If you told me a decade ago that I could have a fuzzy search engine on my desktop that I could use to vaguely describe some program that I needed & it would go out into the universe of publicly available source code & return something that looks as close to the thing I’ve asked for as it can find then that would have been mindblowing. Suddenly I have (slightly lossy) access to all the code ever written, if I can describe it.
Same for every other field of human endeavour! Who cares if AI can “think“ or “do new things”? What it can do is amazing & sometimes extremely powerful. (Sometimes not, but that’s the joy of new technology!)
the things that AI is able to do are incredible, but hype levels are just totally detached from reality.
But it can already do that. Isn't that the whole "one-shotting" thing?
The problem is, of course, that it won't be optimized, maintainable or have anyone responsible you can point to if something with it goes wrong. It almost certainly (unless you carefully prompted it to) won't have a test suite, which means any changes (even fixes) to it are risky.
So it's basically a working mockup generator.
I am so, so tired of "semi-technical" youtubers showing off new models with one-shots. The vast majority of actual devs who use this stuff need it to work over long-term context windows and over multiple iterations.
Remember the hype isn’t just “wow it’s so cool and amazing and useful”, it’s also “I can’t wait to fire all my dumb meat-based employees”
Some people can't see past how the trick is done (take training data and do a bunch of math/statistics on it), but the fact that LLMs are able to build the thing is in-and-of-itself interesting and useful (and fun!).
If the results are useful, then that’s what matters. Although I do suspect that some AI users are spending more time pulling the AI one-armed bandit handle than it would take them to just solve their problem the old fashioned way a lot of the time - but if pulling the one-armed bandit gets them a solution to their problem that they wouldn’t work up the motivation to solve themselves then that counts too, I guess.
Edit: for the young, wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) was common for all sorts of languages from c++ to Delphi to html. You could draw up anything you wanted. Many had native bindings to data sources of all kinds. My favourite was actually HyperCard because I learned it in grade school.
Good times!
Boilerplate generation was never, ever the bottleneck.
* Scaffolding first and foremost - It's usually fine for this, I typically ask "give me the industry standard project structure for x language as designed by a Staff level engineer" blah blah just give me a sane project structure to follow and maintain so I don't have to wonder after switching around to yet another programming language (I'm a geek, sue me).
* Code that makes sense at first glance and is easy to maintain / manage, because if you blindly take code you don't understand, you'll regret it the moment you need to be called in for a production outage and you don't know your own codebase.
