Quote Originally Posted by fafalone View Post
AI can be helpful with a lot of things but it would have to improve dramatically to be of use for programming something complicated and novel.

As an illustration, when I was making a Media Foundation player recently. There's documentation for interfaces to display subtitles, but MS doesn't explicitly document how to actually obtain it. Every single AI did nothing but waste my time with hallucinations that *looked* right but failed, varying from 'good code for getting some MF interfaces but not subtitles' to 'made up methods that don't exist' as I pushed for alternative solutions after failures.

Eventually I found a single extant project that answered my question; must not have been in the training material.

Another funny one was asking for help writing a driver. "VB6 can't do that because..." "Yes it can" "No, it can't" "Really it can" "Ok, here's an error filled routine for calling a driver, the opposite of what you asked!"
AI just isn't there for advanced programming with topics that don't perfectly correlate to code well represented in training data.

And there's good reason to believe we're very close to the limits of the current methodology... ChatGPT for instance has gotten substantially *worse* to the point I don't ask it for help with any vb6/tB code. It's not helping solve exotic edge cases deep in compiler codegen.
Two points.

One, I'm looking at the rapid pace with which AI is advancing. Sure, it might seem that it's stalled a bit as per your experience with ChatGPT, but I don't believe for a second that it will remain so inevitably. I have every confidence that breakthroughs will be made in the coming years that will take AI to levels we can barely imagine right now. There is no doubt in my mind.

Secondly, I think you might be using it wrong. Right now, it's not nearly good enough for us to offload our cognitive tasks but it is really really good at following instructions and executing them way faster than any human can even dream of doing. Current AI models perform far better when they have to think less. The best relationship to have with current models is one where you're doing all the thinking, planning, research and design. The AI just a low-skilled laborer that does all the heavy lifting to execute your vision, something it could do far better and faster than any human.