• 1 Post
  • 3 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 11th, 2024

help-circle
  • I understand and agree.

    I have found that AI is super useful when I am already an expert in what it is about to produce. In a way it just saves key strokes.

    But when I use it for specifics I am not an expert in, I invariably lose time. For instance, I needed to write an implementation of some audio classes to use CoreAudio on Mac. I thought I could use AI to fill in some code, which, if I knew exactly what calls to make, would be obvious. Unfortunately the AI didn’t know either, but gave solutions upon solutions that “looked” like they would work. In the end, I had to tear out the AI code, and just spend the 4-5 hours searching for the exact documentation I needed, with a real functional relevant example.

    Another example is coding up some matrix multiplications + other stuff using both the Apple Accelerate and the Cuda cublas. I thought to myself, “well- I have to cope with the change in row vs column ordering of data, and that’s gonna be super annoying to figure out, and I’m sure 10000 researchers have already used AI to figure this out, so maybe I can use that.” Every solution was wrong. Strangely wrong. Eventually I just did it myself- spent the time. And then I started querying different LLMs via the ChatArena, to see whether or not I was just posing the question wrong or something. All of the answers were incorrect.

    And it was a whole day lost. It did take me 4 hours to just go through everything and make sure everything was right and fix things with testers, etc, but after spending a whole day in this psychedelic rabbit hole, where nothing worked, but everything seemed like it should, it was really tough to take.

    So…

    In the future, I just have to remember, that if I’m not an expert I have to look at real documentation. And that the AI is really an amazing “confidence man.” It inspires confidence no matter whether it is telling the truth or lying.

    So yeah, do all the assignments by yourself. Then after you are done, have testers working, everything is awesome, spend time in different AIs and see what it would have written. If it is web stuff, it probably will get it right, but if it’s something more detailed, as of now, it will probably get it wrong.

    Edited some grammar and words.