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All of Will Sorenson's Comments + Replies

The Codex Skeptic FAQ
Will Sorenson2y2

I also used to think it would be useful for API/glue code and [this](https://www.fast.ai/2021/07/19/copilot/) article persuaded me otherwise. The core of his argument is:

Most time coding is not taken up in writing code, but with designing, debugging, and maintaining code. When code is automatically generated, it’s easy to end up with a lot more of it....As a rule of thumb, less code means less to maintain and understand. Copilot’s code is verbose, and it’s so easy to generate lots of it that you’re likely to end up with a lot of code!

I can imagine code gen... (read more)

1Michaël Trazzi2y
The fastai blog is linked in my post (it's the url for "outdated") since I tried some of the prompts from his blog (especially the first one when reading a file) and ended up with different results. It's worth mentioning that he only talks about Copilot, not Codex, the latter being supposedly from a more advanced model. On the amount of code generated, you could make the similar argument for Stack Overflow. If I were a SO skeptic I would say "back in my day people used to read manuals and use the right options for functions, now that they just copy-paste many paragraphs of code". Codex is just SO on steroids, it's the engineers' responsibility to refactor, although I agree having auto-complete doesn't help solve bad habits.
Covid 8/5: Much Ado About Nothing
Will Sorenson2y12

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4Zvi2y
Section deleted because someone credibly raised the case it is an infohazard, which I assume carries over to a request to delete these comments as well but the visibility level is very different and I leave that to others to decide.  My basic decision was 'well, if the person who knows who said anything said to not talk, and my other feedback (at main blog) was that this wasn't a big deal so don't worry about it, then I guess I'm not doing net good here and should stop.'
Measure2y12

This, at least, from the wiki page:

Mirror life presents potential dangers. For example, a chiral-mirror version of cyanobacteria, which only needs achiral nutrients and light for photosynthesis, could take over Earth's ecosystem due to lack of natural enemies, disturbing the bottom of the food chain by producing mirror versions of the required sugars.