💡

Get smart about A.I.

📐Lots of angles on AI

• The tech
• The politics
• Ethics
• The economy & impact on jobs
• The impact on YOUR job
• Using it in your job
• Using it in your daily life

• Are my coding skills obsolete?
• Will there still be software engineering jobs?
• Should I be getting trained in A.I. technology?

what does A.I. mean for me?

As a software engineer

Generative A.I. tools you can use today

• ChatGPT (free, beta, with limits)
• Bard (Google account, waitlist)
• Tabnine (code completion, freemium)
• GitHub CoPilot (code completion, free for students, otherwise paid)

LLMs (Large Language Models)

• OpenAI's GPT-3.5, GPT-4
• Meta's LLaMA 
• Google's LaMDA
• Lots of different ones on Hugging Face

Using A.I. as a dev

the good, the bad, and the ugly

Industry professionals use A.I. to boost their productivity

As an experienced developer, ChatGPT (and GitHub Copilot) save me an enormous amount of “figuring things out” time.

 

- Simon Willison, co-creator of Django

useful for...

• automation: testing, code review, deployment
• code generation
• exploring unfamiliar technologies and concepts

"80% correct"

Responses are maybe 80% correct, but they're said with absolute and unshakeable confidence.

You get the LLM to draft some code for you that’s 80% complete/correct.

You tweak the last 20% by hand.

I don’t need to even look things up any more, I can just prompt it and get the right answer 80% of the time.

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/the-end-of-frontend-development/

https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-development/

https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/cheating-is-all-you-need

With ChatGPT, it’s too easy to implement ideas without understanding the underlying concepts or even what the individual lines in a program do. Doing so for unfamiliar tasks means failing to learn something new, while doing so for known tasks leads to skill atrophy.

https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/03/29/age-of-ai-skill-atrophy.html

OpenAI API

• Allows integration of AI into other software
• Has software development kits for Python and JavaScript
• Not free but relatively low cost for small scale projects (but can accidentally get expensive real quick)
• You have the skills necessary to use this

Explore the landscape

• A take on the role of junior devs and senior devs in an AI world
• A take on the future for front-end devs
• Anything Simon Willison writes
• Poking around OpenAI
• One of the best overviews I have read on LLMs and how they are trained and fine-tuned
• This guy really hates ChatGPT
• Really good, long technical discussion with context, for devs, of what you should keep your eyes open about
• A dev shows how she used GitHub CoPilot to write a Google Chrome extension
• A friend of Rebecca's wrote an illustrated guide to ML
• This is the best 
• Free courses on the wider landscape

Selected good things I've read lately

What challenges and opportunities are YOU thinking about??

reach out anytime! amy@momentumlearn.com

or, you know where to find me on Slack!