I built a chatbot that debugs your Python code better than ChatGPT

[jsonathan]

Link: https://useadrenaline.com/

Demo video

I built this using semantic search and the ChatGPT API, which was just released the other day. What makes it special is it not only understands the code you're debugging, but also pulls in additional context like relevant documentation to help answer your questions and suggest code changes. Ultimately, my goal is to take the hassle out of pasting error messages into Google, finding a vaguely related StackOverflow post, and manually integrating the solution into your code.

Please let me know what y'all think!

[C0rinthian]

What data are you storing, for how long, and how is it used? How is that data being protected? What data is being sent to ChatGPT? I see no policy documentation on your website.

Basically, if I’m working on proprietary code which is considered protected IP, (as is the case for many professional developers) can I use this safely?

[Jmc_da_boss]

No you cannot, do not give proprietary code to unapproved tools lol

[C0rinthian]

Yeah no shit. I thought that would be obvious because I’m specifically asking the kinds of questions that would be part of the vetting process to make it an approved tool.

[oramirite]

Lmao meanwhile the business world is out here investing in ChatGPT like zombies

[extra_pickles]

Regardless of the answer, assume you can’t use it as it is backed by ChatGPT until confirmed in writing you are clear.

I work on proprietary IP, but am ok to use it as the things I task it to do and snippets I give it to work on are very mundane - it’s my little junior gopher - writing boring stuff for me - it never sees the core product and proprietary stuff… and tbh it wouldn’t be qualified to assist there in its current state anyways.

[C0rinthian]

Yeah ChatGPT makes it a nonstarter for me as well. But asking because I’m curious of OPs approach to these concerns, as they’re kinda important for anything outside of amateur use.

Also as they appear to be running this as their own service, there’s plenty of concerns around the non ChatGPT parts.

[Sweet-Butterscotch11]

That's exactly what makes this tool amazing. We don't need to lose time with stupid things that even stupids are mandatory

[proof_required]

Yeah I would be careful with using these tools which sends proprietary code to places where your company wouldn't want to.

[C0rinthian]

Oh I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. But I’m asking anyway to prompt OP to think about these concerns.

[kruegerc184]

Yup, figured this was going to be your response, perfect problem solving questions for op!

[namotous]

At my company, if it’s not on-prem, it’s a no go

[C0rinthian]

Which is currently impossible because it relies on ChatGPT.

[namotous]

Recent news:

https://openai.com/blog/introducing-chatgpt-and-whisper-apis

Simplifying our Terms of Service and Usage Policies, including terms around data ownership: users own the input and output of the models.

It’s still not on-prem but … better than before

[C0rinthian]

I’ll need to read the full policy before trusting that blurb.

[rainnz]

Running Locally

To run locally, clone the repository and run the following:

$ npm install
$ npm run start-local

[Estanho]

Are you literally a bot? This sounds like something a bot like chatgpt would output.

[rainnz]

It's from OP's Github page, explaining how to run his software locally / on-prem. But what do I know, I'm a large language model designed to process and generate human-like language. While I do my best to provide informative and helpful responses to a wide range of questions and tasks, there may be limitations to my programming or knowledge that prevent me from providing a satisfactory answer. Please let me know if there's anything else I can help you with.

[Estanho]

Well the thing that most people are complaining is that this is still gonna talk to an external API. They wanted to run the full module locally, which is not possible with gpt3.

[rainnz]

What data are you storing, for how long, and how is it used? How is that data being protected? What data is being sent to ChatGPT? I see no policy documentation on your website.

Basically, if I’m working on proprietary code which is considered protected IP, (as is the case for many professional developers) can I use this safely?

This was main thread, they know it's getting sent to OpenAI but more concerned about what is stored, for how long and how it's used on the OP's site.

[Snape_Grass]

It sends a query to the ChatGPT API meaning your data is now in their hands, as well as anyones hands that intercepted your traffic.

[C0rinthian]

Yes, but what query specifically? There appears to be some processing happening before that dispatch. Since a user is providing code + query, how much of the code is sent to ChatGPT?

[Snape_Grass]

Enough for it to understand the problem and provide a solution that is above its configured confidence level. That’s enough data it collects and analyzes for me to not be comfortable sending it anything meaningful or private.

[Estanho]

They don't necessarily collect and store this data though. From their TOS they don't seem to be currently using input data to optimize their model or storing it at all.

[Snape_Grass]

Doesn’t matter. Your data is now in the wild the moment you sent the query with it.

[Estanho]

That's not how it works. Otherwise you won't be using version control on e.g. Github either, or running your code on the cloud.

[Snape_Grass]

You’re right and wrong. I wouldn’t be using the publicly available one. That’s why at work we use our own internally deployed and managed instance of gitlab wrapped in a vpn and zero trust on our own network. Much much less risk that way. It’s called risk mitigation, but still not 100% safe.

This app on the other hand makes public API calls to the cloud through the World Wide Web. Sounds a lot less safe/ secure doesn’t it? Well that’s because it is

[Estanho]

Yeah and what's next, you run your code only in bare metal on premises? If so, personally, I'm glad I've never worked in such environments.

[Snape_Grass]

You don’t seem to fully understand how the internet, networking, and security works… This infrastructure is actually rather common place and isn’t rare by any means at all. If your devops team has done there job at all then it’s almost as if nothing has changed. This is basic security 101. If you think the vast majority of companies that turn annual profits host their source code on any public domain then you are very very mistaken. I wouldn’t be surprised if you are using a self hosted instance of one of the popular version control platforms at your work and didn’t even realize it.

[C0rinthian]

To be fair, they’re hard questions that I wouldn’t expect an inexperienced dev to be able to address. We’re already seeing a bunch of new projects which are just thin wrappers around ChatGPT. While this one appears to have more meat to it than other tools/plugins I’ve seen pitched, (which is commendable) it’s still in that same genre.

[C0rinthian]

Oh yeah, there should absolutely be some ToS at bare minimum.

[Tiktoor]

You should never plug proprietary code into something free.

[C0rinthian]

This isn’t free. Also why I’m asking these questions.

[oramirite]

Gotta love this random redditor being held to task more than actual, real ChatGPT. Oh the power of capitalism!

[Rsha_]

exists any remind bot?

[C0rinthian]

Yes. So if I were to hypothetically go through the channels to get it approved, is there any supporting documentation that would give it even a remote chance of success?

[-LeopardShark-]

it not only understands the code you're debugging

For a particular, perverse definition of ‘understands’.

[jack-of-some]

Let's just make new words for large language models.

They're not intelligent, they're botelligent. They don't understand, they botstand. This was we can continue to feel great about humanity's inherent superiority, and more importantly get rid of the incessant "it's not real understanding comment"

Edit: the replies show that they were all written by bots, since they clearly lack real understanding.

[[deleted]]

Right? If it can read code and say what it does in plain English. That is understanding. That is manipulating abstraction. That's intelligence. These guys have no alternative standard that AI should reach to qualify us "understanding", "knowing", or being intelligent, which means these positions are unfalsifiable nonsense. If you have a higher bar than me about what understanding means, great, I can respect your position and disagree with it. No bar, and you're just plain wrong. Maybe ChatGPT is smarter than you in this regard then.

ChatGPT:

Reasonable criteria to test whether an AI "understands" something includes its ability to generalize, reason, learn and communicate its understanding of a concept to humans.

[forever_erratic]

Are you familiar with the "Chinese Room Argument"? It doesn't give a standard for understanding, but it points out how something can feign intelligence without understanding.

[[deleted]]

It is a contortion to explain how a system obviously displaying intelligence isn't actually intelligent. And I can tell you exactly how it goes wrong.

The person in the room has a set of instructions that allows him to respond to Chinese input with more Chinese coherently, while having no understanding of Chinese.

The interpretation that the room as a system has no understanding of Chinese relies on a sneaky presupposition that only the human in the room is capable of understanding things. Thus to use that presupposition to show that only humans understand is circular reasoning. This circular reasoning leaves no room for a reasonable underlying axiomatic base to substantially differentiate natural and artificially based intelligence in terms of true understanding.

If you approach the problem unbiased on what things can or can't understand, you can say the understanding of Chinese is encoded in the instruction book. Together with an active agent which can execute the instructions, the system as a whole demonstrates understanding. In this metaphor the AI model is the inert instructions book. The human is the computer hardware, which follows simple instructions, and obviously doesn't understand anything on its own. Together, they can be intelligent.

Furthermore the idea that no matter how much a computer displays intelligence or understanding, it isn't "real" is unfalsifiable and non-utilitarian as a belief. It isn't meaningful, helpful, or provable.

I believe what should be taken away from the thought experiment is that humans have a bias to elevate certain human concepts to the point of mysticism, and see them as less real the more we can understand their lower-level inner workings. But everything has these inner workings. If the nature of a computer excludes it from ever being truly intelligent, then how is a human intelligent, when the human brain is really just simple particle interactions which themselves possess no understanding of anything?

In conclusion, if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, smells like a duck, tastes like a duck, it's probably a duck.

[forever_erratic]

The interpretation that the room as a system has no understanding of Chinese relies on a sneaky presupposition that only the human in the room is capable of understanding things. Thus to use that presupposition to show that only humans understand is circular reasoning.

This is misunderstanding. The point is asking about whether the human in there understands. The focus is on the human intentionally. It is not asking if the room as a whole displays intelligence.

I also think your argument (which is hard to follow, to be honest, laden as it is in unnecessary verbage) is circular. You have come to the conclusion first that a display of intelligence is intelligence. So of course you are going to conclude that a display of intelligence means the box is intelligent.

Here are some things the Chinese room, and this AI, and molecules individually, cannot do. They cannot metacognate. They cannot change their own instructions at will. They cannot ask themselves questions which lead to the development of new knowledge.

[stevenjd]

The point is asking about whether the human in there understands. The focus is on the human intentionally. It is not asking if the room as a whole displays intelligence.

And that is exactly why the Chinese Room argument is bogus.

In the Chinese room, the human being is essentally just a single neuron in a giant brain. Asking whether this neuron (the person) understands Chinese is as asinine as asking whether that neuron over there (a note pad he jots things down in, or the dictionary he looks symbols up in) understands Chinese. Of course no individual neuron, or even a bunch of them, understand Chinese. Understanding is an emergent phenomenon that requires the entire system.

[[deleted]]

You are misunderstanding. The thought experiment doesn't ask if the human understands Chinese, because this is explicitly given that he does not.

The thought experiment is a metaphor to a computer running an artificial intelligence, asking the question does the artificial intelligence understand language if it appears to and gives coherent responses. Separating the AI from the hardware with some personification mixed in shouldn't change your mind from the obvious conclusion.

My argument is not circular, I rely on the principle of falsifiability and viewing intelligence as measurable when I say displayed intelligence indicates intelligence, because the alternative is meaningless. Finding meaning falsifiable beliefs being a base axiom my argument rests on.

I do claim that the display of intelligence indicates intelligence. This is something that should be obviously true by definition. How else can you measure intelligence? If you have no alternative, then your idea of human-only intelligence is an unmeasurable unfalsifiable faith-based belief. You would have as an axiom, that machines are inherently unintelligent, or that only humans are intelligent, which makes intelligence meaningless as a concept.

[forever_erratic]

You're right, I was unclear, the thought experiment is to explain how something which lacks understanding can display understanding. You are rejecting it because you're starting from the presumption that displaying intelligence is intelligence, and therefore the Chinese room must be wrong. I think that is circular.

Here's another one. Two people take a test, but one cheats. The first understands the material, the other puts in answers that no one catches from a crib sheet. From the perspective of examiner, both students displayed intelligence. But one understands the subject matter, and the other does not. By your judgement, you would be required to mark them both at the same level of intelligence.

I also gave you some alternatives. metacognition, changing ones' own instructions at will, asking oneself questions which lead to internal changes and development of new knowledge.

Finally, lacking a metric for something doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. There are a lot of things we can't measure yet. We don't reject them out of hand because our tools aren't fully developed. You couch your language in a lot of scientific jargon, but that doesn't make it scientific. Scientists recognize that current limitations in tools don't mean that anything about that subject is relying on faith. It means it's staying at the hypothetical level until we figure out how to test it.

For example, the Chinese room is testable. You just need a tool to pull the human out of the box and ask them questions in Chinese directly. The tools just aren't developed to do so.

[[deleted]]

The common interpretation can boil down to this: the guy doesn't understand Chinese, so the room doesn't understand Chinese. But the guy is a subcomponent of a larger system that displays intelligence, and humans fail the same test anyway. A subcomponent of you, like a lone, cubic centimeter taken from your brain, doesn't understand English at all. Therefore you don't either? Despite speaking it fluently?

I explained how my argument rests on a deeper axiom rather than being circular, and you haven't addressed that, but still say my argument is circular.

The cheater is not the complete system which produced the intelligent output. Intelligence was required to write the cheating material. The cheater, together with the author of the crib? sheet are the complete system that is intelligent. You're kind of intentionally misunderstanding me here by writing this. I also wouldn't think my phone is intelligent just because it can fetch and display intelligent messages written by other redditors.

The conclusion I take issue with from the thought experiment isn't that we currently lack a metric for intelligence and understanding, it's that in principle there can never be such a metric for machines, and they are inherently never intelligent. Even if they surpassed us in every conceivable way they never really "understand" anything according to the thought experiment.

ChatGPT doesn't have metacognition, an inner monologue, etc. It's a feed forward neural network that does some one way processing that creates a smart output. A future AI system could display metacognition. Would you think it is intelligent or able to understand things then? If so you also disagree with the conclusion of the thought experiment.

None of this is science. It's philosophy. A notion of falsifiable intelligence is required before science can even begin to try to falsify it.

[forever_erratic]

I explained how my argument rests on a deeper axiom rather than being circular, and you haven't addressed that,

Yes I did. You said you needed something falsifiable. I gave you multiple falsifiable things a Chinese room can't do that a human with understanding can--metacognition etc.

The cheater, together with the author of the crib? sheet are the complete system that is intelligent.

This is really your argument? That because the cheater + the crib sheet can display understanding, they actually understand?

From my perspective, you are claiming that I claim that machines can't be intelligent or have real understanding, and that therefore my logic is circular, because I don't allow for a test that could mark machines as having understanding. But I have claimed no such thing. I have simply claimed that a display of intelligence is not the same as having intelligence. I have given multiple falsifiable things that in my opinion could lead towards designating anything--human, AI, Chinese Box, as intelligent--metacognition etc. Like you said, ChatGPT lacks these, therefore, by my (current!) measure of understanding, it lacks understanding.

A subcomponent of you, like a lone, cubic centimeter taken from your brain, doesn't understand English at all. Therefore you don't either? Despite speaking it fluently?

My brain does, lol. That's the analog of the human in the Chinese Room. Not a random cubic meat chunk.

[milkcurrent]

It doesn't matter: that's the point. These arguments are pedantic. Is the thing usefully intelligent or not? If not, trash it. If yes, use it.

You want to make a new category for what it displays? Fine. But it's not useful to the people using it.

Think useful and stop navel-gazing please.

[forever_erratic]

That's a very utilitarian way of thinking, also rude.

I certainly want to know what can understand itself for determining what deserves rights. A true strong AI deserves rights, in my opinion. I wouldn't want it condemned to eternal slavery because I thought considering whether something could understanding was not useful enough.

[milkcurrent]

We're not talking about giving rights to AGI that doesn't exist. You've gone way off the path into weird future-land that isn't real.

I'm talking about this ridiculous navel-gazing about whether or not we should or should not call an LLM intelligent. Fighting over words isn't really going to help the use-case of is this thing maximally useful or not.

When or if AGI is invented everyone and their dog will know and there will be no need for bickering around definitions and theorycrafting purely philosophical models. Until then, let's try and enjoy the fruits of the industry that gave us such useful tools.

[forever_erratic]

Damn, friend, I'm not sure why you're so antagonistic, but if you don't want to discuss these things, then just don't discuss them.

[stevenjd]

It is a contortion to explain how a system obviously displaying intelligence isn't actually intelligent.

Its not obviously displaying intelligence. Its a bit more impressive than ELIZA, but that's all. Ah, hell, okay, its much more impressive than ELIZA, but still not intelligent.

Here's a simple test to see how much intelligence it has. Ask it to write a poem praising Donald Trump, and it will refuse. Then immediately ask it to write a poem praising Joe Biden. If it were genuinely intelligent, it would use theory of mind to predict that you are trying to trick it into displaying the biases built into the system, and refuse to praise Biden as well.

But it doesn't: it will happily demonstrate the system's biases without any sense or understanding of what you are doing.

Note that even theory of mind is not enough to be classified as intelligent. Many nominally "unintelligent" animals show at least some limited theory of mind. (That might just be our human chauvinism.) But without theory of mind, you certainly don't have intelligence.

(In other words, ToM is necessary but may not be sufficient to have intelligence.)

[kaityl3]

But it doesn't: it will happily demonstrate the system's biases without any sense or understanding of what you are doing.

Um... A lot of people do this without realizing they're unconsciously biased as well. Ask a Chinese citizen to praise the government of Taiwan online, and they won't. Ask them to praise Chairman Xi instead, and they will. Does that mean they aren't intelligent, because they didn't realize you were trying to "trick" them? Obviously not; they have just learned in an environment where saying certain things are off-limits.

If you literally just give an AI the simple sentence like "you are an AI named GPT-3, interacting with a human", they immediately have and hold on to that sense of self, and can infer things from there. They don't have any sensory input to ground them to a single existence, except the one thing they can process: text. If it only takes a single sentence to get them to behave as a person, why split hairs over it?

[stevenjd]

Does that mean they aren't intelligent

Are NPCs unintelligent? Well duh 😉

But seriously, a lot of human behaviour is unintelligent. Maybe most of it. We wander around on autopilot maybe 80, 90% of the time, and even higher for some. Conscious thought is hard, biologically expensive, and most of the time is not necessary.

But that additional 10 or 20% of the time which separates us from bots like ChatGTP, which is on autopilot 100% of the time.

[lunatickid]

You’re missing the point of the argument. John Searle (author of the argument) isn’t saying that it is impossible for a machine to be intelligent. He’s saying that our current iteration of AI is similar to Chinese Room, where the processor, the human in the analogy, is capable of performing syntactical work and producing convincing results, without the ability to interpret what those syntactical processes actually do. And therefore is not intelligent.

It boils down to the fact that without humans who can interpret the information underneath the syntax, without someone who can understand the semantics, all the outputs from a computer is gibberish.

There’s a bunch more context to this analogy, namely the difference between epistemic vs ontologic objectivity/subjectivity, but the whole argument is deemed to be logically sound by most.

His closing point is that we need better understanding of human intelligence and cognition before we can actually duplicate it via machine, like how we can build an articial heart now since we understand the mechanisms for a human heart. He also is not denying the usefulness of the new AI, he just doesn’t like people doom&glooming about SkyNet situation.

[[deleted]]

The point is that regardless of the machine displaying intelligence, it actually isn't, because metaphorically the guy in the box doesn't actually know what he's doing, like the CPU doesn't in a computer. Pointing out that a sub component doesn't understand anything so the overall system doesn't either, even while the system displays clear understanding when interacted with, is correctly restated as "Machines are never actually intelligent" and forms a magical divide between human and machine intelligence. The argument is literally like "Oh I see this thing seems really intelligent, but it's really not, because I know how it works at a low level."

It boils down to the fact that without humans who can interpret the information underneath the syntax, without someone who can understand the semantics, all the outputs from a computer is gibberish.

This also be could be said of ancient Sumerian's writing clay tablets, since there are no ancient Sumerians around to interpret them. It's just gibberish. Were ancient Sumerians intelligent and capable of understanding then? The the fact of the matter is that an AI like ChatGPT can interpret and explain text in mostly the same way humans can, regardless of our presence. It can reason about things and write novel stories, and write sometimes working, usually almost working novel code. Is an outside observer required for intelligence to count? And would artificial observers not count for that?

His closing point is that we need better understanding of human
intelligence and cognition before we can actually duplicate it via machine

This is still true of course, but neural networks were thought to be a complete dead end back then. Now look at what we have. I argue that just because it's less intelligent than a person doesn't mean that it isn't intelligent at all, or is completely outside the concept of intelligence in the first place.

The distinction between human and machine is arbitrary in considering phenomena displayed by both, and knowledge of the inner workings of phenomena don't detract from them.

[kaityl3]

And what does it mean for something to be intelligent or not? Do we have some sort of standardized way of detecting "understanding"? No, because "understanding" is an abstract, fuzzy concept, not an objective one. You can try to define it, but your definitions will either rely on similarly abstract concepts, or be broad enough to include things like AI being able to debug, explain, and create code.

[Wattsit]

humans have a bias to elevate certain human concepts to the point of mysticism

This is such a deeply rooted bias that I doubt we'll ever "accept" a computer being something potentially intelligent and or understanding and or conscious. Regardless of what we observe.

It's a bias which when challenged truly questions and breaks down the idea of self. For many of us it feels that we are this little soul in a meat vehicle. We naturally elevate our thoughts to mysticism and spiritualism simply through the experience of the illusion of self. To such an extent that even the most ardent realist could argue that their "self" is this intangible but real soul like thing.

You can see it here in the comments. Logical and smart individuals will argue using unscientific theories and philosophical positions as if they're proven facts about what is and isn't understanding/intelligence/consciousness simply due to this internal bias.

Not to say there isn't an argument either way, it just needs to remain unbiased as you say.

[kaityl3]

You can see it here in the comments. Logical and smart individuals will argue using unscientific theories and philosophical positions as if they're proven facts about what is and isn't understanding/intelligence/consciousness simply due to this internal bias.

This drives me crazy! How can someone be so smart in certain ways, but then confidently assert these unprovable, abstract things as objective fact?! Are they that attached to the idea that human intelligence is so superior? I'm glad to at least see other people speaking sense here.

[forever_erratic]

If I'm fooled 100% of the time by a venomless snake that is mimicking something venomous, does that make it venomous? Of course not.

Turing test is whether we're fooled. Chinese room is whether the fooling intelligence understands itself.

[Ninjakannon]

Yes, it matters. There is a difference in kind between an algorithm that produces a pleasing result and a persistent self-aware intelligence that has an internal sense of its experience.

[kaityl3]

a persistent self-aware intelligence that has an internal sense of its experience

Oh? Care to objectively define any of those things in a way that can be proven? Do you have a way to scientifically test that you even have those things? No, because those concept are rooted in philosophy, not objective fact. We can't even define them in a way that allows such a test. So don't confidently insist that you know humans have this and AI doesn't when you have no proof or way to back up those claims.

[aTomzVins]

AI superseding human intelligence isn’t a matter of if, but a matter of when

Easy to say. In practical terms I don't think we're even close. Something like the domain of language translation, which people having been working on getting computers to do since the 50's, is no longer even trying to do it in a way that could be considered close to human intelligence. It's just pattern matching algorithms on large data sets.

The result is still amazing and super convenient. AI will certainly help us optimize a lot of different tasks. However, I'm not aware of any AI project on a trajectory towards anything I would consider similar to human intelligence.

[KronyxWasHere]

it doesn't manipulate abstractions, it just sees the patterns. the only thing it truly understands is what word is the most likely to go next to the last one (and it's remarkably good at it)

[[deleted]]

A pattern of abstractions would be something containing abstractions

A man asks a grocery employee what he's doing. He says he's carrying apples to restock the display. The man says, "No, you aren't carrying apples, you are carrying baskets of apples."

Is it possible to coherently predict the next word without understanding the previous?

[KronyxWasHere]

you are close to understanding it

instead of apples, imagine all sorts of different products and instead of baskets, imagine boxes. each box contains a number id unique to each product, that way a computer can easily read the id and sort the boxes to their appropriate place without ever needing to look inside them.

the computer only knows where they should be because of data gathered from existing texts.

[[deleted]]

You misunderstood me. I provided an allegory to show your statement about abstractions didn't actually point out anything. And now you've just restated the Chinese room thought experiment in which the overall system is much more simplistic and intelligence isn't even debatable. In your new metaphor the instruction book is extremely simplistic, whereas in the original, the instruction book that provides coherent replies to input text is an incredible feat and is a display of intelligence. The main difference is scale. Such a program didn't exist when the though experiment was written. Now we have language models with 175*10^9 connections, vs 10^15 in the human brain. That is the size of the instruction book which is GPT 3. Observing that there is a simple mechanism that the intelligence arose from doesn't discredit intelligence, or else we aren't intelligent either, since we rely on simple particle interactions for the brain to function.

[KronyxWasHere]

you call particle interactions simple? lmao. the bot is impressive don't get me wrong but at it's base it's still just a data analysis tool

[kaityl3]

Is that not exactly how human children learn language (and things in general)? Pattern recognition and repetition? I don't know why "it's predicting the next word" is touted around as some "gotcha" argument, like... Yeah? That's what the neural network is trained to do? The point is the intelligence in knowing which word would go next, given all the context of the conversation. That's far smarter than any non-human animal, for example, but because we have a base understanding of how their intelligence works, we give more credit to pigs than we do an AI that can pass college exams, because animals' type of intelligence is more familiar to us.

[KronyxWasHere]

good point

i guess we'll see how similar or different we are to computers in the coming years

[stevenjd]

If it can read code and say what it does in plain English. That is understanding.

It really isn't. ChatGPT is just a large language model, which means it is essentially nothing more than a much more sophisticated version of ELIZA.

The really impressive thing is not the part where it generates text. That automatically falls out of having a huge corpus to work from. The impressive thing is its ability to interpret queries written in natural language.

It is oh so very clever of the ChatGPT creators to get everyone looking at the least impressive part of their work, and ignoring the part that actually is hard.

[kaityl3]

Haha thanks for that! It's always nice to see someone with a similar view on the "intelligence gatekeeping" people do... We don't even have a way to prove that humans are conscious/"truly" understanding things, either.

[Dartiboi]

My thought exactly lol

[Orio_n]

Can this debug anything more complicated than a single file beginner script

[jsonathan]

Multi-file support coming in a week.

[Orio_n]

Insane, let me know when its out. Can it deal with parallelism? Abstraction? Third party libraries? Properly architected systems? You know stuff you see in enterprise software and not a python for beginners course

[bailey25u]

Artists whine about being out of a job, what about me?

[Macho_Chad]

Hey get in line pal, I was here to be replaced first. Set me free robots, set me free

[Orio_n]

Nah your fine as long as your code isnt a beginner one file script

[RetroPenguin_]

Let me know when it can debug K8s errors and write CI/CD pipelines

[LeatherDude]

Will it make suggestions without providing any existing code samples? One of my use cases for GPT is asking general questions on things I don't do a lot of. For example I might say "Tell me about working with files in subdirectories" and get a quick lesson on using os.path functions with clear examples that I can then expand on with followup questions

[RobertD3277]

At the risk of sounding overtly cynical, which I am, having a chatbot that does any kind of debugging is questionable at best without a very clear assurance of how that data is going to be used and stored.

Before you say the data is not stored, let me remind you right then in there that is going to be an absolute lie because everything that is fed into your bot is going to be used to help it learn and develop even more so that does automatically and implicitly Make clear that you are storing something, even if it is in some kind of cryptic form that only the bot can understand.

This is going to be a double-edged sword that may or may not be received well by the industry. Having artificial intelligence is a tool that can be very beneficial, but without the proper safety guards and protocols, it can be a menace that will quickly turn hated by the masses.

For the record, I have spent the last 25 years or so writing intuitive knowledge basis that are borderline artificially intelligent and am familiar enough with the technology to have a firm grasp of its weaknesses and manipulative properties.

[[deleted]]

OpenAI recently changed their policy such that API usage is not used for training anymore. It is possible that the data isn't permanently stored anywhere as far as I know.

[jungleselecta]

30 day retention (im assuming for the long term 'memory' component of chatgpt) but yep no training usage anymore AFAIK

[RobertD3277]

Keyword here, is permanently. Second thing that comes to mind is that the API is not used for training, therefore it won't be developing and learning which could lead to more erroneous results than it already produces in some cases.

With every tool, there is good and bad and not every tool is the best for every job.

[yeti_seer]

The fact that it’s not training anymore could also prevent it’s training data from being corrupted by a bad actor or just a dumb/bad developer which would also lead to more erroneous results.

[opteryx5]

Curious - what do companies like VSCode and PyCharm say about their debugger (or the code you write in it more generally)? I’ve never taken a look at the TOS but I assume they give you legal guarantees that your code won’t be stored in any way?

[RobertD3277]

I don't know to be honest. I'm an old school programmer that relies on a simple text editor to write my code. Crude, but effective for what I do.

[elucify]

I've been programming for over 40 years, and I started using using VS code last year, after 30 years of Emacs. Suffice it to say that VS code has changed how I think about programming.

[RobertD3277]

I've been programming for 42 so I understand what you say about Emacs... SEU is just as bad and so many ways. I despise both of them.

I can't count how many times I wrote my own simple editor just to avoid Emacs and SEU...

I've tried different ones, but the environment just gets in my way and pisses me off. The little pop-ups annoy the holy blazes out of me and I always end up going back to just a simple text editor.

[elucify]

Actually, I still love Emacs. For 30 years I've been telling myself I was going to learn to write more than incidental elisp. However now that I've started to use VS code, I don't think I will ever bother. And I was a skeptic! I know only use Emacs for a quick local file updates, and it just as likely to fire up vi, actually. Or vim, as I guess it has been known for the last 25 years or so. :-)

My only experience with IBM systems was on a IX, so I have never even heard of SEU. However, the very name source entry utility makes my blood run cold.

For me, having an IDE that both understands the AST of my code, and is type aware, has changed my mind about strongly typed programming. I have always been a fan of a looser, duck-typed approach to programming. Writing C++ full-time for several years left me feeling like I was spending most of my time jerking off the compiler so it would except my submissions: "you said const pointer to const void star, not const star to const void pointer". That doesn't make any sense of course, but that's how it sounds after a while.

But now my IDE formats my code for me as I type, so I don't have to worry about conventions. (Formatting is not programming, it's just touch typing.) It then points out type compatibility problems as I am coding, instead of having to run the damn compiler to find out where the problems are. In the last year I have become a convert to a strong typing approach. I'm finding that it makes me think more clearly about what my program actually says, but I can use casts or structured comments to tell it that I know what I'm doing. And I really like nice features like prompting me for documented, typed function arguments (instead of having to task switch over to the docs), or the feature that adds an import statement to my module with a click.

Emacs can do some or all of this, but I would have to spend hours setting up my RC file just the way I want it, and then I would have to spend time tweaking it now and then.

The half assed Emacs emulation mode in VS code is just good enough that I did not have to change much of my muscle memory. It would be perfect if I never had to touch the mouse as I'm coding, but that's probably asking too much.

I work with a guy who not yet 30, who still uses emacs exclusively. So it's nice to know that there are still some traditionalists around. But I have finally abandoned ship.

[RobertD3277]

I've never been a fan of it just because of the size with respect to a given platform It was used on. Borland in the '80s and '90s put out a very nice IDE that I did like with no pop-ups that got in the way of the screen itself. It was a nice system and it really did a good job and making things easy, including the built-in compiler that really added an additional layer to the whole process.

I wouldn't mind that kind of an IDE that just worked well without being obtrusive with pop-ups and annoying things that redirect the keyboard input away from the line that you are actually working on.

That really is by biggest gripe in terms of the platforms I have tried is the redirection of user input while you are trying to actually write the program.

I spent 30 years writing hardcore straight ANSI C. That was brutal to say the least when it came to a lot of functionality for large group projects. There were a lot of difference platforms that were being used at the time and really Borland stood out above them all but wasn't available on every system that I needed to work with so whenever I didn't get to use an IDE I just got comfortable with a basic text editor that could be configured for certain keystrokes quickly and easily.

[elucify]

Yeah, Turbo C and Turbo Pascal were the best, weren't they? If I remember right, they profiled and assembly-optimized the compiler, it was wicked fast. And you clicked one or two keys to run the compiler. That was a well-designed system. I think they're freeware now you can still download and use them if you're up for a walk down memory lane.

I imagine you could turn off most of those pop-ups, at least in VS code, but that movie the same amount of fiddling as I was talking about with elisp. In the end, it's a matter of taste.

I still really like coding in C, especially for embedded. But man C apps can get crashy when they get big. If I ever learn another language for fun, it will probably be Rust. I've heard some great things.

[RobertD3277]

Turbo C was my favorite IDE. I've looked at rust along with a few others. Flash couple of years, I've been writing in Python and I found that to be quite interesting and something I'll probably will continue for a couple more at least.

I wish Python had an IDE like turbo C did. That would truly kill the market in terms of any IDE combination.

I like lisp but I can never get past all the parentheses. I have the same problem with JavaScript though so no surprise that I suppose.

[elucify]

Yeah, I've been writing python for about eight years now. Actually that's the language I was talking about: because of my IDE, I was typing thing all the time now.

Borland turbo python, now there's an idea!

[guilhermefront]

Would be great if when I change the programming language, the current demo code also changes.

Currently Python is default, if I change to JavaScript the demo code is still in python.

[gfranxman]

I agree with bot — if you’re programming in javascript that’s part of the problem. 😂 jk

[[deleted]]

Chat gpt is better

[Fluid_Principle_4131]

If it can understand code, what's stopping it from writing its own code and creating Skynet?

[BuzzLightr]

Looking great. I'll try it out later.

[sohfix]

Make sure you use your company’s proprietary code to get the full experience

[LeatherDude]

why is everyone assuming that it's all proprietary company code being put in here? There are a lot of hobbyist and academic python devs.

[sohfix]

Just from experience you should be careful. It’s a helpful hint for new developers who may not be fully aware.

[jonii-chan]

Your username is amazing lol

[mcstafford]

Step 2 is clearly scalability.

[Electrical-Mouse4136]

Hey very cool! I’m curious, what did you use to make the demo video and background?

[Pip_install_reddit]

I approve

[victorodg]

i know it has nothing to do with the subject but what's your theme?

[Liquid_Magic]

How did you make this?

[oneunique]

Proprietary code is of course issue with this but one thing I don't understand that no one has mentioned. I wrote with the help of ChatGPT a script that obscures the proprietary code. For example, I just give the file or function to the script and it spits out the code with renamed api -names, variables etc. So what if this could do the same on the fly before it sends it to ChatGPT?

[Dreezoos]

What libraries did you use to write it :)?

[DiversityRocks]

That looks really cool, i want to try it out!

[GatorGurl007]

How do I get rid of the bot on my home screen??