Avalon local LLM

[SteamyTea]

I hate coding, even though I do appreciate what can be achieved with it.

But as computer coding is a logical processes, is AI not showing up it's weakness but not being able to write some scripts easily? Or is it that most programming languages are so full of contradictions that the whole industry needs to have a word with itself.

[Pocster]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

I hate coding, even though I do appreciate what can be achieved with it.

But as computer coding is a logical processes, is AI not showing up it's weakness but not being able to write some scripts easily? Or is it that most programming languages are so full of contradictions that the whole industry needs to have a word with itself.

Thats actually an extremely good point. AI coding isn't like mine at all. The style, the way AI usually over engineers. As models are trained off existing code bases then it loses the "human" element of coding i.e. elegance . Ask 50 competent programmers to write pac-man and you'll get 50 packman games - the code though will vary wildly on how they solve issues and do things - infinite variation in fact. The future will be IMHO AI checking other AI written code no human coding. Of course that's what I do now! Chat checks codex suggestions but when chat gets in a mess I literally say STOP!. We then uncommit previous code so we are back to a known state. Though I have not looked still at 1 line of code I can see where it's getting stuck. Then I can direct it better on what to do.

[SimonD]

5 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

so full of contradictions that the whole industry needs to have a word with itself.

That probably sums it up rather nicely. It's random. Having been out of the game for over 2 decades, I'm not massively surprised by the short cuts and poor approaches to design that I'm seeing in programming generally. I've pulled Claude up on that a few times but we have a chat about it and then take an informed decision. Probably one of the best aspects to using AI for coding is the commenting. As long as the prompts specify the extent of commenting, it is miles above what you usually find with human produced code because it takes a lot of effort to think about and formulate comments if you're the programmer. So this makes life so much easier.

Generally though, it's actually one of the good things the AI does and I'm blown away by what it can do, even if it does have its moments. You just have to learn how to compartmentalise the work, slicing it up into smaller components and formulate your prompts.

[SteamyTea]

7 minutes ago, SimonD said:

You just have to learn how to compartmentalise the work, slicing it up into smaller components and formulate your prompts.

Which is what I was taught to do in the early 1980s.

Does it recognise flow diagrams, assuming they are done correctly?

 

  

7 minutes ago, SimonD said:

Probably one of the best aspects to using AI for coding is the commenting. As long as the prompts specify the extent of commenting, it is miles above what you usually find with human produced code because it takes a lot of effort to think about and formulate comments if you're the programmer

Once saw a comment in a database that said "this is shit code"

Edited 16 minutes ago by SteamyTea