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by ryandvm 668 days ago
I do not understand the AI naysayers.

The other day I had an idea for a Chrome plugin. I'm a senior dev, but I've never made a Chrome plugin. I asked ChatGPT 4o if my idea was possible (it was) and then I asked it to create an MVP of the plugin. In 10 seconds I had a full skeleton of my plugin. I then had it iterate and incrementally add capability until it was fully developed.

I had to do some stylesheet tweaking and it asked for a permission that we didn't need, but otherwise it completely nailed it. Easily provided 95% of the work for my extension.

I was able to do in 60 minutes what would have probably taken several days of reading specs and deciphering APIs.

Is my Chrome plugin derivative? Yes. Is most of what we all do every single day derivative? Also yes.

How are people still skeptical of the value that LLMs are already delivering?
2 comments
jryan49 668 days ago
It's probably because it's providing different amounts of value to different people. For some people, it's not giving any benefits, and in fact making their work harder (me). They are skeptical because people naturally don't believe each other when their personal experience does not match up with another.
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BigParm 668 days ago
It's the best API searcher ever made but most people don't search APIs. They are waiting for it to make them a grilled cheese or something.
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daemonologist 668 days ago
It's the best API searcher for APIs which are used a lot. If you want do anything other than the most common thing it can be worse than useless. (I've been running into this in a project where I'm using Svelte 5, and the language models are only interested in telling me about/writing Svelte 4, and transformers.js, where they tend to veer off towards tensorflow.js instead. This despite me explicitly mentioning what version/library I'm using and the existing code being written for said version.)

Anyways, they can definitely be very useful, but they also have a golden path/winning team/wheel rut effect as well which is not always desirable.

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meiraleal 667 days ago
That's only Svelte to blame. How can something change so much every major release.
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