Let's talk about AI

J.Hilk

So, how long do you guys think it will take before tokens get too expensive, or AI tools become so bloated with ads that we'll see a reversal in the current trend?

We never really saw it happen with Google Search or YouTube, but we do see it elsewhere – streaming services being the obvious example. Netflix, Amazon and the rest started lean and affordable, and look where we ended up. Personally, I find myself just one step away from the high seas again, which I had presumed would stay a relic of my rebellious youth.

Chris Kawa

The so called enshittification of services is a 3 step process - attract users, please investors, squeeze both dry.
Since most AI companies currently operate at a significant loss we are still in the first phase, but investors already see that the money is vanishing fast, so I'd say we're nearing phase 2, this or next year would be my broad estimate.

What do you mean we didn't see it with Google Search or YouTube? Have you tried to use search or watch a video lately? We're deep deep in phase 3 with both of these. Ad ridden hellscapes that funnel you into subscriptions.

J.Hilk

@Chris-Kawa said in Let's talk about AI:

What do you mean we didn't see it with Google Search or YouTube? Have you tried to use search or watch a video lately? We're deep deep in phase 3 with both of these. Ad ridden hellscapes that funnel you into subscriptions.

I have, and I agree!

With Google and YouTube users are trapped, and they know it. Sure, other search engines exist, but Google is so deeply baked into everything that switching just isn't realistic for most people. So they stay, they grumble, and nothing really changes. No exodus, just quiet acceptance. And let's be honest, no real competition exists or survives against YouTube either – Twitch carved out its niche but that's about it.

My question is whether AI will follow the same path. With streaming we did at least see some reaction, people cancelling, rotating, or heading back to the high seas. Google never triggered that, despite arguably deserving it. And unlike Google, people could simply go back to before – AI makes a lot of things more convenient, but honestly I haven't encountered anything it does that I couldn't live without.

I can see things going more specialised too – dedicated models for single tasks: summarising documents, finding patterns, translations and the like, all locked behind corporate paywalls. That seems like the natural endpoint for a lot of this.

Funny enough though, I already use AI instead of googling things myself – just ask it to find me relevant links rather than wading through pages of SEO nonsense. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

JKSH

@J.Hilk said in Let's talk about AI:

With Google and YouTube users are trapped, and they know it. Sure, other search engines exist, but Google is so deeply baked into everything that switching just isn't realistic for most people. So they stay, they grumble, and nothing really changes. No exodus, just quiet acceptance. And let's be honest, no real competition exists or survives against YouTube either – Twitch carved out its niche but that's about it.
...
Funny enough though, I already use AI instead of googling things myself – just ask it to find me relevant links rather than wading through pages of SEO nonsense.

There's no mandate for us to be like "most people" 😊

I agree that it's hard to switch from YouTube or many of Google's cloud services. However, switching from Google Search is much easier since it doesn't involve abandoning existing networks or data. I've been using https://www.ecosia.org/ for the past year and I've found that ~~its search results are comparable to Google's~~ I don't miss anything from Google . It offers "AI Search" too (but I haven't used it enough to comment on its quality)

unlike Google, people could simply go back to before – AI makes a lot of things more convenient, but honestly I haven't encountered anything it does that I couldn't live without.

I think it's great that you retain your independence. The big players are trying to make people dependent on AI to the point where they can't "go back to before" (the same way an animal raised in a zoo might be unable to survive in the wild).

@J.Hilk said in Let's talk about AI:

So, how long do you guys think it will take before tokens get too expensive, or AI tools become so bloated with ads that we'll see a reversal in the current trend?

The ads have already started: https://openai.com/index/testing-ads-in-chatgpt/

So has a movement pushing for reversal: https://quitgpt.org/ (Well, it's more a push towards alternatives, but hopefully that slows down the enshittification process of all AI at least)

SimonSchroeder

@J.Hilk said in Let's talk about AI:

Funny enough though, I already use AI instead of googling things myself – just ask it to find me relevant links rather than wading through pages of SEO nonsense. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

I find it harder every single time I try to use Google for something more specific (not just googling a celebrity or city or movie or song) to get good results. It's been a very long time that you could put in AND and OR into your search. And even adding double quotes or + does not work reliably anymore. An LLM is the much better alternative to find something on the internet. BTW, the internet nowadays does forget–in many cases you need to know the original website and dig it up on the wayback machine.

@JKSH said in Let's talk about AI:

I've been using https://www.ecosia.org/ for the past year and I've found that its search results are comparable to Google's.

If that is true, then I don't need to try it. Google is bad and this statement says, that ecosia is as bad as Google. I need a "retro" search engine that works in the way they did in the '90s/'00s. Don't try to outsmart me!

@J.Hilk said in Let's talk about AI:

AI makes a lot of things more convenient, but honestly I haven't encountered anything it does that I couldn't live without.

The problem is that things that have worked fine in the past have been replaced by AI. One very noticeable thing is spellcheck in Word: It used to be rule-based/dictionary-based and it worked in many cases and you'd understand why it had occasional problems (I'm speaking of German spellchecking). Most recently the suggested corrections aren't even words (and no suggestion is anything plausible). So, we replaced something that worked reasonably well in all cases with something that fully fails regularly. Why don't people understand that AI is not the solution to every problem?

@JKSH said in Let's talk about AI:

So has a movement pushing for reversal: https://quitgpt.org/ (Well, it's more a push towards alternatives, but hopefully that slows down the enshittification process of all AI at least)

I have recently learned about https://chatjimmy.ai/ . They are putting LLMs into silicon (on their website this is currently quantized LLama). Having the LLM inside a chip makes it really, really fast and uses a lot less power.

JonB

@SimonSchroeder said in Let's talk about AI:

It's been a very long time that you could put in AND and OR into your search. And even adding double quotes or + does not work reliably anymore.

Very true! :( Modern AI ~= Google with ANDs, ORs and quoting ;-)

Most recently the suggested corrections aren't even words (and no suggestion is anything plausible).

OT, but I use a mixture of spellchecking in web pages, WhatsApp, Outlook etc. "Recently" (year or more?) it drives me mad that I find some stick to the old way of right-click for suggestions but now some others (web pages??) go left-click for suggestions! I find myself indiscriminately trying right- versus left-clicking and getting confused. Right-click is "correct", just how it always used to be....

And just while we are on spellchecking. Given "modern AI" I still find the correction suggestions "lacking". It really wouldn't take much to make them a tiny bit context dependent, like the previous couple of words would indicate what the most likely suggestions should be instead of some random word that you would never use which happens to be like what you have typed when a more common word would be much more likely. Abd please do a better job of dealing with "words" when the user happens to have hit a punctuation character on the keyboard next to the intended letter in the middle of the word. A punctuation character typed into the middle of a word does not always mean it's intended to be two quite separate (misspelled) words....

JoeCFD

cursor AI and codec AI are getting popular. Both of them use VS code. If QtCreator can have similar features with the vast Qt resources for the users(even with some fee), that will be tremendous.

I tried the free version of cursor and were able to create a simple Qt GUI without writing a single line of code.

SGaist

@JoeCFD Are you thinking about the Qt AI Assistant ?

Axel Spoerl

I started to use the AI in Qt Creator assistant last weekend.
I must say, it helps a lot. A little less in C++ than in QML, but it really speeds up my development performance.
Especially boiler plating, like switch statements, event handlers data() and setData() functions of item models are really nice and efficient. It even thinks about data conversion from/to QVariant. It handles tasks like "here is a JSON file, write me a QAbstractItemModel for it. I found it stunning, that it even detected the source of the JSON file and figured out that timestamps are nanoseconds from epoch. It wrote a conversion helper and a logging category.

On the downside, it permanently confuses Qt5 and Qt6, spitting out mixed code that compiles neither in Qt5 nor in Qt6. But all in all, it's been fun. My code is slightly dirtier though.

Chris Kawa

Out of curiosity - I have two questions to people who use AI for coding daily. I'm kinda interested in how that works for you:

As someone who iterates on code a lot, tests, rewrites, measures, rinse and repeat all day long - I'm kinda curious how do you make that work with the costs of LLMs. Does it impact how you think about designing stuff, e.g. "oh, I'm not gonna try this or that because it's gonna take too many tokens/requests". Do the costs sit in your mind at all when you code or do you just pay up whatever your usage amounts to? Do you use it for small stuff or large design of whole systems? Do you make one or two requests and then take over? From what I see, depending on service and plan it's usually a couple hundred requests a month. Thinking about how I code it would probably last me about a day or so. How do you deal with that? Do you just don't code as much? Do you have private local models that are any good?
Since all those requests pass your code to 3rd party services do you have any company policies about that? What about paid and patented algorithms that you use. What about "secret files" in your projects, like crypto keys, serial numbers etc? What about closed source license code you work on - are your companies ok with sharing those things with 3rd parties for them to learn on for free and with no legal framework? What's the legal and security side of your AI usage is probably what I'm trying to ask. Or do you just don't think about it until there's actually a problem.

Axel Spoerl

@Chris-Kawa:
To make this clear: I don't use AI tools for professional coding.
I use them around it though. Bisecting and pinning a bug to a potential lines of code is something where AI is really good at.
Fixing the bug in an atomic manner, eliminating the exact root cause, without wading neck deep in regressions - that is something where I claim to be way better than the Claude's of this world.
I tried it to make something work very quickly and explore how I feel about it.
I got something done fast, that is really helpful and it would have taken me a lot of time otherwise.
Won't qualify for any beauty contest. But I learned a lot.

Axel Spoerl

That's also a bit in the nature of the beast, isn't it?
If you break down a desktop application into pieces, just about everything was done many time before. So LLMs chew up whatever has attractive robustness scores.
New features of a framework, or its long standing bugs are unique. Never done before, never fixed before.

JoeCFD

@SGaist Yes. I am using other tools. I do not know Qt AI assistant. Good to know. Thanks. Will try it out.

JKSH

@SimonSchroeder said in Let's talk about AI:

@JKSH said in Let's talk about AI:
I've been using https://www.ecosia.org/ for the past year and I've found that its search results are comparable to Google's.
If that is true, then I don't need to try it. Google is bad and this statement says, that ecosia is as bad as Google. I need a "retro" search engine that works in the way they did in the '90s/'00s. Don't try to outsmart me!

I certainly wasn't expecting anyone to interpret my words that way 😅

I was trying to say this: Everything that I needed from Google Search, I could get from Ecosia (including double-quotes, ANDs, etc). No sacrifice was required for the switch -- I didn't miss anything after switching -- so it was a no-brainer.

@JonB said in Let's talk about AI:

@SimonSchroeder said in Let's talk about AI:
It's been a very long time that you could put in AND and OR into your search. And even adding double quotes or + does not work reliably anymore.
Very true! :( Modern AI ~= Google with ANDs, ORs and quoting ;-)

AI is great for complex research: ANDs, ORs and quoting PLUS organizing info/links on multiple sub-topics in a coherent way. That last part is a big time-saver.

For simple searches though, Ecosia still has the ANDs + ORs + quotes. I'd rather scan through a list of candidates and pick one myself. Not looking for an exposition on the search results.

SimonSchroeder

@Chris-Kawa said in Let's talk about AI:

Do the costs sit in your mind at all when you code or do you just pay up whatever your usage amounts to?

From what I've seen so far (I'm not an AI user myself) people pay whatever amount it is. It's usually something like $200 per month. Compared to an employees wage it is basically negligible (especially if it really saves time).

I mostly share your concerns which is why I don't really use AI for this kind of work. One additional concern is the technical dept you are introducing by using AI. You'll end up with a system that can only be programmed any further with AI. But, for this you need to hope that AI evolves fast enough that it'll be able to do this job in the future because it is certainly not up for the task right now. "Best case scenario" everybody learned to rely on AI and doesn't know how to code themselves and we'll get high paying jobs because we are the only ones left to be able to fix it (although I'm gonna think hard how much pain I'd be willing to suffer through when fixing these programs).

cristian-adam

@JoeCFD Note that Qt AI Assistant is ...:

Qt AI Assistant is available only for premium commercial Qt developer license holders. For more information on licensing, check Qt pricing on the qt.io web pages

If you are on the open-source Qt Creator you can try out:

The latter is also available in the Qt Creator's Extension's pane.

JoeCFD

@cristian-adam Thanks!

GrecKo

@cristian-adam isn't the "legacy" copilot plugin also available with Qt Open Source? I believe that's what I'm using for basic auto-completion.

cristian-adam

@GrecKo said in Let's talk about AI:

@cristian-adam isn't the "legacy" copilot plugin also available with Qt Open Source? I believe that's what I'm using for basic auto-completion.

That's still available. You need the copilot access though. And it's just code completion, no chat, no agents.