It’s surprising that it’s taken this long, given how good public AI coding assistants were a year ago. I’m skeptical of anything with only closed demos and not interactive use by outside reviewers, but there’s nothing unbelievable about it.
As a consumer, I don’t look forward to the deluge of low-quality apps that’s coming (though we already have it to some extent with the sheer number of low-quality coders in the world). As a developer,I don’t like the competition (mostly for “my” junior programmers, not yet me directly), and I worry a lot about whether the software profession can make great stuff ever again.
It’s surprising that it’s taken this long, given how good public AI coding assistants were a year ago.
The way I explain this to people is that current LLMs can be modeled as having three parts:
1. The improv actor, which is is amazing. 2. The reasoner, which is inconsistent but not totally hopeless at simple things. 3. The planner/execution/troubleshooting engine, which is still inferior to the average squirrel trying to raid a bird feeder.
Copilot is designed to rely on (1) and (2), but it is still almost entirely reliant on humans for (3). (GPT 4 Code Interpeter is slightly better at (3).)
Since I don’t really believe in any reliable way to control a super-human intelligence for long, I do not look forward to people completely fixing (3). Sometime after that point, we’re either pets or paperclips.
It’s surprising that it’s taken this long, given how good public AI coding assistants were a year ago. I’m skeptical of anything with only closed demos and not interactive use by outside reviewers, but there’s nothing unbelievable about it.
As a consumer, I don’t look forward to the deluge of low-quality apps that’s coming (though we already have it to some extent with the sheer number of low-quality coders in the world). As a developer,I don’t like the competition (mostly for “my” junior programmers, not yet me directly), and I worry a lot about whether the software profession can make great stuff ever again.
The way I explain this to people is that current LLMs can be modeled as having three parts:
1. The improv actor, which is is amazing.
2. The reasoner, which is inconsistent but not totally hopeless at simple things.
3. The planner/execution/troubleshooting engine, which is still inferior to the average squirrel trying to raid a bird feeder.
Copilot is designed to rely on (1) and (2), but it is still almost entirely reliant on humans for (3). (GPT 4 Code Interpeter is slightly better at (3).)
Since I don’t really believe in any reliable way to control a super-human intelligence for long, I do not look forward to people completely fixing (3). Sometime after that point, we’re either pets or paperclips.