this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023

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Meta releases Code Llama, a code-generating AI model (techcrunch-com.cdn.ampproject.org)

submitted 1 year ago by AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] Rand0mA@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have used a few coding models and they are good, but they will not replace a programmer. You can ask for a class to be made, or a method. You can ask it to find issues or improvements with/for your code or spot mistakes, but it can't hack multiple modules and give you a fully working complex app. It'll help you learn to code, it'll write you whatever you ask, but when you start adding the fact you need to know about X for y and z is also important it starts forgetting the original prompt.

Don't get me wrong. It's really good. But it's a tool, not a full on master coder.

Looking forward to getting more tokens to work with on a normal computer. Happy to wait for the CPU to gen code considering the ridiculous prices of high VRAM GPUs these days, but it's still fisher price 'My first AI coding assistant'. Give it a few more years, a few more breakthroughs and we will get there.

I have tried GPT Engineer.. it's not there yet. Will make you a simple app, but it's not going to knock out anything more than modular microshite.

[–] fizgigtiznalkie@lemmynsfw.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've found they really help with unit tests. Sometimes with regular code they straight up make up libraries that aren't real.

[–] CoopaLoopa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago

Google Bard is the worst when it comes to powershell modules. Every time you ask it for a way to get some info from an O365 tenant, it makes up a Get-ExactlyTheDataYouWant module that doesn't actually exist.

Bing AI is actually pretty good when it comes to basic powershell commands; I figure MS probably trained it on their own scripting language.

[–] derpo@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Officially, this time 😂

[–] trackcharlie@lemmynsfw.com 4 points 1 year ago

Is this article trying to imply meta had a choice in the matter when llama's code has been available online for the better part of a year?

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And if it was actually good and fully usable they'd just use it themselves to make billions..

Imagine you could just write a specification for any software project in the world (even invest some programmers and project managers to do it together with reviews), throw it at the AI and you get a fully functioning program out. Preferably even with a DevOps pipeline set up, so all you have to do is copy it into AWS, Azure or whatever, throw money at it and you're done.

They wouldn't give that away, lol.

[–] TheRaven@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Definitely not how it works. It’ll be a tool for programmers to make them more efficient. It’ll be like the difference between a hammer and nails and a nail gun. You still need the worker to know where to put the nail.

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Writing code is fast, checking it's correct and debugging is slow. If some AI spits out 2000 lines of code it won't make you faster at all.

[–] Teppic@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you tried asking ChatGPT or Bard to write you code to do something? It is actually remarkably good at it.
That and being an alternative to a thesaurus is about all I use LLMs for.

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Lol, yeah, and it hallucinates all the time. You also use it to just write a little bit of new code, you can't give it a 100k lines code base and tell it to actually add or modify something..

[–] Teppic@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Indeed, and for me giving me a rough framework to modify is hugely useful and time saving. As the commenter above said it's a tool, it's not a team member.

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

With code it doesn’t hallucinate all that much if you prompt well.

Ive created complex powershell scripts with it. I never used powershell before. Some actual developers checked my work and admitted that they where impressed, questioned why someone with my skill didn’t pursue the career of dev. my prior Experience is failing at programming class (was never any good at writing my own code, just understand it reasonably well. ) and modding games. The programming teacher i had hinted that i should find something else.

My work now offered. I looked at the powershell classes, the stuff i am doing daily is covered by the advanced class which i can only do if i succeed the basic class. I don’t expect to learn much.

Chatgpt is the best teacher i ever had. Yes it makes mistakes but so did every other teacher i ever had. Chatgpt at least adapts if i call out its bullshit.

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sheesh, trying to get a PowerShell script to do something you can learn in a day or two (if you're interested).

Actual programming is mostly grabbing a larger system (or micro services), interacting with other interfaces and databases, modifying and extending existing code (which is what I do 99% of the time, it's really rare to write something new from the ground up in most companies). DevOps where you might also handle deployment pipelines. And so on.

You always work in bigger systems. Sure, sometimes you write helper scripts, but that's the easy stuff.

So yes, I can obviously ask ChatGPT to set up a REST API for me with a handful of endpoints and it will do that reasonably well. If I also want it to connect to a database though it might try to set that up, but that will fail (as you have to actually do steps yourself to make it work). It's good for boilerplate code, but nothing more than that.

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

“programming is mostly grabbing a larger system (or micro services), interacting with other interfaces and databases, modifying and extending existing code”

Yes, i just happen to use powershell to make the api calls to maken changes in the database because thats what my job said i should use. Then i extend the functionality of what the scripts can do by modifying the code. Chatgpt was a great help at providing a quality result, much more then i would on my own.

No it doesnt replace the job of a actual programmers, no one expects it to do that for the time being.

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This does sound like you're providing plenty of future work for developers to clean up that mess :)

Though I don't envy them, at least it's job security.

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Its providing me with job security for a start. An issue i found exists is that while many parts of jobs can be automated not many people understand how. Full time developers have the missing knowledge but because they dont have that job there is a disconnect.

Everyone should know how to program to their personal needs and ai is the way to do it.

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you want to nuke your job and kill your company, yes.

Let me ask: How are you authenticating with the API (or directly with the database) in your scripts?

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had a concern about security/data safety beforehand we started any code, so i asked the people responsible for cyber security and did it like they told me to do.

We are a professional institution, I’ve told you, actual in house developers looked at my work and approved of it, i am not going rogue with this, theres a schedule and meetings about this project. If my work wasn’t good they wouldn’t have green lit it to expand on it months ago.

If you continue to be this condescending i won’t reply. Ai ain’t replacing “reAl PrOgRamMers” yet. That doesn’t mean yall have exclusive rights on being able to write code. I am willing to bet in 15 years almost every job will require at least some coding affinity.

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So the API you are connecting to is properly written then (and does all the database handling), you are basically just calling it from your scripts? That's totally fine then, but those scripts are the easiest part. Usually done in something like a Python tool, but Powershell works too I guess (just more limited in what it can do).

I'm curious though how you managed to get ChatGPT to do this kind of work, did you throw the full API definition into it, then ask it to create a Powershell application to do x, y and z with helper functions?

My viewpoint is from the side of a backend developer (like the API you are using), I wouldn't trust ChatGPT to get anything right there (especially with cross system communication, between Microservices and to the databases). We spend probably a third to half of the time on security, reliability and performance, just getting the code to do what you want is the easiest part of the job.

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes i haven’t written the api itself, we (or at least most of my direct coworkers) also don’t have direct acces to the raw database in production.

All the documentation was intended for python and i was provided an jupyter notebook with some python demos. Giving chatgpt the documentation expecting it to understand it is not recommended.

Seems one of of my higher ups is biased againt python “They use that in school as a starter language” (as if that makes it inferior) But there seems to be more in house experience with powershell and others have to be able to continue my work if i quit or fall sick for long.

So the first thing i gave to chatgpt was a selected few snippets of the python notebook and asked to show how i would do the exact same thing in poweshell.

Then i asked what i would need to do more to make this a final working script. (With a very basic goal).

Once that is working i could easily provide a new instance of chatgpt with either full code or the function/part i was working on and provide it with information on what the next step is or what i am trying to do. If i get an error i provide it with that and ask what might cause it.

I have enough coding affinity to notice if it hallucinates, Most of my personal problems writing code is that i am very bad at syntax and not great at spelling.

Chatgpt very often provides long stretches of non functional code because it doesn’t fully understand the context of what i am trying to do but in the middle of that code i may find an excellent for loop function that does successfully implement the logic for that part. i then copy that part with minor changes.

I recognize that for you most of my code counts as boilerplate stuff. But id have a frustrating experience writing it my self.

I rather explain the logic i need in a prompt, and i find it very fun to then puzzle all the snippets together into a coherent script.

I estimate i am on average slower then a full dev but i have the massive benefit of being my own client. The things i am automating are things my team constantly have to do manually trough crapware. Therefor i fully understand what exactly needs to be done, as opposed to us asking the in house devs to check options to see if maybe x y z can be done easier.

Those in house devs are also at my disposal if i get stuck or have questions, some parts are code snippets directly provided by them.

Edit: thats gpt4, i started with 3.5 and its helpful but 4 is such a massive jump i cant take 3.5 seriously anymore.

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But that sounds like you already know how to code, but instead of asking Google you just ask ChatGPT and hope for the best.

How do you think programmers work? I don't know shit either, if I need to call an API I look up the docs for it. If I have to do something in Python, C# or whatever and I don't know how, I just google it (and there's hopefully a neat Stackoverflow answer that shows how it's done, otherwise I have to scour the documentation and figure it out myself).

Instead of Googling you're using ChatGPT, but in the end it seems like you are checking yourself if the answer could work and you build it into your software yourself. That's way above any random person who now thinks they can produce code by asking ChatGPT.

Most of my personal problems writing code is that i am very bad at syntax and not great at spelling.

That should be a non-issue, because you should be using an IDE (which sucks for Powershell, but would be really easy for Python or other languages). I just start typing and it usually auto-completes. If I don't know what the function is named I can just ask the IDE what's available, then select the one I want. The only thing I have to write myself are variable names (the first time around), but I get help for anything else.

Your boss is honestly an idiot, working in Powershell is like pulling nails. Yes, it works, but you're severely limited in how you can write the code and it's usually a mess of random scripts thrown together. Python or any other scripting language would be vastly better for tooling.

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Pretty much yes. Except i find chatgpt multitudes easier and faster to find answers then google ever was.

My stance on the power of AI remains that its not a magic button yet. You have to understand its output and know how to use, just like with every other tool.

I was never in a position to code with an autocompleting IDE, back when i had programming in school we were supposed to type everything ourselves. I understand why they wanted it like that but it very much disadvantaged me and my grades.

I may have to add i am neurodivergent between adhd and autism with some mild dyslectic/dyscalculia overlap. What works for others rarely works for me. This has added to my gripe of how hostile the internet has become, littered with ads and unnecessary fluff. Chatgpt always gets straight to the point, even if its wrong (but so are many people). Its consistently trying to be helpful no matter how stupid a question i ask it.

While my career advice was to not go into programming, i have good faith that with the evolving tools and also my own knowledge gain by tinkering with linux (also sm chatgpt is an amazing help with) my disadvantages will fade and i will become a competitive equal to the mainstream developers of today.

That boss regularly causes eye rolling. There is some good reasons on why we use powershell, we have close relations to microsoft and it has good compatible features with some other things we use. But simply dismissing python was really uncalled for. The best tool for the job always depends on the job. And to sort of quote the sorting hat “Python would have done well for this job”

[–] ZILtoid1991@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Also many programmers write their own stuff for generating boilerplate code, with some languages like D having a strong support for it via its metaprogramming features. All while being more reliable.

[–] ohlaph@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

How does one use it?