Re: Re: AI assistant for NetBeans
On Sun, 11 Feb 2024 at 11:42, Andreas Reichel < andr...@manticore-projects.com> wrote: > On Sun, 2024-02-11 at 09:50 +1100, Owen Thomas wrote: > > On Sat, 10 Feb 2024 at 13:46, Andreas Reichel < > andr...@manticore-projects.com> wrote: > > Smart people will become smarter and faster using it. Others won't. > > > What do you mean when you say this? > > > What I meant was: it amplifies experience and skills. If you are > experienced it will make you faster because you know when to trust and use > it. If you are inexperienced it will harm you because it can pretend > providing "solutions", which actually may be harmful or wrong. > Yes, I understand that perhaps it does help one who is already experienced leverage off the experience of others to quickly come to an optimal solution to a particular problem. Perhaps I would agree to using an AI that makes suggestions without "learning" from the code it is being exposed to. > > > I think I would surely benefit from some assistance too, but I am afraid > that an AI algorithm may suggest what it found in my code to a wider > developer community, thus leaking my own work to a wider world out of my > control. > > > That is a different and very valid and interesting angle to look at it: > what guarantees are there when its integrated into your UI, which opens ALL > your code? None and nothing! They just will say "sorry" when eventually > caught and that's it. > I would recommend Netbeans think about this scenario. I believe that the point I make in this reply above about preventing the AI from being trained on the code it is exposed to in a particular user's IDE would be considered valuable to many. > I would say, when you believed in proprietary code then IDE AI integration > was not for you even when it worked. > I'm not averse to publishing my code and being attributed for it - that's why I do this. Hence, I would be flattered if I saw snippets of my published code being suggested back to me by an AI, but I wouldn't be as happy if I saw unpublished work appearing. I will steer clear of an AI looking at the code in my IDE for now and wait a while perhaps until this AI stuff matures; let others make the mistakes that I hopefully avoid. :) > Although the same concern applies to GitHub already. So unless you host by > yourself strictly (as we do, except for what we publish as OpenSource) this > concern should not be new. > Just as well because I have no code in GitHub. Owen. > Clique Space(TM). Anima ex machina. Find out more on cliquespace.net.
Re: Re: AI assistant for NetBeans
Good Morning Owen and All, On Sun, 2024-02-11 at 09:50 +1100, Owen Thomas wrote: > > On Sat, 10 Feb 2024 at 13:46, Andreas Reichel > wrote: > > Smart people will become smarter and faster using it. Others won't. > > > > What do you mean when you say this? What I meant was: it amplifies experience and skills. If you are experienced it will make you faster because you know when to trust and use it. If you are inexperienced it will harm you because it can pretend providing "solutions", which actually may be harmful or wrong. > > I think I would surely benefit from some assistance too, but I am > afraid that an AI algorithm may suggest what it found in my code to a > wider developer community, thus leaking my own work to a wider world > out of my control. That is a different and very valid and interesting angle to look at it: what guarantees are there when its integrated into your UI, which opens ALL your code? None and nothing! They just will say "sorry" when eventually caught and that's it. I would say, when you believed in proprietary code then IDE AI integration was not for you even when it worked. Although the same concern applies to GitHub already. So unless you host by yourself strictly (as we do, except for what we publish as OpenSource) this concern should not be new. Cheers Andreas
Re: Re: AI assistant for NetBeans
Hi Andreas. On Sat, 10 Feb 2024 at 13:46, Andreas Reichel < andr...@manticore-projects.com> wrote: > Smart people will become smarter and faster using it. Others won't. > What do you mean when you say this? I think I would surely benefit from some assistance too, but I am afraid that an AI algorithm may suggest what it found in my code to a wider developer community, thus leaking my own work to a wider world out of my control. Would I be one of the "others" as you define them above?
Re: Re: AI assistant for NetBeans
I wholeheartedly agree with all remarks. Your expertise needs to be excellent in the field to be able to have any benefits of AI. Then it may take the brunt work away but needs strict surveillance. Like a captain versus a bootsman. met vriendelijke groet Pieter van den Hombergh Op za 10 feb 2024 20:06 schreef Sam Lalani : > Thank you for the responses. I would use it like I currently use ChatGPT, > which is to quickly give me small functions that I can edit to get exactly > what I want, instead of spending the time to do it myself from scratch. It > saves minutes every time I use it and overall, it ends up saving me hours. > If it was integrated into NetBeans then I envision it taking even less > time, but I know that I would still have to edit it to get exactly what I > need. It could also potentially help in debugging or searching for through > my projects to get what I have already written before and use it in the > current project. Again, I understand that I would need to tweak it for my > situation. > > > > Hopefully soon we can have this capability in NetBeans, instead of me > having to start using another IDE just for this functionality. I have been > using NetBeans for over 20 years and I love it and would like to continue > using it. > > > > *From:* Andreas Reichel > *Sent:* Friday, February 9, 2024 7:46 PM > *To:* users@netbeans.apache.org > *Subject:* Re: Re: AI assistant for NetBeans > > > > On Sat, 2024-02-10 at 12:17 +1000, Peter Kirkham wrote: > > Maybe I'm wrong and I'm just a modern-day Luddite. > > > > No, you are not. It CAN be extremely useful WHEN you know exactly what you > want and are an expert in your topic. THEN you can use the AI generated > template and quickly tweak it until it works. Like a secretary. > > This is great when you don't know the API or programming language. For > example, this dynamic TOC side bar was done by ChatGPT within 30 > iterations: https://manticore-projects.com/JSQLFormatter/javadoc.html -- > it was great because I don't write JavaScript code or Website stuff. > > > > But when you don't know the solution and can't validate the outcome, then > stay away from AI. > > My former example "RGBA ByteSwapping" brought up useful AVX/SSE methods, > but filled the bytes completely wrong -- and kept filling it wrongly > continuously. > > This is worse than "phantom libraries", which don't exist because it > appears to be working but produces wrong, potentially dangerous results. > > > > Its a tool, SELECTIVELY useful for the right purpose and harmful otherwise. > > Smart people will become smarter and faster using it. Others won't. > > > > Cheers > > Andreas > > > > > <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient> > Virus-free.www.avast.com > <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient> > <#m_6658158458116445778_DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2> >
RE: Re: AI assistant for NetBeans
Thank you for the responses. I would use it like I currently use ChatGPT, which is to quickly give me small functions that I can edit to get exactly what I want, instead of spending the time to do it myself from scratch. It saves minutes every time I use it and overall, it ends up saving me hours. If it was integrated into NetBeans then I envision it taking even less time, but I know that I would still have to edit it to get exactly what I need. It could also potentially help in debugging or searching for through my projects to get what I have already written before and use it in the current project. Again, I understand that I would need to tweak it for my situation. Hopefully soon we can have this capability in NetBeans, instead of me having to start using another IDE just for this functionality. I have been using NetBeans for over 20 years and I love it and would like to continue using it. From: Andreas Reichel Sent: Friday, February 9, 2024 7:46 PM To: users@netbeans.apache.org Subject: Re: Re: AI assistant for NetBeans On Sat, 2024-02-10 at 12:17 +1000, Peter Kirkham wrote: Maybe I'm wrong and I'm just a modern-day Luddite. No, you are not. It CAN be extremely useful WHEN you know exactly what you want and are an expert in your topic. THEN you can use the AI generated template and quickly tweak it until it works. Like a secretary. This is great when you don't know the API or programming language. For example, this dynamic TOC side bar was done by ChatGPT within 30 iterations: https://manticore-projects.com/JSQLFormatter/javadoc.html -- it was great because I don't write JavaScript code or Website stuff. But when you don't know the solution and can't validate the outcome, then stay away from AI. My former example "RGBA ByteSwapping" brought up useful AVX/SSE methods, but filled the bytes completely wrong -- and kept filling it wrongly continuously. This is worse than "phantom libraries", which don't exist because it appears to be working but produces wrong, potentially dangerous results. Its a tool, SELECTIVELY useful for the right purpose and harmful otherwise. Smart people will become smarter and faster using it. Others won't. Cheers Andreas -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com
Re: Re: AI assistant for NetBeans
On Sat, 2024-02-10 at 12:17 +1000, Peter Kirkham wrote: > Maybe I'm wrong and I'm just a modern-day Luddite. No, you are not. It CAN be extremely useful WHEN you know exactly what you want and are an expert in your topic. THEN you can use the AI generated template and quickly tweak it until it works. Like a secretary. This is great when you don't know the API or programming language. For example, this dynamic TOC side bar was done by ChatGPT within 30 iterations: https://manticore-projects.com/JSQLFormatter/javadoc.html - - it was great because I don't write JavaScript code or Website stuff. But when you don't know the solution and can't validate the outcome, then stay away from AI. My former example "RGBA ByteSwapping" brought up useful AVX/SSE methods, but filled the bytes completely wrong -- and kept filling it wrongly continuously. This is worse than "phantom libraries", which don't exist because it appears to be working but produces wrong, potentially dangerous results. Its a tool, SELECTIVELY useful for the right purpose and harmful otherwise. Smart people will become smarter and faster using it. Others won't. Cheers Andreas
RE: Re: AI assistant for NetBeans
When the AI hype train was just getting rolling last year I thought I would try this out to write a basic but non-trivial algorithm. I wanted to implement a method to get the nodes and weights for Gauss-Laguerre quadrature integration for the Gamma function for any number of nodes, rather than just using a hard-coded series of arrays for the numbers. I didn't need to do this (the hard-coded array approach works) but I thought this was an interesting test because it's not an everyday garden topic that the AI will just be able to cut and paste from Stack Overflow. On the other hand it does have a known solution so it can be shown whether the AI solution is any good or not. The AI was able to generate a plausible looking solution very quickly and confidently. Which was, at first glance, impressive. Wow. It compiled first time and ran. Syntactically it was great. And that is where the positives end. The code wasn't just wrong in terms of being close, but inaccurate. It was just gibberish. The results weren't even vaguely in the ballpark. People talk about AI being able to pass university exam level questions... what a load of rubbish. This was clearly plagarised so badly that the 'student' submitting the answer was clueless that their answer was even wrong. The AI had no idea -- and why would it. It is nothing more than a large neural net that has produced a sequence of tokens based on another input sequence of tokens. At its heart it is nothing more than a sophisticated regression algorithm based on a series of data points which were used to train it. What we are doing is the equivalent of deriving a line of best fit through a cloud of data points and then asking the algorithm to extrapolate based on that regression equation. It works -- of course it does, it's just an equation -- but fundamentally it is grossly misleading. Any decently educated person knows that extrapolation is fraught with error. And that is all AI is (with the techniques used today). A sophisticated extrapolation engine. Anyone who says otherwise is deluding themselves. Andreas is, in my view, completely right. If you rely on AI for coding you will spend more time correcting the code than you would writing it yourself. More than that, the code appears very neat, so the errors are not obvious at first. Writing the code yourself will also bring you closer to it, and that familiarity will breed insight that AI never had to start with and certainly cannot impart to its users. Why would you want to give up that side benefit from writing your own code? AI is, in my view, one of the more dangerous fads to come out recently. Not necessarily because of the harm it might do itself, but because it drives a false sense of security amongst those that do not understand it -- which is to say most of the world, as there are very few people I've met who are able to explain to me how it works, even on a basic level. Perversely this could lead to a loss of knowledge and intelligence amongst the non-machine population. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm just a modern-day Luddite. I'd be interested to know if there are any genuine real-world cases where AI code is useful. I was thinking that maybe boilerplate code, like when writing GUI etc. but NetBeans Matisse already has that covered just fine. How would AI improve this? It wouldn't have a chance improving on many of the algorithms I write for solving engineering problems for the simple reason that many of those algorithms never existed before I wrote them and I'm proud to admit that I had to fall back on real intelligence, and not artificial intelligence, to write them :-) Anyway, an interesting topic! Peter On 2024/02/08 16:17:51 Andreas Reichel wrote: > On Thu, 2024-02-08 at 11:16 -0500, Alonso Del Arte wrote: > > There isn't, but probably soon there will be. If it's built-in, it > > better come with an off switch. But if BlueJ adds an AI assistant, > > then we're really in trouble. > > I have tried them all on IntelliJ and I can tell you: they are rubbish! > OpenAI is great for looking up JAVA or C API efficiently and for this > case you have a 50% chance to get something useful (although 50% chance > of getting completely wrong information, like Java Libraries that don't > exist.) > > But in the IDE it is just annoying. You will spend more time correcting > the suggestions than writing code. > > Example: ask for a Java Example of Prophet Time Series Forecast! Or ask > for a sample of RGBA to ARGB Byte Swapping using SSE or AVX. > The given information will be TOTALLY wrong and fantasy! > > Cheers > Andreas > > > - To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@netbeans.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@netbeans.apache.org For further information about the NetBeans mailing lists, visit: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/Mailing+lists
