A.I. Technology

[Scot_Lover 1,786]

G’day all.  
 

I’m programming (putzing around with it more like it) using VS Code on a Windows 11 pc. This also runs CoPilot, Microsoft/Bing implementation of A.I. 
 

A recent update incorporates Copilot into VS Code, and you can now ask it to write code for you. I tested this with 3 questions, ‘show me the code to obtain MAC addresses, show me the code to obtain ip address of MAC addresses and show me the code to import into Excel’

It did this easily, with options to use Python, C+ and C#. 
 

Is this still programming? Are the advances in A.I taking away our artistic abilities? I know programming isn’t an art form, it’s more like sorcery, but I’ve seen A.I generated art, stories and now coding has been added.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the way this  technology is heading?

[Adyguy6970 813]

Personally I know nothing about programming or coding.  However on the subject of AI I have found people on Character ai who are pee friendly.  

[gldenwetgoose 20,249]

9 hours ago, Scot_Lover said:

A recent update incorporates Copilot into VS Code, and you can now ask it to write code for you. I tested this with 3 questions, ‘show me the code to obtain MAC addresses, show me the code to obtain ip address of MAC addresses and show me the code to import into Excel’

It did this easily, with options to use Python, C+ and C#. 
 

Is this still programming? Are the advances in A.I taking away our artistic abilities? I know programming isn’t an art form, it’s more like sorcery, but I’ve seen A.I generated art, stories and now coding has been added.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the way this  technology is heading?

It's an interesting question - with some interesting follow-ons...

For me, programming in a high level language is a bit of an artform, an exercise in being elegant and efficient in producing some script which functions correctly with a reasonable minimum of resources.  But also is well commented.   Most software 'errors' are either incorrect requirements, or incorrectly interpreted requirements (apart from typos in the code) and hence I wonder if it'd be as easy to trace through machine written high level code?   Will it be possible to make sense of it?

For that matter. Why with AI in the future would there be high level code at all...  In the same way as you'd tell the self driving car your destination and close your eyes for a snooze, the AI could take your requirement an directly code it into an assembler type output.

Whilst AI can 'show me the code for...' there's the question as to how colleges and universities deem that a student is competent at writing software.

 

In another sense though, currently in programming Arduino, Pi etc, I'm totally dependant on libraries and modules for (eg.) devices like displays.  I just import the module and it does some magic interfacing to my code.   And what you're seeing maybe is just the next step?   Allowing AI to choose the magic.

Since humans invented the axe, the wheel etc we've been obsessed with inventing tools to make things easier.   And in a lot of cases, computer technology hasn't dispensed with engineers but has given them tools to make them more effective - computational flow dynamics being used to model aerodynamic design before putting it into a wind tunnel, surgeons using augmented VR in the operating theatre.   Perhaps this is the inevitable next step for programmers - just taking high level languages and scripts one level higher?

[Kupar 12,389]

52 minutes ago, gldenwetgoose said:

And in a lot of cases, computer technology hasn't dispensed with engineers but has given them tools to make them more effective - computational flow dynamics being used to model aerodynamic design before putting it into a wind tunnel, surgeons using augmented VR in the operating theatre. 

I'd add to this list mobile telecoms adaptive antenna arrays for beamforming etc: writing the algorithms for this is really tough, especially when it needs to take into consideration how to deal with the real-world RF environment. Machine learning / AI helps enormously.

[HitEmAll 967]

As someone who earns money with coding, I started to use chatgpt and then gpt4 pretty much since it was available (i.e. in December 2022) in my work. Coding was from the beginning one of the tasks where LLMs absolutely excel.

Coding / software engineering really has changed quite a bit. It is not only that AI can code / implement things (usually much cleaner and faster than any human coder), it is also that I discuss more "strategic" things (like software design, what technology / library / algorithm to use etc.) with the AI. For the implementation part it is really nice, because AI can not only code, it also can create nice tests (unit tests, integration tests etc. that "prove" that the code actually is doing what it is supposed to do) and it can also write the documentation.

One thing for me as a software engineer that is really amazing is, that learning / trying out new technologies is much faster and easier than before. You have the perfect "coach" available that can provide you with examples and answer all your questions, help you when you try to do more advanced things, and help you debug if you are stuck with some problem.

I have no idea where all of this is heading. However, I feel like for the near future (say, the next 3-5 years), the importance of being able to read / understand and efficiently write code will increase. Code is for the moment the most efficient way to automate things / solve problems, and now that creating code is faster, more and more problems will be solved directly via code, in my opinion.

[p1ssputz 14]

On 2/12/2024 at 2:15 PM, Scot_Lover said:

G’day all.  
 

I’m programming (putzing around with it more like it) using VS Code on a Windows 11 pc. This also runs CoPilot, Microsoft/Bing implementation of A.I. 
 

A recent update incorporates Copilot into VS Code, and you can now ask it to write code for you. I tested this with 3 questions, ‘show me the code to obtain MAC addresses, show me the code to obtain ip address of MAC addresses and show me the code to import into Excel’

It did this easily, with options to use Python, C+ and C#. 
 

Is this still programming? Are the advances in A.I taking away our artistic abilities? I know programming isn’t an art form, it’s more like sorcery, but I’ve seen A.I generated art, stories and now coding has been added.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the way this  technology is heading?

Languages learning models in regards to coding will eventually easily provide solutions to problems that are essentially already solved (as that's part of its nature by default). It likely won't solve unknown programming problems or patterns and will probably have some trouble architecting larger solutions for a long while. However, it is good as a code snippet tool when you are able to provide adequate guidance to what you want and have the ability to know when the generated code needs to be edited to work correctly in a certain context.

At this point in time it's more like an automated check of StackOverflow than anything else, but that will probably change in the future.

I don't think it's necessarily taking away our artistic abilities, but I do think that it will have a profound impact on "mainstream" art and culture. I think that we are people will start to adapt to it just as much as it adapts to us, if not more so.

[randomiser 26]

Coding is a language.  AI is extremely good with language ... and there are plenty of code examples on the internet.  Put those together and I'd expect ChatGPT or similar to produce reasonable code without difficulty  

 @gldenwetgoose makes a really good point about code maintenance, though.  If a human needs to maintain the code, it needs comments, etc. which I doubt an AI would bother to include.  Simple code wouldn't be a problem but I shudder at the idea of debugging 10k lines of AI generated code.

Good code is like poetry.  I used to pride myself on the efficiency of my code (I was quite handy with assembly coding way back when), but I pitied anyone else trying to debug it.  Really tight code can be a royal pain in the arse to fix, even for the writer.  If an AI writes some really complex code it'll take some hardcore hax to maintain by hand. 

[Scot_Lover 1,786]

6 hours ago, randomiser said:

Coding is a language.  AI is extremely good with language ... and there are plenty of code examples on the internet.  Put those together and I'd expect ChatGPT or similar to produce reasonable code without difficulty  

 @gldenwetgoose makes a really good point about code maintenance, though.  If a human needs to maintain the code, it needs comments, etc. which I doubt an AI would bother to include.  Simple code wouldn't be a problem but I shudder at the idea of debugging 10k lines of AI generated code.

Good code is like poetry.  I used to pride myself on the efficiency of my code (I was quite handy with assembly coding way back when), but I pitied anyone else trying to debug it.  Really tight code can be a royal pain in the arse to fix, even for the writer.  If an AI writes some really complex code it'll take some hardcore hax to maintain by hand. 

All good points. The code I ran resulted in the form of a module, you could just copy it into a program and link to / call however you wanted. It was a rather simple exercise, the resulting code was well indented, easy to read.

I wouldn't use it as such as a final product, it would need documenting to suit my style, but the bones were there.

 

[likesToLick 9,781]

On 2/13/2024 at 8:45 AM, Scot_Lover said:

Does anyone have any thoughts on the way this  technology is heading?

I think that you have found some specific examples of places where AI can be very helpful.   Your requirement can be clearly expressed in a simple English statement,  but it involves looking up some technical details that might be tedious to find.  I'd say that's a problem that is tailor made for AI to solve.

My guess is that if it came to a requirement that required a lot of complex logic and conditional processing,  then it would take longer for you to explain what you want to the AI than it would take you to write the code.  Human languages are by their very nature, ambiguous. This means that a requirement given in English to an AI can easily be misinterpreted and give you faulty code as a result.  That might be more difficult to debug than if you had written the code yourself.

What I have seen of the results of AI so far suggests to me that it is not really "intelligent" yet.  By that I mean that it does not have an actual understanding of real-life concepts, objects and events.  It seems to be able to parse natural language into a set of symbols that it can compare with a database and act upon the results,  all without ever actually "knowing" what it is doing.

My guess is that in future it will assist by taking on some of the trivial and repetitive parts of programming,  thus freeing up the developer to concentrate more on the business logic and overall design concepts of the software.  If that was done well,  it could mean a big increase in individual productivity.  To some extent development platforms like Eclipse, Netbeans and TOAD do this already,  so I can imagine them incorporating AI features into future versions.

Caveat:  These opinions are all based on the point of view of someone who spent his life in large corporate-style software development,  but retired five years ago.

[Scot_Lover 1,786]

6 hours ago, likesToLick said:

Caveat:  These opinions are all based on the point of view of someone who spent his life in large corporate-style software development,  but retired five years ago.

Ah, yes. I wasn’t  that cut and dried. There were a couple of attempts to get a usable result, Australian accents don’t seem to match Microsoft’s interpretation. I won’t tell you what it did with M’s accent, lol.

Do you think a software house would allow this A.I. assistance into their business?

I used to run a small programming / internet service back in the late 80’s early 90’s basically using HTML type of reporting software, that just dumped all info into a database, same kind of thing is still used. One of my programmers was a tiny little Russian girl, she could code using Windows Notepad, but trying to get her to comment her code was a nightmare. 
 

I’m still playing with it, mostly with Python (it’s what I’m more familiar with) 

 

[likesToLick 9,781]

1 hour ago, Scot_Lover said:

Do you think a software house would allow this A.I. assistance into their business?

I worked for a few years in an international consulting firm.   Management was very conservative, particularly when it came to spending money for software licenses or training,  but new techniques tended to come in through the back door,  as developers had internet access, and were willing to use whatever resources were freely available on line.

The response from @HitEmAll is a good example of how developers are already discovering the useful things that it can do to help them with their work.  My guess would be that people in software houses are already taking advantage of AI assistance,  and quite possibly their management doesn't know it.

[likesToLick 9,781]

I seem to be saying "my guess" much too often. Sorry about that. 🙄