Mindshifts in Sofware Engineering
An oral history into the first contact between humanity and an alien intelligence
💻 Mindshifts in Sofware Engineering
If there is a generative AI person in your circle of friends, yes, they’ve probably felt that they were going slightly crazy in the last year. Only a few generative AI systems have truly succeeded in production, and they’ve been hard to build. This wonderful paper from Microsoft-Github, the first organization outside OpenAI to unveil a large-scale system, makes clear the challenges and opportunities:
Time-consuming process of trial and error “Early days, we just wrote a bunch of crap to see if it worked. Experimenting is the most time-consuming [thing] if you don’t have the right tools. We need to build better tools”
Wrangling prompt output “It would make up objects that didn’t conform to that JSON schema, and we’d have to figure out what to do with that“ “if the model is kind of inherently predisposed to respond with a certain type of data, we don’t try to force it to give us something else because that seems to yield a higher error rate“ - o…
