lostintangent (u/lostintangent)

lostintangent commented on Show HN: Reactive: A React Book for the Reluctant (written by Claude) github.com/cloudstreet-de... · Posted by u/DavidCanHelp

lostintangent · 5 months ago

This is so fun, and I just learned a couple things from it :)

Personally, I find “learning through demystification” really effective. So putting the humor aside, I’d love to see more things written like this.

lostintangent commented on GitHub Spark lets you build web apps in plain English techcrunch.com/2024/10/29... · Posted by u/davidgomes

benatkin · a year ago

The GitHub Next team sounds more like a department than a team. It also sounded odd to hear that a group of that size uses and loves something that is unlikely to be used by a large percentage of the team directly. Yay corporate motivational speak! I can use another look at https://despair.com/collections/demotivators after this.

When GitHub Next asked for this, there was already pressure in place for ASF to give that to them, because they're locked into GitHub, so it may not have been given entirely freely. You can say that you're confident it was, but to me it seems impossible to know for sure. I don't know if it was or not. It might be that they would have decided to give it freely but the thought of their relationship with GitHub came to mind while they were considering it. In any case, it's a big ask, because if this takes off, soon the phrase Spark Application that another commenter mentioned will be ambiguous.

lostintangent · a year ago

Out of curiosity: what size do you think constitutes a “team” vs. a “department”?

GitHub Next is 18 people (inclusive of all roles), which seems appropriately-sized to be called a “team” (certainly in a large engineering company).

But apologies if that came off as misleading.

lostintangent commented on GitHub Spark lets you build web apps in plain English techcrunch.com/2024/10/29... · Posted by u/davidgomes

benatkin · a year ago

Whether it's a namespace collision or not, it's uncool of them to steal the name of Apache Spark, which was an influential project in machine learning, and must have helped generative AI get to where it is today.

lostintangent · a year ago

We (the GitHub Next team) use and love Apache Spark. So we made sure to connect with ASF before releasing GitHub Spark, and confirm they were comfortable with us using this name.

We felt like there was sufficient difference between the two products, that there wouldn’t be any confusion. Especially with the target audience that GitHub Spark ultimately intends to reach.

That said, we plan to validate this during the Technical Preview phase. Since we absolutely want to be respectful of Apache Spark, and its impact on software.

lostintangent commented on GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview github.blog/2024-04-29-gi... · Posted by u/davidbarker

lostintangent · 2 years ago

If folks want to see what Copilot Workspace looks like, here’s a sample session where I addressed a feature request in an OSS VS Code extension I maintain: https://copilot-workspace.githubnext.com/lostintangent/gitdo....

You can see the originating issue and the resulting PR from there. And note that while the initial spec/plan/code was mostly good, I iterated on a couple parts of the plan, and then made a minor tweak to the code manually (everything in CW is editable). Which is a key part of our goal with CW: to help bootstrap you with a task (or think out loud with AI), and then provide the iteration primitives to explore further.

lostintangent commented on GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview github.blog/2024-04-29-gi... · Posted by u/davidbarker

Cilvic · 2 years ago

I'm not sure why they insist on code spaces instead of running this inside vs code?

Setups/working looks pretty similar to aider [1] that I've been using and liking, Aider is smaller steps than plandex, but plandex went into some kind of loops a couple of times so I stoped using it for now.

[1] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider

lostintangent · 2 years ago

We definitely intend to explore a VS Code extension in the not too distant future. And we decided to build a web client + integrated cloud terminal, simply because that allowed us to create an experience that is one-click away from an issue, and could be accessed from anywhere and any device (i.e. we’ve deeply optimized CW for mobile, and I do quite a bit of code thinking in that modality).

In the meantime, when you open a Codespace from Copilot Workspace, you could open that Codespace in VS Code desktop. And use that as a companion editor to the web client (since we bi-directionally sync file changes between them). But totally agreed that a more integrated VS Code experience will be compelling!

lostintangent commented on GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview github.blog/2024-04-29-gi... · Posted by u/davidbarker

singluere · 2 years ago

While I've not used this product, I've created somewhat similar setup using open source LLMs that runs locally. After having used it for about three months, I can say that debugging LLM prompts was far more annoying than debugging code. Ultimately, I ended up abandoning my setup and going in favor of writing code the good old fashioned way. YMMV

lostintangent · 2 years ago

I can definitely echo the challenges of debugging non-trivial LLM apps, and making sure you have the right evals to validate progress. I spent many hours optimizing Copilot Workspace, and there is definitely both an art and a science to it :)

That said, I’m optimistic that tool builders can take on a lot of that responsibility, and create abstractions that allow developer to focus solely on their code, and the problem at hand.

lostintangent commented on GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview github.blog/2024-04-29-gi... · Posted by u/davidbarker

sdesol · 2 years ago

Interesting. I don't think the AI code generation will live up to developer expectations, but I do see the value in "project management for developers". The value I see with workspace is not the code generation, but the ability to help developers organize their thoughts.

lostintangent · 2 years ago

One of our main goals with Copilot Workspace is to help offer a "thought partner"/rubber duck for developers, and potentially even other members of a software team (as you said, PMs, designers, etc.). And code generation is obviously just one means of helping you think through a problem, along with a fleshed out spec (what are you trying to accomplish?), and plan for how to approach the problem (how might you actually accomplish it?).

And so while we want to help generate code for tasks (e.g. from issue->PR), we also find that it's just super helpful to take an idea and make it more tangible/concrete. And then use that Workspace session to drive a conversation amongst the team, or spark the implementation. Especially since that might only take a couple clicks.

Within the GitHub Next team, I'll often file issues on one of the team's project repos, and then pause for a moment, before realizing I'm actually curious how it might be accomplished. So I'll open it in CW, iterate a bit on the plan, and then either 1) realize it's simple enough to just fix it, or 2) understand more about my intentions and use a shared session to drive a discussion with the team. But in either case, it's pretty nice to give my curiosity the space to progress forward, and also, capitalize on serendipitous learning opportunities.

So while AI-powered code generation is clearly compelling, I agree with you that there are other, more broadly interesting benefits to the idea->code environment that CW is trying to explore. We have a LOT of work to do, but I'm excited about the potential :)

lostintangent commented on Show HN: PromptLayer – Track, debug, and maintain GPT prompts in prod promptlayer.com/?hn... · Posted by u/jzone3

lostintangent · 3 years ago

Is this like Weights & Biases for prompt-based LLM experimentation (as opposed to model training)?

lostintangent commented on ActivityPub could be the future (2020) kyefox.com/2020/04/09/act... · Posted by u/Kye

lostintangent · 3 years ago

> No one interacts with my tweets anymore. Meanwhile, I get response on Mastodon that reminds me of the early days of Twitter, before they betrayed their developer community and hired a legion of people to cut ad deals.

Out of curiosity: is your excitement about ActivityPub, based largely on a greater amount of perceived engagement, as compared to other channels?