code.

I refuse to believe there were ever editors before vim.

Vim has been around since the Stone Age.

Jokes aside, I don’t really see why ai tools need new editors vs plugins EXCEPT that they don’t want to have to compete with Microsoft’s first party AI offerings in vscode.

It’s just a strategy for lock-in.

An exception may be like zed, which provides a lot of features besides AI integration which require a new editor.

Falling behind what?

I used this while Cursor was broken (Pylance problems), but Continue's code replace tooling sometimes will delete huge swaths of adjacent code. I've filed a comprehensive ticket in their repo and they're working on it, but I've been able to reproduce the problem recently.

I think it has to do with Cursor's much better custom small models for code search/replace, but can't be sure.

I didn't realise Continue had a Jetbrains IDE plugin. Neat! Going to give it a go.

I tried it a while back and had a lot of trouble getting it to work, it's on my list to try again. I also tried Sourcegraph's Cody and just constant errors even after paying for the Pro plan so now I'm back on Copilot.

I just tried it, has some bugs and feels unpolished, but it works for Jetbrains, which is a game changer for me too

And copilot workspace for people using github.

Continue.dev's plugin is as close as it gets for Cursor, but there are clearly limitations to a VSCode plugin when it comes to the inline editing and code search/replace - made a comment above about it.

I would.

Nice, there is also gptel https://github.com/karthink/gptel

Anyone aware of one supporting suggestions? I.e. the possibility to accept/decline LLM-suggested changes point by point?

I’m a professional IntelliJ plugin developer, this is absolutely not true. IntelliJ is incredibly customisable, and you can always code raw swing to achieve whatever you want if there’s something that the base platform doesn’t provide.

You either do local inference or get Azure OpenAI to have your own private gpt-4o or whatever. :)

Replit with AI support is web based and has GitHub integration.

it needs to be said that web dev is by far the area in which LLMs are more versed , i suppose due to the incredible amount of training data available. Other languages produce more allucinations for now.

I have had a similar experience. I build wordpress websites and ChatGPT has allowed me to extend their functionality a great deal without needing to learn how to code PHP.

This is the killer app for gen AI. Everything else said about AI e.g replacing workers is just building castles in the air.

I think in 4-5 years’ time there will be huge demand for fixing / maintaining these LLM-built apps. Perhaps the LLMs that follow can do it.

Mechanical Turks will be the first to go.

More seriously, the output quality of LLMs for code is pretty inconsistent. I think there's an analogy to be made with literature. For instance, a short story generated by an LLM can't really hold a candle to the work of a human author.

LLM-generated code can be a good starting point for avoiding tedious aspects of software development, like boilerplate or repetitive tasks. When it works, it saves a lot of time. For example, if I need to generate a bunch of similar functions, an LLM can sometimes act like an ad-hoc code generator, helping to skip the manual labor. I’ve also gotten some helpful suggestions on code style, though mostly for small snippets. It’s especially useful for refreshing things you already know—like quickly recalling "How do I do this with TypeScript?" without needing to search for documentation.

Anyway, literature writers and software engineers aren't going to be replaced anytime soon.

That thinking is driven by limited product imagination.

The kind of apps that will be built in the next 5 years,are nowhere near what we have today.

Developers will need to update their skillset, though.

It's the same thing that happened with mechanical looms. Programming will go from an artisan craft to the sweatshops and software programming will become low paying precarious gig work.

This is all about labor and capital. When people toss hundreds of billions at something it almost always is.

The social relationship doesn't have to be this way. Technological improvement could help us instead of screw us over. But we'd first have to admit that profit exploitation isn't absolutely the best thing ever and we'll never do that. Soooo here we are.

Sticking to my prediction that lawyers will be first.

I think there's a lot of evidence out there that supports your theory.

- There's the biggest/most high quality training corpus that captures all aspects of dev work (code, changes, discussions about issues, etc.) out there with open source hosting sites like GitHub

- Synthetic data is easy to generate and verify, you can just run unit tests/debugger in a loop until you get it right. Try doing that with contracts or tax statements.

- Little to no regulatory protections.

> Because programming is an activity that requires the least amount of "grounding to reality" among all human activities.

Maybe once you're deep into APIs that talk to other APIs, but near the surface where the data is collected there's nothing but "grounding to reality".

As my professor of Software Engineering put it: when building a system for counting the number of people inside a room most people would put a turnstile and count the turns. Does this fulfill the requirement? No - people can turn the wheel multiple times, leave through a window, give birth inside the room, etc. Is it good enough? Only your client can say, and only after considering factors like "available technology" and "budget" that have nothing to do with software.

Maintenance and long-term development will still require grounding to reality. A super-CEO might build the app themself, but keeping it running 5, 10, 20 years is a completely different deal. I imagine developers will eventually start to act more like librarians, knowing their system very well but not necessarily in charge of making new content.

When AGI comes, who are the first to go is solely decided by regulation. Nothing else.

No one has a job when AGI "takes over"? Weird take.

With AGI you won’t need most of the human race anymore, developers are just the tip of the iceberg.

Luckily ChatGPT and the rest have nothing to do with an AI not to mention AGI.

I have the exact opposite concern. Software is/was one of the few industries where a solo person can already compete with big companies, or at least live comfortably alongside. Just look at the market for niche or boutique software that does stuff like calendars or emails or task management in a particular way.

To me the current direction LLMs are headed seems like it will just further entrench the power of the trillion dollar megacorps because they’re the only people that can fund the creation and operation of this stuff.

Yes, this is more or less my life. I run a small bootstrapped startup and do some consulting on the side. I have a few decades of experience. So it's not like I can't do things myself. But chat GPT has enormously enhanced my output. It's rarely perfect but I can bridge the gap usually by completing the job. My role is increasingly directing changes and telling it what needs doing next.

Canvas sounds useful. I'll be playing with that as soon as I can access it.

Another useful thing in chat gpt that I've been leveraging is its memory function. I just tell it to remember instructions so I don't have to spell them out the next time I'm doing something.

I agree, and want to add: AI will make it possible to inexpensively produce small tailored applications that only support locally required functionality. The advantage to this is very small code bases that are easier to understand. In other words, it makes it possible to avoid huge mega apps that any particular user might use a small percentage of the functionality.

Also, is it possible that smaller focused apps will have few edge cases and be more reliable?

[dead]

You need to ask 'when'.

ChatGPT shows a clear path forward. Feedback loop (consistent improvement), tooling which leverages all of llms powers, writing unit tests automatically and running code (chatgpt can run python already, when will it able to run java and other langauges?)

And its arleady useful today for small things. Copilot is easier and more integrated than googling parameters or looking up documentation.

UIs/IDEs like curser.ai are a lot more integrated.

What you see today is just the beginning of a something, potentially big.

<insert manic laughter> I mean that might happen, but why get funding? Why not move to market immediately? Without debt. Get in the thick of it. Just do. You want a wage or do you want a product that does the thing. Because sometimes, with the llm, you can just build the thing. The marketing, the compliance, you might hire for that, or you might also out-source to the llm.

Why would you hire? Either it works- in the sense of does the job and is cost effective- or it is not.

Is there a situation where paying 100's of k of wages makes a thing suddenly a good idea? I have doubts.

This my technique- test the output, make sure it works (in the sense of outputs) the way I want. Test the input edge cases, move on. Occasionally when I can't get it to do what I want the llm suggests things like logging of output between functions etc- in which case they get added, but at the end I ask it to take out all the logging and make the code more concise.

And sometimes it breaks in ways I can't fix - so rolling back or picking a new patch from a know break point becomes important.

16 hours for my first azure pipeline, auto-updates from code to prod, static app including setting up git, vscode, node, azure creds etc. I chose a stack I have never seen at work (mostly see AWS) and I am not a coder. Last code was Pascal in the 1980s.

3rd app took 4 hours.

Built things I have wanted for 30 years.

But yes- no code understanding, brute force.

Yeah until you realize that a lot of small scale companies do the same thing with avg/bad developers for ages and ... It does work.

IF you don't have a central security team like in big companies or the need for an audit, what you don't know is what you don't care for.

Obviously until its too late but holy shit i have seen too much garbage just working for waaaay to long.

I also wonder what the person would have been hired for... maybe QA? I was doing this with random relevant scripts nearly 20 years ago but wasn't given a job where code would be relevant for the task until loooooong after I could comprehend what I was doing

Nono, he has shipped an app before learning to code.

The fact that he liked and enjoyed coding was what actually prompted him into learning to code after that first experience.

Why exactly?

Even letting people with experience is risky.

I mean the following:

`use matplotlib to generate an image with 3 bars of values 3, 6, 1`

followed by

`execute it`

https://chatgpt.com/share/66fefc66-13d8-800e-8428-815d9a07ae...

(apparently the shared link does not show the executed content, which was an image)

https://imgur.com/a/PkJCnKO

Which has interesting consequences, because I saw it self-execute code it generated for me and fix the errors contained in that code by itself two times until it gave me a working solution.

(Note that I am no longer a Plus user)

---

Claude: I apologize, but I don't have the ability to execute code or generate images directly. I'm an AI language model designed to provide information and assist with code writing, but I can't run programs or create actual files on a computer.

---

Gemini: Unfortunately, I cannot directly execute Python code within this text-based environment. However, I can guide you on how to execute it yourself.

---

> 4. Also you can use takeout

I just checked and wasn't able to takeout Gemini interactions. There are some irrelevant things like "start timer 5 minutes" which I triggered with my phone, absolutely unrelated to my Gemini chats. takeout.google.com has no Gemini section.