@Phosphenes @noplasticshower @futurebird @aeveltstra There are some reasons to be a tiny bit skeptical about this demo.

Plummer omits printing as a feature, which smells like he's tried this before, and found that printing was a stumbling block.

A Windows Notepad-alike is such a simple application that it was used as a teaching example pretty frequently. An LLM that's been trained on textbooks and sample code is going to be much more familiar with Notepad than it will be with whatever random thing you're seriously trying to build now.

Notepad is simple partly because it doesn't even have any of the really important, difficult code -- the text editor itself -- in it. That editor component is built in to Windows. Text editing is complicated enough that most little Notepad replacements are built on top of someone else's text editor library (Notepad++ and Geany both use Scintilla, for example).

@Phosphenes @noplasticshower @futurebird @aeveltstra I'm not in the software business myself anymore. I haven't watched any colleagues use a coding LLM, I haven't used one, I don't know how common it is to use one or what kinds of problems LLMs get tasked with in practice.

There's an eye-opening demo from Dave Plummer here, though, where he describes what he wants and the ChatGPT/Codex thing gives it to him. It produces work that might take a human hours or days, but in 20 minutes or so.

It's not completely seamless, there are hiccups that he uses his expertise to overcome. But the LLM produces a much more complete solution, a much more promising foundation, than I would have expected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmBd39OwvWg

@futurebird @aeveltstra I don't like it because I agree all ends would be better served by improving the intimidating software in the first place. And if LLMs are really such warp-speed advancements in software development, that should be easier now than its ever been, right?

But desktop applications are a stodgy backwater for software developers, now, I guess. The best minds of our generation are trying to figure out how to get us to see more ads.

@futurebird @aeveltstra I don't *like* it, but I had really expected one of the big obvious use-cases for "AI" agents would be exactly stuff like "Hey, how can I send a templated email to the 500 people in this list?" And "Can you make this spreadsheet look more professional?" And "The grammar checker is complaining but I don't understand why!" Basically, "Help me operate this software that's too intimidating for me to learn."

I don't know if any of the AI stuffed into MS's latest can help with such things or not. It doesn't feel like the sort of thing they would prioritize these days.

@Unixbigot @alter_kaker @futurebird A friend of mine has been a professional database wizard for a couple of decades now. He has taught some corporate and conference classes. He gave a presentation like that once with a test database he had set up. For a company he had called "United Consumer Fuckers."

Actually mailing stuff out like that is obviously better, though.