12 ms·

I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code

541 points by BitWiseVibe 2y ago

sproosemoose 2y ago
The crypto product in question is for a very young age group. https://pump.fun/board https://pump.fun/board
- FractalHQ 2y ago
  This website is so cursed… on mobile it’s constantly layout shifting up and down by an entire screen height every ~0.3 seconds. I’m not sure how to feel.
pmarreck 2y ago
The game might change (a little) when it can actually run the code it generates, examine any errors and potentially fix based on that. And when you use a language that has better checks all around.
imrejonk 2y ago
> The worst is when a request starts out simple — I help them fix one hallucination — but then that customer wants to build more complex logic, and somehow I’ve set the expectation that I will provide unlimited free support forever. I’ve gotten a number of angry messages from customers who essentially want me to build their whole app for free. Annoying, but a good way to weed out bad customers. Life’s too short to deal with people who feel this entitled.
michaelcampbell 2y ago
This whole thing reminds me of the dotcom boom where people who learned a week or 2's worth of HTML were suddenly "programmers", and were being hired because they could put on their own pants more often than not.
fuzzfactor 2y ago
>I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code Well, that didn't take long . . .
yym68686 2y ago
[dead]
w_for_wumbo 2y ago
I'd be tempted to just roll with the AI generated endpoints/hallucinations. If it's presenting me statistically probable names that make sense after absorbing the world's knowledge, I'm tempted to lean into that, instead of insisting that I have it right. Correct names don't succeed as often as useful names do.
- pocketarc 2y ago
  That's a great idea, but I think the main problem is that the generated endpoints/properties will be affected quite heavily by whatever the prompt/context was. AI isn't necessarily saying "this is the one endpoint that will always be generated". Unless it is - if the customer generated code is always the same endpoints/properties then it'd definitely make sense to also support those.
TillE 2y ago
I'm always a little surprised at how many people out there want to develop software yet haven't put in the effort to gain even the most basic computer nerd programming chops. You see this all the time in the more newbie-friendly game engine communities. Maybe you don't want to pursue a career in software, but anyone can spend a week learning Python or JavaScript. I suspect/hope a lot of these people are just kids who haven't gotten there yet.
- jprete 2y ago
  Coding requires a willingness to understand and manipulate systems made of unbreakable rules. Most people don't want to deal with such an uncompromising method of communication.
  - busterarm 2y ago
    And then there are those of us who find computers to be more bearable than people... At least computers don't think it's their god-given right to treat you like garbage.
    - Mistletoe 2y ago
      Did you not use Windows 95?
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      What percentage of web traffic today would you say is composed of bits that the user--if they bothered to inspect it--would prefer to not have anything to do with? I'd say it's more than half. Computers treat people like garbage all the time.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        you're right, but I have a hard time picturing the computer as having emotions to be able to treat me like garbage in the first place. you won't rm the file? sudo rm file! the computer could fight back and say access denied still because of extended attributes, but for some reason I don't equate poorly written software as being treated like garbage. I always imagine some hapless programmer is doing the best they could with the resources they have in the system they're under, it's just not very good but that's not their fault.
tazu 2y ago
Hilariously, the target market for the author's API seems to be the same as the top post on HN today[0]: "traders". I think amateur "trading" attracts a specific brand of idiot that is high/left on the Dunning Kruger curve. While taking money from idiots is a viable (even admirable) business strategy, you may want to fully automate customer service to retain your sanity. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41308599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41308599
- cscurmudgeon 2y ago
  Out of topic, but: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-... > The two papers, by Dr. Ed Nuhfer and colleagues, argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect could be replicated by using random data.
  - kaoD 2y ago
    The more I'm reading this article the less I understand their point. Is there an actual paper that describes how their "random data" is generated? I can also generate random data that looks like any distribution by carefully choosing the random distribution. What's their point?
- bofadeez 2y ago
  It's people who generally don't have any other skills and reject all evidence for Efficient Market Hypothesis. They legitimately think what they're doing is not gambling. No amount of empirical evidence can convince them they have no risk-adjusted alpha
- creesch 2y ago
  Yeah the customer demographic here likely does worsen the situation. Although I am sure that this is happening elsewhere as well.
cratermoon 2y ago
There's already a big market for taking out AI garbage, and it expect it to grow as the AI bubble bursts. The best thing a consultant can do today is learn the common issues and failure modes of AI generated code. Providing an API service to customers means you will get terrible client code. Sometimes it's dumb stuff like not respecting rate limits and responding to errors by just trying again. One option, if you don't want to fix it yourself, is to partner with a consultant who will take it on, send your customers to them. Bill (or set your API access rates) appropriately. Sometimes you have to fire customers. Really bad ones that cost more than they bring in are prime candidates for firing, or for introducing to your "Enterprise Support Tier".
OutOfHere 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- axelthegerman 2y ago
  As long as AI is just hallucinating sh*t I don't think anyone needs to be particularly worried :) It's got a long way to go to even stack up to bad programmers that somehow are always able to find a job somewhere.
- core_dumped 2y ago
  Language models aren’t AI no matter how hard you squint. When we get actual AI (not counting on anytime soon) it will be more than the annoyed developer that loses their job
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    We'll never have AI, because once we figure something out it stops being AI. Modern generative stuff like LLMs and image diffusers counts at least as much as the various older used-to-be-AI things.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    I mean, when the LLM says it isn't intelligent, why question it? https://chatgpt.com/share/127aa0ca-2273-4330-862d-53d9ff3dcf71 https://chatgpt.com/share/127aa0ca-2273-4330-862d-53d9ff3dcf... On the other hand, if you ask it if it's artificially intelligent, it says yes: https://chatgpt.com/share/37517e92-4c53-4053-846f-ab513e1dc939 https://chatgpt.com/share/37517e92-4c53-4053-846f-ab513e1dc9...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - randomdata 2y ago
    > Language models aren’t AI no matter how hard you squint. While you are free to make up any definition you want on the spot, so are others. Yes, language models are just plain old boring machine learning like any other, but machine learning is a subset of what most people consider to be the area of AI. > When we get actual AI (not counting on anytime soon) it will be more than the annoyed developer that loses their job Again, while you can define things however you please, so can everyone else. This is what most people would consider AGI, not AI.
djaouen 2y ago
I'm not! Email in bio.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
matrix_overload 2y ago
Well, if you are annoyed by a particular maintenance task related to your business, find a way to automate it! In this case, you could create examples for your API in common programming languages, publish them on the product website, and even implement an automatic test that would verify that your last commit didn't break them. So, most of the non-programmer inquiries can be answered with a simple link to the examples page for the language they want. As a bonus point, you will get some organic search traffic when people search for <what your API is doing> in <language name>.
- mrbombastic 2y ago
  Funnily enough an llm is pretty good at categorizing and prioritizing support requests.
lagniappe 2y ago
There's room for all of us in this industry. What someone is unwilling to do is just an opportunity for someone else to pick up the yoke.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- aunty_helen 2y ago
  This could actually be an ingenious way of solving the problem. If someone has a support issue and can't solve it themselves, yet requires coding help, forward them a freelancer that they can hire for 20$/hr from upwork that knows this API well etc.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Unfortunately it doesn't look like there's a way to contact the author of this piece.
- nkrisc 2y ago
  I have the sense that most of these people won’t be willing to pay anything to have their code fixed.
shadowgovt 2y ago
I wonder if there's any consistent pattern to the API hallucinations.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  Yes. They are all crap.
lqcfcjx 2y ago
now you probably should build an AI to fix AI generated code based on your documentation.
bdcravens 2y ago
This seems like a support issue, not an AI issue. AI is how the code was written, but the issue would be the same if it was amateurs writing bad code. If all you want to do is support your API, a support article outlining the issues you see over and over would be something to point your customers to. Warrant your API against errors, but point out that anything more is billable work. If you're not interested, partner with someone to do that work. You could even offer support contracts that include some amount of customization.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  It's a support issue in a sense, but in many contexts people want to offer a better support experience than "anything more is billable work". A reputation for being helpful and customer-friendly is valuable, especially in a business where you're selling to other programmers, and you can't buy that reputation after the fact with money from support contracts.
- omoikane 2y ago
  This post seems to be saying that AI opened up a new avenue for people to demand free work. If someone asked "I wrote some rough designs and interfaces, can you write me an app for free?" The author could easily detect it as a request for free work. But because the first part is hidden behind some ChatGPT generated code and the second part is disguised as a request for help, the author would be tricked into doing this free work, until they detected this pattern and write a blog post about it.
  - xoac 2y ago
    Is this a chatgpt summary of the article?
- m463 2y ago
  > amateurs writing bad code in volume, this turns into support writing the code. I think of how the south park movie folks sent so much questionable content to the censors that the compromise in the end let through lots of the puppet sex.
- 2y ago
nsonha 2y ago
is there a way we can make a support bot or a chat-based document that is fine tuned and limit the answer to only what's in the API? Getting the users to use it is another issue but one problem at a time.
protocolture 2y ago
Yeah so every tech revolution does this right. ATMs were meant to kill banking jobs but ah theres more jobs in banking than ever. The Cloud was meant to automate away tech people, but all it did was create new tech jobs. A lot of which is cleaning up after idiots who think they can outsource everything to the cloud and get burned. LLMs are no different. The "Ideas Man" can now get from 0 to 30% without approaching a person with experience. Cleaning up after him is going to be lucrative. There are already stories about businesses rehiring graphic designers they fired, because someone needs to finish and fine tune the results of the LLM.
- dylan604 2y ago
  I seriously hope those rehires are coming back with a refined rate as well.
  - protocolture 2y ago
    A healthy dickhead tax on the way back in would be smart.
- busterarm 2y ago
  > ATMs were meant to kill banking jobs but ah theres more jobs in banking than ever. ATMs only handle basic teller functions and since COVID in NYC I had to change banks twice because I couldn't find actual tellers or banks with reasonable open hours. BoA had these virtual-teller only branches and the video systems were always broken (and the only option on Saturday). This was in Midtown Manhattan and my only option was basically a single branch on the other side of town 8-4 M-F. I'm now happily with a credit union but at least since moving to the south things are generally better because customers won't tolerate not being able to deal with an actual person.
- creesch 2y ago
  > ATMs were meant to kill banking jobs but ah theres more jobs in banking than ever. US banks, who are surprisingly behind the times in as far as automation goes. Here a lot of banks used a lot of automation to reduce the amount of manual jobs needed. to the degree that many offices are now also closing as everything can be done online. And no, there is no need to visit banks here as I get the impression it is in the US. We don't even have physical checks anymore.
anonzzzies 2y ago
I have a business fixing broken code/systems (especially if it is stressful and last minute); if you are tired/annoyed of something in the software market, just up your fees. For us not much changed; a lot of badly (throw the spec over the wall) outsourced software was fairly bad since forever; AI generated code is similar. I guess this will grow even faster though, as normally solid developers might take on a lot more work and get sloppy with AI.
sira04 2y ago
Could you make a model from your API/docs and let them plug that into their AI stuff? That would be funny.
danielmarkbruce 2y ago
If you are building an API and have decent docs, it's a totally ok trade off to say "i'll lose some customers this way, but I'm not providing support". And just be upfront about it. Some stores have a no return policy with no exceptions. They lose some customers, it's ok.
tonyoconnell 2y ago
Why don't you use AI to provide support? I'm serious actually. This sounds like something AI can do really well.
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y ago
  Spoken like someone whose never been on the receiving end of any such ‘support’.
- ilaksh 2y ago
  For the problems given in the article, it will 100% work. It's very easy for Claude 3.5 or gpt-4o to look at documentation for a couple of API endpoints, compare it to submitted code, and point out invalid endpoints and properties. It can provide correct code also if the custom is asking for something possible. It won't be flawless but if the issues are as basic as stated in this article, then it seems like a good option. It will cost money to use the good models though. So I think the first step would be to make sure if they ask for an invalid endpoint it says that in so many words in the API response, and if they ask for an invalid property it states that also. Then if that doesn't give them a clue, an LLM scans incoming support requests and automatically answers them. Or flags them for review.. To prevent abuse, it might be a person doing it but just pressing a button to send an auto-answer. But maybe a relatively cheap bot in a Discord channel or something connected to llama 3.1 70b would be good enough to start, and people have to provide a ticket number from that bot to get an answer from a person.
- stitched2gethr 2y ago
  I'm a bit torn. My first thought was "If the current state of the art LLMs made the mistakes it's unlikely an LLM would be able to correct them." But I'm not sure that's true if the support LLM (chat bot) is given very specific instructions so as to limit the possible answers. Still I think that's gonna break down pretty quick for other reasons. Maybe the chat bot can recognize a botched request and even suggest a fix but what then? It certainly won't be able to convert the user's next request into a working application of even moderate complexity. And do you really want a chat bot to be the first interaction your customers have. I think this is why we haven't seen these things take off outside of very large organizations who are looking to save money in exchange for making customers ask for a human when they need one.
mediumsmart 2y ago
I always make gpt fix the code it created. How else would I learn.
alexeiz 2y ago
I had a related episode at work when my coworker asked me why his seemingly trivial 10 line piece of code was misbehaving inexplicably. It turned out he had two variables `file_name` and `filename` and used one in place of another. I asked him how he ended up with such code, he said he used copilot to create it. Using code from a generative AI without understanding what it does is never a good idea.
- berniedurfee 2y ago
  I burned a couple hours debugging some generated code only to finally realize copilot was referencing a variable as ‘variableO1’. Artificial Incompetence indeed!
- FanaHOVA 2y ago
  Copilot wouldn't make a typo. He just made that up and / or broke the code himself.
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    You are getting downvoted but you are right, a typo in a variable that already exists in a file like this is not the failure mode for LLMs. The failure mode is logic bugs, making up methods / functions.
    - varjag 2y ago
      No, you can get variable names "mutated" on follow up requests. The thing is like sculpting with toothpaste.
      - brigadier132 2y ago
        I've been using copilot for as long as it has existed and what you are describing has not happened to me once. Literally on in the background 8 hours a day. Excuse me for not trusting the internet hivemind that hates everything that is hyped just a little bit.
bijutoha 2y ago
[dead]
sholladay 2y ago
So have an AI do it for you!
jowdones 2y ago
Retail "traders" are the textbook definition of mentally challenged obnoxiousnes. Go meet them on forums like EliteTrader.com and you will soon realize who you are dealing with. It's your fault really. You don't build custom software for guys having the intellectual capacity and budget of a tractor driver unless you enjoy pain.
wh-uws 2y ago
I will take all of these customers. Please forward them to me.
- atomic128 2y ago
  For real: profitable consulting businesses have been formed to help LLM programmers. BUGFIX 66, for example, and various others. They can charge substantial money to help customers cross that "last mile" and get their LLM-generated pile of code working.
  - schainks 2y ago
    I am literally doing this right now for a client with a prototype, never realized the market is as big as people are saying!
- cbg0 2y ago
  These "customers" were receiving free help. If they wanted to spend money on quality software they wouldn't have used an LLM.
gumby 2y ago
> Helping a customer solve challenges is often super rewarding, but only when I can remove roadblocks for customers who can do most of the work themselves. One thing I loved about doing technical enterprise sales is that I’d meet people doing something I knew little or nothing about and who didn’t really understand what we offered but had a problem they could explain and our offering could help with. They’d have deep technical knowledge of their domain and we had the same in ours, and there was just enough shared knowledge at the interface between the two that we could have fun and useful discussions. Lots of mutual respect. I’ve always enjoyed working with smart people even when I don’t really understand what they do. Of course there were also idiots, but generally they weren’t interested in paying what we charged, so that was OK. > Helping a customer solve challenges is often super rewarding, but only when I can remove roadblocks for customers who can do most of the work themselves. So I feel a lot of sympathy for the author — that would be terribly soul sucking. I guess generative grammars have increased the number of “I have a great idea for a technical business, I just need a technical co founder” who think that an idea is 90% of it and have no idea what technical work actually is.
- mananaysiempre 2y ago
  Please also consider this when a localization contractor advertises lower costs by having human editors go over machine translations, then.
- cl3misch 2y ago
  Your second quote is the same as the first one. Did you copy the same one twice by accident?
  - underdeserver 2y ago
    I suspect the quote was pasted by mistake the first time.
    - gumby 2y ago
      Yeah, I moved the paragraphs around and pasted the quote in where it belonged, forgetting that it had been pasted at the top. Too late to edit, though.
userbinator 2y ago
Cryptocurrent trading tools? The susceptibility of people to get-rich-quick scams and the desire to not do even the minimum of work is surely correlated. Stop poisoning the well and then complaining that you have to drink from it.
tdignan 2y ago
OP should set up an AI chatbot to triage his customer support. It probably wouldn't be that hard to send that code right back to GPT and get a fix suggestion to the customer instantly. Stick your documentation for each endpoint in a vector database, and use RAG to give them a quick fix. If it doesn't work let them go to level 2 support for a fee.
- thomasahle 2y ago
  These kind of support requests are also a big issue for open source projects. Hanging out at the DSPy discord, we get a lot of people who need help with "their" code. The code often uses hallucinated API calls, but they insist it "should work" and our library simply is buggy.
black_13 2y ago
[dead]
bruce511 2y ago
A tiered approach to sales can help here. Cheap version offers minimal support. (Although you still have to sift "bug reports" into my problem/ your problem.) Standard version allows for more support (but still rate limited.) Developer version charges for time spent, in advance. This helps because people only expect free support if you don't explicitly offer something else. If you offer paid support them it's reasonable and expected that there are limits on free support.
gorbachev 2y ago
I've been saying for a while now that there's an absolute gold mine waiting for people who want to specialize in fixing AI generated applications. A lot of businesses are going to either think they can have generative AI create all of their apps with the help of a cousin of the wife of the accountant, or they unknowingly contract a 10x developer from Upwork or alike who uses generative AI to create everything. Once they realize how well that's working out, the smart ones will start from scratch, the not-so-smart will attempt to fix it. Develop a reputation for yourself for getting companies out of that pickle, and you can probably retire early.
- PeterStuer 2y ago
  Doesn't solve the problem that the budget they has in mind for the app was $300, while an experienced dev can directly see this is going to be a $20K v.1 before change requests project.
  - KoolKat23 2y ago
    And this is why people continue to do it. And at that, with such a discrepancy, why not? Proof of concept, you know if it adds value and makes money, enough money to pay $20k.
    - urbandw311er 2y ago
      I think the missing proof point is whether companies would fork out the extra $19,700 once they understand the actual cost.
      - PeterStuer 2y ago
        99% of them were never in the bespoke sofware market to begin with. If the $300 did not work put, they'll cobble something together in Excel pr use some SaaS that comes close enough.
  - gorbachev 2y ago
    So they'll try 5 $300 fixes, and then either give up entirely, or figure out that maybe the 100 developers they ignored who told them it's gonna cost $20K were right.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nbzso 2y ago
This is only the beginning. Imagine this when AI bot chains and "agents" replace conveniently junior devs on scale. Someone will "hack" an API/Lang Chain/Insert-LLM-Framework Solution. The next decade of support business is here. Fix my "hallucination" market. Thank you, Microsoft. You did it again.
delifue 2y ago
Someone mentioned "hallucination-based API design" on twitter (I cannot find it now). It's designing API by LLM hallucination. If there is a common hallucination API call, just add that API. This will make the API more "friendly" and resemble common similar APIs. Considering that LLM can hallucinate in different ways unpredictably, not sure whether it will work in practice.
- sim7c00 2y ago
  I doubt LLM hallucinations will produce good secure code. In my opinion, using code from LLMs, which might see your program come to life a bit quicker, will only enhance the time needed for debugging and testing, as there might be bugs and problems in there ranging from trivial things (unused variables) to very subtle and hard to find logic issues which require a deeper knowledge of the libraries and frameworks cobbled together by an LLM. Additionally, it takes out a lot of the knowledge of these things in the long run, so people will find it more and more challenging to properly do this testing and debugging phase.
  - IanCal 2y ago
    The description here isn't about using LLM hallucinations as code. It's using them as example API users and seeing what they get stuck on. Let's say you've got some rest API. Are they trying to send PATCH requests but you only support POST? Do they keep trying to add pagination or look for a cursor? Do they expect /things to return everything and /things/id to return a single one but you have /things and /thing/1 ? None of this is to say you must do whatever they are trying to do but it's a very cheap way of seeing what introducing your API/library to a new user might be like. And, moreover, you can only ever introduce someone once but you can go again and again with a LLM. Review the things they're doing and see if actually you've deviated from broad principles and if a change/new endpoint actually would make things much easier. Fundamentally you can break this down to "if there's someone who can do some coding but isn't a top class programmer, how much do I need to explain it to them before they can solve a particular problem?"
    - sim7c00 2y ago
Pikamander2 2y ago
> Often this takes the form of trying to access an endpoint that does not exist, or read a property off the API response that does not exist. After probing a bit more, my suspicions are usually confirmed — ChatGPT hallucinated that endpoint or property In some cases, you might be able to use this to your advantage to improve the product. When working with third-party APIs, I've often run into situations where my code could be simplified greatly if the API had an extra endpoint or parameter to filter certain data, only to be disappointed when it turns out to have nothing of the sort. It's possible that ChatGPT is "thinking" the same thing here; that most APIs have an X endpoint to make a task easier, so surely yours does too? Over time I've sent in a few support tickets with ideas for new endpoints/parameters and on one occasion had the developer add them, which was a great feeling and allowed me to write cleaner code and make fewer redundant API calls.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > It's possible that ChatGPT is "thinking" the same thing here; that most APIs have an X endpoint to make a task easier, so surely yours does too? While this is possible, I would caution with an anecdote from my ongoing side project of "can I use it to make browser games?", in which 3.5 would create a reasonable Vector2D class and then get confused and try to call .mul() and .sub() instead of the .multiply() and .subtract() that it had just created. Sometimes it's exceptionally insightful, other times it needs to RTFM.
  - fenomas 2y ago
    I feel like we'll eventually all agree that it's a mistake to ask a generalist LLM for code. I've found ChatGPT to be fine at talking about code - like describing the difference between two APIs - but for generating nontrivial chunks of working code I think it's miles behind Copilot and similar. And I assume that's just because, y'know, ChatGPT can write sonnets and translate Korean to Swahili and whatnot. It's amazingly broad, but it's not the right tool for the comparatively narrow problem of code generation.
    - Kuinox 2y ago
jonplackett 2y ago
I would suggest adding a help section with advice for people using ChatGPT that sets expectations and also gives a pre-written prompt for them to use. Something like. Some of you may use ChatGPT/Copilot to help with your coding. Please understand this service is designed for professional programmers and we cannot provide extensive support for basic coding issues, or code your app for you. However if you do want to use ChatGPT here is a useful starting prompt to help prevent hallucinations - though they still could happen. Prompt: I need you to generate code in ____ language using only the endpoints described below [describe the endpoints and include all your docs] Do not use any additional variables or endpoints. Only use these exactly as described. Do not create any new endpoints or assume any other variables exist. This is very important. Then give it some examples in in curl / fetch / axios / python / etc. Maybe also add some instructions to separate out code into multiple files / endpoints. ChatGPT loves to make one humungous file that’s really hard to debug. ChatGPT works fairly well if you know how to use it correctly. I would defo not trust it with my crypto though, but I guess if some people wanna that’s up to them. May as well try and help them!
markatkinson 2y ago
I'm tired of fixing my own AI generated code.
xg15 2y ago
We have come full circle: Silicon Valley is finally disrupting the software engineering industry...
orbit7 2y ago
As a basic offering have good documentation and a community support forum and the option to report bugs. Make the type of support you are providing paid, this could be in tiers. Outsource support as needed.
amai 2y ago
I‘m tired of fixing my colleagues‘ AI generated code. They churn out a lot of code in a short amount of time, but then we loose the saved time again because during pull request review they often cannot explain what this code is actually doing. Maybe I should use an AI for code review, too?
- throwuxiytayq 2y ago
  Why are these people employed? Isn’t that a bit like a fake employee who outsources his work behind your back? You can’t work with the guy because he literally doesn’t even know or understand the code he’s pushing to the repo
  - ramesh31 2y ago
    >Why are these people employed? After being stuck on a project with a few of them recently, I've started to figure it out. They know they are incompetent, and are afraid of being around competent people who would call them out. So they link up with other likewise incompetents to maintain a diffusion of responsibility, so the finger can't be pointed at any one person. And when the system they are building inevitably fails horribly, management can't really fire the whole team. So they bumble along and create "make work" tickets to fill time and look like something is happening, or they spend their time "fixing" things that should have never existed in the first place by layering mountains of hacks on top, rather than reassessing anything or asking for help. Rinse and repeat once the project has clearly failed or been abandoned.
j-a-a-p 2y ago
> My API is just a few well documented endpoints. If you can figure out how to send a POST request using any programming language, you should have no problem using it. But that seems to be too high a bar for the new generation of prompt-engineer coders. Nice. The time has come that we need to design the API with the LLM in mind. Or, to rephrase that, test your API that it is working with the popular LLM tools regularly.
OJFord 2y ago
I think this is the point to establish a 'community', and in particular to only 'offer' community support (or charge more for spending your own time on it). Some people will enthusiastically fix other customers' generated crap for free, let them.
treprinum 2y ago
Set firm boundaries and reject/ghost customers that want to build their app for free and are "angry". Those never lead to anything profitable.
tpoacher 2y ago
Same, but for academic documents. It used to be that a 'bad' document had things 'missing', which were easy to spot and rephrase / suggest improvements. Now a 'bad' document is 50 pages of confusing waffle instead of 5, you need to get through the headache of reading all 50 to figure out what 'sentence' the person was trying to express at the place where an autogenerated section has appeared, figure out if the condensed document is something that actually had any merit to begin with, THEN identify what's missing, and then ask them to try again. At which point you get a NEW 50-page autogenerated document and start the process again. F this shit.
shireboy 2y ago
I can empathize, but am also wondering if some of these are feature requests in disguise. For “how to call api” docs, sample code, and even client libraries can be generated from your OpenAPI specs. Link to the docs in every reply. The more complex asks could be translated “build this endpoint and charge me for it”. If all else fails, set up partnership with devs who want to fix/build customers crap and figure out some copy to direct the more complex asks to them.
- jollyllama 2y ago
  Agreed, client libs and sample applications have fallen by the wayside and could provide a solution here. It makes it very obvious to the customer when they download and run something that works, and then their changes break it, that the issue is with their changes.
afro88 2y ago
> Often this takes the form of trying to access an endpoint that does not exist, or read a property off the API response that does not exist. After probing a bit more, my suspicions are usually confirmed — ChatGPT hallucinated that endpoint or property This is an opportunity. Add another tier to your pricing structure that provides an AI that assists with coding the API connection. Really simple Llama 3.1 that RAGs your docs. Or perhaps your docs fit in the context already if the API is as simple as it sounds.
netcan 2y ago
This is totally understandable, valid, etc. OTOH, see script kiddies, WYSIWYG Stack Overflow C&P, etc. It's just the way things are now.
paxys 2y ago
> The worst is when a request starts out simple — I help them fix one hallucination — but then that customer wants to build more complex logic, and somehow I’ve set the expectation that I will provide unlimited free support forever. I’ve gotten a number of angry messages from customers who essentially want me to build their whole app for free. Welcome to the life of any consultant/support agent/open source maintainer ever. AI isn't the problem here, managing expectations is.
mu2si3 2y ago
[dead]
paxys 2y ago
I can guarantee that all these users are following some "hustle university" course peddled by a Twitter influencer. Crypto and AI are the two favorite words of all these get rich quick scams.
- pvillano 2y ago
  I won't say all investors are entitled and overconfident, inspired by grifters, emboldened by survivorship bias, and motivated by greed. That would be rude
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    It’d also be pretty naive, speaking to your seemingly quite narrow experience with the outside world. So, thank goodness you didn’t say it.
- b112 2y ago
  You can be a Google dev, and make half a million a year! For only $29.95, we'll show you how to empower yourself with the wonders of AI!
  - Tade0 2y ago
    Typically the decimal separator is two steps to the right here. The other day my friend showed me a curious screenshot where an, ahem, dev influencer showed all the courses he's done. Problem is, just one of those six courses amounted to two average net salaries in the region and they were fairly basic. Either the guy in question had a year's worth of runway (then why even bother getting into IT?), got into debt or... didn't actually pay for any of this and it was not disclosed. I do my best to dissuade people from spending their hard earned money on such things, but a significant chunk unfortunately does not listen.
mikewarot 2y ago
I'm on the other side of this when it comes to the C programming language. I've avoided it for decades, preferring Pascal, or even Visual Basic. The single best thing to help someone in my place is clear and coherent documentation with working examples. It's how I learned to use Turbo Pascal so long ago, and generally the quickest way to get up to speed. It's also my biggest gripe with Free Pascal... their old help processing infrastructure binds them to horrible automatically generated naming of parameters as documentation, and nothing more. Fortunately, CoPilot doesn't get impatient, and I know this, so I can just keep pounding away at things until I get something close to what I want, in spite of myself. ;-)
linsomniac 2y ago
Seems like the opportunity here is for the author to sell an AI that is trained on the API and documentation.
andai 2y ago
As the author says, the errors are very easy to fix. Easy enough for GPT! He should set up a support chatbot. Only seems fair? ;) I'm half joking, but in most cases I found that GPT was able to fix its own code. So this would reduce support burden by like 90%. I hate chatbot support as much as the next guy, but the alternative (hiring a programmer to work as a customer support agent on AI generated code all day?) sounds not only cruel, but just bad engineering.
- dimal 2y ago
  I’ve found that it’s often able to fix its own code when I’m able to understand that problem and state it clearly. On its own, it tends to just go in circles and proudly declare that its solve the problem, even though it hasn’t. It needs a knowledgeable person to guide it.
cynicalpeace 2y ago
AI is going to be like any other tool. If you don't know how to use it, you may end up hurting yourself. If you know how to use it, it will make you 100x more efficient.
pacoWebConsult 2y ago
Seems to me like you have an opportunity to develop a couple SDKs in your customers' favorite languages (probably python and typescript) and a simple "Get Started" template that could alleviate a lot of these requests. Show them the base case, let them figure out how to work with your api via an SDK instead of directly with an API and let the advanced users build their own SDKs in whatever language they prefer. Since its, as OP claims, a simple HTTP API, the SDK could be generated with OpenAPI client generation tools.
- jdance 2y ago
  Seems like a good way to have a bunch of new products to also support
  - pacoWebConsult 2y ago
    Maintaining an OpenAPI spec when you make changes to your API and regenerating the client SDKs through CI is really not a ton of extra work. A template to show a dead simple usage of your API can pay dividends as it lowers the barrier to a customer adopting your product over a competitor's.
- maxidorius 2y ago
  And then the customers will open support requests for code generated by an AI that misuse that very SDK. It doesn't look like OP's issue is with the code per say, only with the lack of skills of its customers, regardless of the code they write...
  - dpassens 2y ago
    I don't really know how to point this out without sounding rude and obnoxious, which is not my intention, but it's "per se" (Latin for by itself), not "per say".
    - maxidorius 2y ago
      No rudeness taken, don't worry! TIL, I didn't know! Thanks!
snakeyjake 2y ago
AI, Rust, crypto, Medium, SAAS startups It's a fuckin perfect hacker news bingo. Magnificent!
suprt411 2y ago
Do you want to outsource this L1 L2 or even L3+ support? Lets talk
bkazez 2y ago
Charge for engineering support and hire someone to do it for you!
ramesh31 2y ago
Welcome to the hell that is being a senior dev nowadays. Every junior with a Copilot license all of the sudden fancies themselves an expert programmer now. It's absolutely maddening.
adverbly 2y ago
Another concern is around reviewing it. I can't tell in a pull request what someone wrote themselves, or to what level of detail they have pre-reviewed the AI code which is now part of the pull request before allowing it to get to me. I can tell you I don't want to be fixing someone else's AI generated bugs though... Especially given that AI writes more/less dry/more verbose code, and increases code churn in general.
- hoosieree 2y ago
  Just add more AI, that'll solve everything. [edit] unfortunately I think I need to point out the above is sarcasm. Because there really are people using AI to review AI-generated code, and they do not see the problem with this approach.
jrochkind1 2y ago
I am no partiuclar fan of AI (and actually haven't used copilot or similar myself ever), but the real problem here is not AI but: > I’ve gotten a number of angry messages from customers who essentially want me to build their whole app for free. I guess AI maybe encourages more people to think they can build something without knowing what they are doing. i can believe that for sure. There was plenty of that before AI too. Must be even worse now.
lacoolj 2y ago
lol this is just like trying to help people in programming discords that are literally using AI on screen to write and rewrite the entire app as they go. then they run into an issue, ask for help, and don't understand when you say "there's a memory leak 50 lines down" or "you have to define that variable first". AI is a great tool to help someone start an idea. When it goes past that, please don't ask us for help until you know what the code is doing that you just generated.
zzz95 2y ago
Every problem hides opportunities! I can see a future where documentation will be replaced by a plugin to an AI code service. Instead of providing users with documentation on how to use the package, devs will be training an LLM on how to assist the user in generating the interface code. An elaborate Chat GPT prompt for instance.
darepublic 2y ago
I often think about code when I'm driving. I've thought about a way to brainstorm code ideas out loud and have the llm generate a code file with my idea. I'm talking about a fairly granular level, where I'm specifying individual if blocks and the like. Then when I have my hands available I can correct the code and run my idea
jameslk 2y ago
> Often, though, the customer is envisioning a more complex application, and I just have to tell them, “Sorry, you’re going to have to hire a professional developer for this.” Welcome to enterprise sales, where building custom solutions atop of your sprawling BaaS empire is exactly what you do. Your customers have a need and you’re basically turning down an upsell opportunity that also buys you lock in to your platform. Another way to look at it: are they all trying to build something similar or something with similar components? Maybe it’s time to expand the features of your product to reduce the amount of work they need to do.
julianeon 2y ago
I'm wondering if he could just adjust the API to give an error message that an LLM (or a person) could understand and then correct. It might be worth putting some effort into beefing that up, to cut down the support requests.
aussieguy1234 2y ago
and they thought AI would put SWE's out of work... If there are more people able to prototype their ideas with AI, sooner or later they will need a real engineer to maintain/improve that code. That will lead to more jobs and higher demand for SWE's.
yawaramin 2y ago
The customer support issue with selling SaaS is not just about AI, I think. It's widespread across the industry. There are customers who have almost no idea about how their software works, and expect you to guide them through their own specific setups. One issue we regularly have is people complain that our TLS certificate keeps changing and that they want us to notify them in advance of any change. We try to tell them that two/three-month duration TLS certificates is a best practice and that they should ensure that their trust store knows about standard root certificates. Then it turns out their software only supports one root cert at a time and they want us to jump into a call and guide them through changing it in their software.

541 points by BitWiseVibe 2y ago

sproosemoose 2y ago

The crypto product in question is for a very young age group. https://pump.fun/board https://pump.fun/board

FractalHQ 2y ago
This website is so cursed… on mobile it’s constantly layout shifting up and down by an entire screen height every ~0.3 seconds. I’m not sure how to feel.

pmarreck 2y ago

The game might change (a little) when it can actually run the code it generates, examine any errors and potentially fix based on that. And when you use a language that has better checks all around.

imrejonk 2y ago

> The worst is when a request starts out simple — I help them fix one hallucination — but then that customer wants to build more complex logic, and somehow I’ve set the expectation that I will provide unlimited free support forever. I’ve gotten a number of angry messages from customers who essentially want me to build their whole app for free. Annoying, but a good way to weed out bad customers. Life’s too short to deal with people who feel this entitled.

michaelcampbell 2y ago

This whole thing reminds me of the dotcom boom where people who learned a week or 2's worth of HTML were suddenly "programmers", and were being hired because they could put on their own pants more often than not.

fuzzfactor 2y ago

>I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code Well, that didn't take long . . .

yym68686 2y ago

[dead]

w_for_wumbo 2y ago

I'd be tempted to just roll with the AI generated endpoints/hallucinations. If it's presenting me statistically probable names that make sense after absorbing the world's knowledge, I'm tempted to lean into that, instead of insisting that I have it right. Correct names don't succeed as often as useful names do.

pocketarc 2y ago
That's a great idea, but I think the main problem is that the generated endpoints/properties will be affected quite heavily by whatever the prompt/context was. AI isn't necessarily saying "this is the one endpoint that will always be generated". Unless it is - if the customer generated code is always the same endpoints/properties then it'd definitely make sense to also support those.

TillE 2y ago

I'm always a little surprised at how many people out there want to develop software yet haven't put in the effort to gain even the most basic computer nerd programming chops. You see this all the time in the more newbie-friendly game engine communities. Maybe you don't want to pursue a career in software, but anyone can spend a week learning Python or JavaScript. I suspect/hope a lot of these people are just kids who haven't gotten there yet.

jprete 2y ago
Coding requires a willingness to understand and manipulate systems made of unbreakable rules. Most people don't want to deal with such an uncompromising method of communication.
- busterarm 2y ago
  And then there are those of us who find computers to be more bearable than people... At least computers don't think it's their god-given right to treat you like garbage.
  - Mistletoe 2y ago
    Did you not use Windows 95?
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    What percentage of web traffic today would you say is composed of bits that the user--if they bothered to inspect it--would prefer to not have anything to do with? I'd say it's more than half. Computers treat people like garbage all the time.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      you're right, but I have a hard time picturing the computer as having emotions to be able to treat me like garbage in the first place. you won't rm the file? sudo rm file! the computer could fight back and say access denied still because of extended attributes, but for some reason I don't equate poorly written software as being treated like garbage. I always imagine some hapless programmer is doing the best they could with the resources they have in the system they're under, it's just not very good but that's not their fault.

tazu 2y ago

Hilariously, the target market for the author's API seems to be the same as the top post on HN today[0]: "traders". I think amateur "trading" attracts a specific brand of idiot that is high/left on the Dunning Kruger curve. While taking money from idiots is a viable (even admirable) business strategy, you may want to fully automate customer service to retain your sanity. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41308599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41308599

cscurmudgeon 2y ago
Out of topic, but: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-... > The two papers, by Dr. Ed Nuhfer and colleagues, argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect could be replicated by using random data.
- kaoD 2y ago
  The more I'm reading this article the less I understand their point. Is there an actual paper that describes how their "random data" is generated? I can also generate random data that looks like any distribution by carefully choosing the random distribution. What's their point?
bofadeez 2y ago
It's people who generally don't have any other skills and reject all evidence for Efficient Market Hypothesis. They legitimately think what they're doing is not gambling. No amount of empirical evidence can convince them they have no risk-adjusted alpha
creesch 2y ago
Yeah the customer demographic here likely does worsen the situation. Although I am sure that this is happening elsewhere as well.

cratermoon 2y ago

There's already a big market for taking out AI garbage, and it expect it to grow as the AI bubble bursts. The best thing a consultant can do today is learn the common issues and failure modes of AI generated code. Providing an API service to customers means you will get terrible client code. Sometimes it's dumb stuff like not respecting rate limits and responding to errors by just trying again. One option, if you don't want to fix it yourself, is to partner with a consultant who will take it on, send your customers to them. Bill (or set your API access rates) appropriately. Sometimes you have to fire customers. Really bad ones that cost more than they bring in are prime candidates for firing, or for introducing to your "Enterprise Support Tier".

OutOfHere 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
axelthegerman 2y ago
As long as AI is just hallucinating sh*t I don't think anyone needs to be particularly worried :) It's got a long way to go to even stack up to bad programmers that somehow are always able to find a job somewhere.
core_dumped 2y ago
Language models aren’t AI no matter how hard you squint. When we get actual AI (not counting on anytime soon) it will be more than the annoyed developer that loses their job
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  We'll never have AI, because once we figure something out it stops being AI. Modern generative stuff like LLMs and image diffusers counts at least as much as the various older used-to-be-AI things.
- fragmede 2y ago
  I mean, when the LLM says it isn't intelligent, why question it? https://chatgpt.com/share/127aa0ca-2273-4330-862d-53d9ff3dcf71 https://chatgpt.com/share/127aa0ca-2273-4330-862d-53d9ff3dcf... On the other hand, if you ask it if it's artificially intelligent, it says yes: https://chatgpt.com/share/37517e92-4c53-4053-846f-ab513e1dc939 https://chatgpt.com/share/37517e92-4c53-4053-846f-ab513e1dc9...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- randomdata 2y ago
  > Language models aren’t AI no matter how hard you squint. While you are free to make up any definition you want on the spot, so are others. Yes, language models are just plain old boring machine learning like any other, but machine learning is a subset of what most people consider to be the area of AI. > When we get actual AI (not counting on anytime soon) it will be more than the annoyed developer that loses their job Again, while you can define things however you please, so can everyone else. This is what most people would consider AGI, not AI.

djaouen 2y ago

I'm not! Email in bio.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

matrix_overload 2y ago

Well, if you are annoyed by a particular maintenance task related to your business, find a way to automate it! In this case, you could create examples for your API in common programming languages, publish them on the product website, and even implement an automatic test that would verify that your last commit didn't break them. So, most of the non-programmer inquiries can be answered with a simple link to the examples page for the language they want. As a bonus point, you will get some organic search traffic when people search for <what your API is doing> in <language name>.

mrbombastic 2y ago
Funnily enough an llm is pretty good at categorizing and prioritizing support requests.

lagniappe 2y ago

There's room for all of us in this industry. What someone is unwilling to do is just an opportunity for someone else to pick up the yoke.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
aunty_helen 2y ago
This could actually be an ingenious way of solving the problem. If someone has a support issue and can't solve it themselves, yet requires coding help, forward them a freelancer that they can hire for 20$/hr from upwork that knows this API well etc.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Unfortunately it doesn't look like there's a way to contact the author of this piece.
nkrisc 2y ago
I have the sense that most of these people won’t be willing to pay anything to have their code fixed.

shadowgovt 2y ago

I wonder if there's any consistent pattern to the API hallucinations.

surfingdino 2y ago
Yes. They are all crap.

lqcfcjx 2y ago

now you probably should build an AI to fix AI generated code based on your documentation.

bdcravens 2y ago

This seems like a support issue, not an AI issue. AI is how the code was written, but the issue would be the same if it was amateurs writing bad code. If all you want to do is support your API, a support article outlining the issues you see over and over would be something to point your customers to. Warrant your API against errors, but point out that anything more is billable work. If you're not interested, partner with someone to do that work. You could even offer support contracts that include some amount of customization.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
It's a support issue in a sense, but in many contexts people want to offer a better support experience than "anything more is billable work". A reputation for being helpful and customer-friendly is valuable, especially in a business where you're selling to other programmers, and you can't buy that reputation after the fact with money from support contracts.
omoikane 2y ago
This post seems to be saying that AI opened up a new avenue for people to demand free work. If someone asked "I wrote some rough designs and interfaces, can you write me an app for free?" The author could easily detect it as a request for free work. But because the first part is hidden behind some ChatGPT generated code and the second part is disguised as a request for help, the author would be tricked into doing this free work, until they detected this pattern and write a blog post about it.
- xoac 2y ago
  Is this a chatgpt summary of the article?
m463 2y ago
> amateurs writing bad code in volume, this turns into support writing the code. I think of how the south park movie folks sent so much questionable content to the censors that the compromise in the end let through lots of the puppet sex.
2y ago

nsonha 2y ago

is there a way we can make a support bot or a chat-based document that is fine tuned and limit the answer to only what's in the API? Getting the users to use it is another issue but one problem at a time.

protocolture 2y ago

Yeah so every tech revolution does this right. ATMs were meant to kill banking jobs but ah theres more jobs in banking than ever. The Cloud was meant to automate away tech people, but all it did was create new tech jobs. A lot of which is cleaning up after idiots who think they can outsource everything to the cloud and get burned. LLMs are no different. The "Ideas Man" can now get from 0 to 30% without approaching a person with experience. Cleaning up after him is going to be lucrative. There are already stories about businesses rehiring graphic designers they fired, because someone needs to finish and fine tune the results of the LLM.

dylan604 2y ago
I seriously hope those rehires are coming back with a refined rate as well.
- protocolture 2y ago
  A healthy dickhead tax on the way back in would be smart.
busterarm 2y ago
> ATMs were meant to kill banking jobs but ah theres more jobs in banking than ever. ATMs only handle basic teller functions and since COVID in NYC I had to change banks twice because I couldn't find actual tellers or banks with reasonable open hours. BoA had these virtual-teller only branches and the video systems were always broken (and the only option on Saturday). This was in Midtown Manhattan and my only option was basically a single branch on the other side of town 8-4 M-F. I'm now happily with a credit union but at least since moving to the south things are generally better because customers won't tolerate not being able to deal with an actual person.
creesch 2y ago
> ATMs were meant to kill banking jobs but ah theres more jobs in banking than ever. US banks, who are surprisingly behind the times in as far as automation goes. Here a lot of banks used a lot of automation to reduce the amount of manual jobs needed. to the degree that many offices are now also closing as everything can be done online. And no, there is no need to visit banks here as I get the impression it is in the US. We don't even have physical checks anymore.

anonzzzies 2y ago

I have a business fixing broken code/systems (especially if it is stressful and last minute); if you are tired/annoyed of something in the software market, just up your fees. For us not much changed; a lot of badly (throw the spec over the wall) outsourced software was fairly bad since forever; AI generated code is similar. I guess this will grow even faster though, as normally solid developers might take on a lot more work and get sloppy with AI.

sira04 2y ago

Could you make a model from your API/docs and let them plug that into their AI stuff? That would be funny.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago

If you are building an API and have decent docs, it's a totally ok trade off to say "i'll lose some customers this way, but I'm not providing support". And just be upfront about it. Some stores have a no return policy with no exceptions. They lose some customers, it's ok.

tonyoconnell 2y ago

Why don't you use AI to provide support? I'm serious actually. This sounds like something AI can do really well.

hsbauauvhabzb 2y ago
Spoken like someone whose never been on the receiving end of any such ‘support’.
ilaksh 2y ago
For the problems given in the article, it will 100% work. It's very easy for Claude 3.5 or gpt-4o to look at documentation for a couple of API endpoints, compare it to submitted code, and point out invalid endpoints and properties. It can provide correct code also if the custom is asking for something possible. It won't be flawless but if the issues are as basic as stated in this article, then it seems like a good option. It will cost money to use the good models though. So I think the first step would be to make sure if they ask for an invalid endpoint it says that in so many words in the API response, and if they ask for an invalid property it states that also. Then if that doesn't give them a clue, an LLM scans incoming support requests and automatically answers them. Or flags them for review.. To prevent abuse, it might be a person doing it but just pressing a button to send an auto-answer. But maybe a relatively cheap bot in a Discord channel or something connected to llama 3.1 70b would be good enough to start, and people have to provide a ticket number from that bot to get an answer from a person.
stitched2gethr 2y ago
I'm a bit torn. My first thought was "If the current state of the art LLMs made the mistakes it's unlikely an LLM would be able to correct them." But I'm not sure that's true if the support LLM (chat bot) is given very specific instructions so as to limit the possible answers. Still I think that's gonna break down pretty quick for other reasons. Maybe the chat bot can recognize a botched request and even suggest a fix but what then? It certainly won't be able to convert the user's next request into a working application of even moderate complexity. And do you really want a chat bot to be the first interaction your customers have. I think this is why we haven't seen these things take off outside of very large organizations who are looking to save money in exchange for making customers ask for a human when they need one.

mediumsmart 2y ago

I always make gpt fix the code it created. How else would I learn.

alexeiz 2y ago

I had a related episode at work when my coworker asked me why his seemingly trivial 10 line piece of code was misbehaving inexplicably. It turned out he had two variables `file_name` and `filename` and used one in place of another. I asked him how he ended up with such code, he said he used copilot to create it. Using code from a generative AI without understanding what it does is never a good idea.

berniedurfee 2y ago
I burned a couple hours debugging some generated code only to finally realize copilot was referencing a variable as ‘variableO1’. Artificial Incompetence indeed!
FanaHOVA 2y ago
Copilot wouldn't make a typo. He just made that up and / or broke the code himself.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  You are getting downvoted but you are right, a typo in a variable that already exists in a file like this is not the failure mode for LLMs. The failure mode is logic bugs, making up methods / functions.
  - varjag 2y ago
    No, you can get variable names "mutated" on follow up requests. The thing is like sculpting with toothpaste.
    - brigadier132 2y ago
      I've been using copilot for as long as it has existed and what you are describing has not happened to me once. Literally on in the background 8 hours a day. Excuse me for not trusting the internet hivemind that hates everything that is hyped just a little bit.

bijutoha 2y ago

[dead]

sholladay 2y ago

So have an AI do it for you!

jowdones 2y ago

Retail "traders" are the textbook definition of mentally challenged obnoxiousnes. Go meet them on forums like EliteTrader.com and you will soon realize who you are dealing with. It's your fault really. You don't build custom software for guys having the intellectual capacity and budget of a tractor driver unless you enjoy pain.

wh-uws 2y ago

I will take all of these customers. Please forward them to me.

atomic128 2y ago
For real: profitable consulting businesses have been formed to help LLM programmers. BUGFIX 66, for example, and various others. They can charge substantial money to help customers cross that "last mile" and get their LLM-generated pile of code working.
- schainks 2y ago
  I am literally doing this right now for a client with a prototype, never realized the market is as big as people are saying!
cbg0 2y ago
These "customers" were receiving free help. If they wanted to spend money on quality software they wouldn't have used an LLM.

gumby 2y ago

> Helping a customer solve challenges is often super rewarding, but only when I can remove roadblocks for customers who can do most of the work themselves. One thing I loved about doing technical enterprise sales is that I’d meet people doing something I knew little or nothing about and who didn’t really understand what we offered but had a problem they could explain and our offering could help with. They’d have deep technical knowledge of their domain and we had the same in ours, and there was just enough shared knowledge at the interface between the two that we could have fun and useful discussions. Lots of mutual respect. I’ve always enjoyed working with smart people even when I don’t really understand what they do. Of course there were also idiots, but generally they weren’t interested in paying what we charged, so that was OK. > Helping a customer solve challenges is often super rewarding, but only when I can remove roadblocks for customers who can do most of the work themselves. So I feel a lot of sympathy for the author — that would be terribly soul sucking. I guess generative grammars have increased the number of “I have a great idea for a technical business, I just need a technical co founder” who think that an idea is 90% of it and have no idea what technical work actually is.

mananaysiempre 2y ago
Please also consider this when a localization contractor advertises lower costs by having human editors go over machine translations, then.
cl3misch 2y ago
Your second quote is the same as the first one. Did you copy the same one twice by accident?
- underdeserver 2y ago
  I suspect the quote was pasted by mistake the first time.
  - gumby 2y ago
    Yeah, I moved the paragraphs around and pasted the quote in where it belonged, forgetting that it had been pasted at the top. Too late to edit, though.

userbinator 2y ago

Cryptocurrent trading tools? The susceptibility of people to get-rich-quick scams and the desire to not do even the minimum of work is surely correlated. Stop poisoning the well and then complaining that you have to drink from it.

tdignan 2y ago

OP should set up an AI chatbot to triage his customer support. It probably wouldn't be that hard to send that code right back to GPT and get a fix suggestion to the customer instantly. Stick your documentation for each endpoint in a vector database, and use RAG to give them a quick fix. If it doesn't work let them go to level 2 support for a fee.

thomasahle 2y ago
These kind of support requests are also a big issue for open source projects. Hanging out at the DSPy discord, we get a lot of people who need help with "their" code. The code often uses hallucinated API calls, but they insist it "should work" and our library simply is buggy.

black_13 2y ago

[dead]

bruce511 2y ago

A tiered approach to sales can help here. Cheap version offers minimal support. (Although you still have to sift "bug reports" into my problem/ your problem.) Standard version allows for more support (but still rate limited.) Developer version charges for time spent, in advance. This helps because people only expect free support if you don't explicitly offer something else. If you offer paid support them it's reasonable and expected that there are limits on free support.

gorbachev 2y ago

I've been saying for a while now that there's an absolute gold mine waiting for people who want to specialize in fixing AI generated applications. A lot of businesses are going to either think they can have generative AI create all of their apps with the help of a cousin of the wife of the accountant, or they unknowingly contract a 10x developer from Upwork or alike who uses generative AI to create everything. Once they realize how well that's working out, the smart ones will start from scratch, the not-so-smart will attempt to fix it. Develop a reputation for yourself for getting companies out of that pickle, and you can probably retire early.

PeterStuer 2y ago
Doesn't solve the problem that the budget they has in mind for the app was $300, while an experienced dev can directly see this is going to be a $20K v.1 before change requests project.
- KoolKat23 2y ago
  And this is why people continue to do it. And at that, with such a discrepancy, why not? Proof of concept, you know if it adds value and makes money, enough money to pay $20k.
  - urbandw311er 2y ago
    I think the missing proof point is whether companies would fork out the extra $19,700 once they understand the actual cost.
    - PeterStuer 2y ago
      99% of them were never in the bespoke sofware market to begin with. If the $300 did not work put, they'll cobble something together in Excel pr use some SaaS that comes close enough.
- gorbachev 2y ago
  So they'll try 5 $300 fixes, and then either give up entirely, or figure out that maybe the 100 developers they ignored who told them it's gonna cost $20K were right.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nbzso 2y ago

This is only the beginning. Imagine this when AI bot chains and "agents" replace conveniently junior devs on scale. Someone will "hack" an API/Lang Chain/Insert-LLM-Framework Solution. The next decade of support business is here. Fix my "hallucination" market. Thank you, Microsoft. You did it again.

delifue 2y ago

Someone mentioned "hallucination-based API design" on twitter (I cannot find it now). It's designing API by LLM hallucination. If there is a common hallucination API call, just add that API. This will make the API more "friendly" and resemble common similar APIs. Considering that LLM can hallucinate in different ways unpredictably, not sure whether it will work in practice.

sim7c00 2y ago
I doubt LLM hallucinations will produce good secure code. In my opinion, using code from LLMs, which might see your program come to life a bit quicker, will only enhance the time needed for debugging and testing, as there might be bugs and problems in there ranging from trivial things (unused variables) to very subtle and hard to find logic issues which require a deeper knowledge of the libraries and frameworks cobbled together by an LLM. Additionally, it takes out a lot of the knowledge of these things in the long run, so people will find it more and more challenging to properly do this testing and debugging phase.
- IanCal 2y ago
  The description here isn't about using LLM hallucinations as code. It's using them as example API users and seeing what they get stuck on. Let's say you've got some rest API. Are they trying to send PATCH requests but you only support POST? Do they keep trying to add pagination or look for a cursor? Do they expect /things to return everything and /things/id to return a single one but you have /things and /thing/1 ? None of this is to say you must do whatever they are trying to do but it's a very cheap way of seeing what introducing your API/library to a new user might be like. And, moreover, you can only ever introduce someone once but you can go again and again with a LLM. Review the things they're doing and see if actually you've deviated from broad principles and if a change/new endpoint actually would make things much easier. Fundamentally you can break this down to "if there's someone who can do some coding but isn't a top class programmer, how much do I need to explain it to them before they can solve a particular problem?"
  - sim7c00 2y ago

Pikamander2 2y ago

> Often this takes the form of trying to access an endpoint that does not exist, or read a property off the API response that does not exist. After probing a bit more, my suspicions are usually confirmed — ChatGPT hallucinated that endpoint or property In some cases, you might be able to use this to your advantage to improve the product. When working with third-party APIs, I've often run into situations where my code could be simplified greatly if the API had an extra endpoint or parameter to filter certain data, only to be disappointed when it turns out to have nothing of the sort. It's possible that ChatGPT is "thinking" the same thing here; that most APIs have an X endpoint to make a task easier, so surely yours does too? Over time I've sent in a few support tickets with ideas for new endpoints/parameters and on one occasion had the developer add them, which was a great feeling and allowed me to write cleaner code and make fewer redundant API calls.

ben_w 2y ago
> It's possible that ChatGPT is "thinking" the same thing here; that most APIs have an X endpoint to make a task easier, so surely yours does too? While this is possible, I would caution with an anecdote from my ongoing side project of "can I use it to make browser games?", in which 3.5 would create a reasonable Vector2D class and then get confused and try to call .mul() and .sub() instead of the .multiply() and .subtract() that it had just created. Sometimes it's exceptionally insightful, other times it needs to RTFM.
- fenomas 2y ago
  I feel like we'll eventually all agree that it's a mistake to ask a generalist LLM for code. I've found ChatGPT to be fine at talking about code - like describing the difference between two APIs - but for generating nontrivial chunks of working code I think it's miles behind Copilot and similar. And I assume that's just because, y'know, ChatGPT can write sonnets and translate Korean to Swahili and whatnot. It's amazingly broad, but it's not the right tool for the comparatively narrow problem of code generation.
  - Kuinox 2y ago

jonplackett 2y ago

I would suggest adding a help section with advice for people using ChatGPT that sets expectations and also gives a pre-written prompt for them to use. Something like. Some of you may use ChatGPT/Copilot to help with your coding. Please understand this service is designed for professional programmers and we cannot provide extensive support for basic coding issues, or code your app for you. However if you do want to use ChatGPT here is a useful starting prompt to help prevent hallucinations - though they still could happen. Prompt: I need you to generate code in ____ language using only the endpoints described below [describe the endpoints and include all your docs] Do not use any additional variables or endpoints. Only use these exactly as described. Do not create any new endpoints or assume any other variables exist. This is very important. Then give it some examples in in curl / fetch / axios / python / etc. Maybe also add some instructions to separate out code into multiple files / endpoints. ChatGPT loves to make one humungous file that’s really hard to debug. ChatGPT works fairly well if you know how to use it correctly. I would defo not trust it with my crypto though, but I guess if some people wanna that’s up to them. May as well try and help them!

markatkinson 2y ago

I'm tired of fixing my own AI generated code.

xg15 2y ago

We have come full circle: Silicon Valley is finally disrupting the software engineering industry...

orbit7 2y ago

As a basic offering have good documentation and a community support forum and the option to report bugs. Make the type of support you are providing paid, this could be in tiers. Outsource support as needed.

amai 2y ago

I‘m tired of fixing my colleagues‘ AI generated code. They churn out a lot of code in a short amount of time, but then we loose the saved time again because during pull request review they often cannot explain what this code is actually doing. Maybe I should use an AI for code review, too?

throwuxiytayq 2y ago
Why are these people employed? Isn’t that a bit like a fake employee who outsources his work behind your back? You can’t work with the guy because he literally doesn’t even know or understand the code he’s pushing to the repo
- ramesh31 2y ago
  >Why are these people employed? After being stuck on a project with a few of them recently, I've started to figure it out. They know they are incompetent, and are afraid of being around competent people who would call them out. So they link up with other likewise incompetents to maintain a diffusion of responsibility, so the finger can't be pointed at any one person. And when the system they are building inevitably fails horribly, management can't really fire the whole team. So they bumble along and create "make work" tickets to fill time and look like something is happening, or they spend their time "fixing" things that should have never existed in the first place by layering mountains of hacks on top, rather than reassessing anything or asking for help. Rinse and repeat once the project has clearly failed or been abandoned.

j-a-a-p 2y ago

> My API is just a few well documented endpoints. If you can figure out how to send a POST request using any programming language, you should have no problem using it. But that seems to be too high a bar for the new generation of prompt-engineer coders. Nice. The time has come that we need to design the API with the LLM in mind. Or, to rephrase that, test your API that it is working with the popular LLM tools regularly.

OJFord 2y ago

I think this is the point to establish a 'community', and in particular to only 'offer' community support (or charge more for spending your own time on it). Some people will enthusiastically fix other customers' generated crap for free, let them.

treprinum 2y ago

Set firm boundaries and reject/ghost customers that want to build their app for free and are "angry". Those never lead to anything profitable.

tpoacher 2y ago

Same, but for academic documents. It used to be that a 'bad' document had things 'missing', which were easy to spot and rephrase / suggest improvements. Now a 'bad' document is 50 pages of confusing waffle instead of 5, you need to get through the headache of reading all 50 to figure out what 'sentence' the person was trying to express at the place where an autogenerated section has appeared, figure out if the condensed document is something that actually had any merit to begin with, THEN identify what's missing, and then ask them to try again. At which point you get a NEW 50-page autogenerated document and start the process again. F this shit.

shireboy 2y ago

I can empathize, but am also wondering if some of these are feature requests in disguise. For “how to call api” docs, sample code, and even client libraries can be generated from your OpenAPI specs. Link to the docs in every reply. The more complex asks could be translated “build this endpoint and charge me for it”. If all else fails, set up partnership with devs who want to fix/build customers crap and figure out some copy to direct the more complex asks to them.

jollyllama 2y ago
Agreed, client libs and sample applications have fallen by the wayside and could provide a solution here. It makes it very obvious to the customer when they download and run something that works, and then their changes break it, that the issue is with their changes.

afro88 2y ago

netcan 2y ago

This is totally understandable, valid, etc. OTOH, see script kiddies, WYSIWYG Stack Overflow C&P, etc. It's just the way things are now.

paxys 2y ago

> The worst is when a request starts out simple — I help them fix one hallucination — but then that customer wants to build more complex logic, and somehow I’ve set the expectation that I will provide unlimited free support forever. I’ve gotten a number of angry messages from customers who essentially want me to build their whole app for free. Welcome to the life of any consultant/support agent/open source maintainer ever. AI isn't the problem here, managing expectations is.

mu2si3 2y ago

[dead]

paxys 2y ago

I can guarantee that all these users are following some "hustle university" course peddled by a Twitter influencer. Crypto and AI are the two favorite words of all these get rich quick scams.

pvillano 2y ago
I won't say all investors are entitled and overconfident, inspired by grifters, emboldened by survivorship bias, and motivated by greed. That would be rude
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  It’d also be pretty naive, speaking to your seemingly quite narrow experience with the outside world. So, thank goodness you didn’t say it.
b112 2y ago
You can be a Google dev, and make half a million a year! For only $29.95, we'll show you how to empower yourself with the wonders of AI!
- Tade0 2y ago
  Typically the decimal separator is two steps to the right here. The other day my friend showed me a curious screenshot where an, ahem, dev influencer showed all the courses he's done. Problem is, just one of those six courses amounted to two average net salaries in the region and they were fairly basic. Either the guy in question had a year's worth of runway (then why even bother getting into IT?), got into debt or... didn't actually pay for any of this and it was not disclosed. I do my best to dissuade people from spending their hard earned money on such things, but a significant chunk unfortunately does not listen.

mikewarot 2y ago

I'm on the other side of this when it comes to the C programming language. I've avoided it for decades, preferring Pascal, or even Visual Basic. The single best thing to help someone in my place is clear and coherent documentation with working examples. It's how I learned to use Turbo Pascal so long ago, and generally the quickest way to get up to speed. It's also my biggest gripe with Free Pascal... their old help processing infrastructure binds them to horrible automatically generated naming of parameters as documentation, and nothing more. Fortunately, CoPilot doesn't get impatient, and I know this, so I can just keep pounding away at things until I get something close to what I want, in spite of myself. ;-)

linsomniac 2y ago

Seems like the opportunity here is for the author to sell an AI that is trained on the API and documentation.

andai 2y ago

As the author says, the errors are very easy to fix. Easy enough for GPT! He should set up a support chatbot. Only seems fair? ;) I'm half joking, but in most cases I found that GPT was able to fix its own code. So this would reduce support burden by like 90%. I hate chatbot support as much as the next guy, but the alternative (hiring a programmer to work as a customer support agent on AI generated code all day?) sounds not only cruel, but just bad engineering.

dimal 2y ago
I’ve found that it’s often able to fix its own code when I’m able to understand that problem and state it clearly. On its own, it tends to just go in circles and proudly declare that its solve the problem, even though it hasn’t. It needs a knowledgeable person to guide it.

cynicalpeace 2y ago

AI is going to be like any other tool. If you don't know how to use it, you may end up hurting yourself. If you know how to use it, it will make you 100x more efficient.

pacoWebConsult 2y ago

Seems to me like you have an opportunity to develop a couple SDKs in your customers' favorite languages (probably python and typescript) and a simple "Get Started" template that could alleviate a lot of these requests. Show them the base case, let them figure out how to work with your api via an SDK instead of directly with an API and let the advanced users build their own SDKs in whatever language they prefer. Since its, as OP claims, a simple HTTP API, the SDK could be generated with OpenAPI client generation tools.

jdance 2y ago
Seems like a good way to have a bunch of new products to also support
- pacoWebConsult 2y ago
  Maintaining an OpenAPI spec when you make changes to your API and regenerating the client SDKs through CI is really not a ton of extra work. A template to show a dead simple usage of your API can pay dividends as it lowers the barrier to a customer adopting your product over a competitor's.
maxidorius 2y ago
And then the customers will open support requests for code generated by an AI that misuse that very SDK. It doesn't look like OP's issue is with the code per say, only with the lack of skills of its customers, regardless of the code they write...
- dpassens 2y ago
  I don't really know how to point this out without sounding rude and obnoxious, which is not my intention, but it's "per se" (Latin for by itself), not "per say".
  - maxidorius 2y ago
    No rudeness taken, don't worry! TIL, I didn't know! Thanks!

snakeyjake 2y ago

AI, Rust, crypto, Medium, SAAS startups It's a fuckin perfect hacker news bingo. Magnificent!

suprt411 2y ago

Do you want to outsource this L1 L2 or even L3+ support? Lets talk

bkazez 2y ago

Charge for engineering support and hire someone to do it for you!

ramesh31 2y ago

Welcome to the hell that is being a senior dev nowadays. Every junior with a Copilot license all of the sudden fancies themselves an expert programmer now. It's absolutely maddening.

adverbly 2y ago

Another concern is around reviewing it. I can't tell in a pull request what someone wrote themselves, or to what level of detail they have pre-reviewed the AI code which is now part of the pull request before allowing it to get to me. I can tell you I don't want to be fixing someone else's AI generated bugs though... Especially given that AI writes more/less dry/more verbose code, and increases code churn in general.

hoosieree 2y ago
Just add more AI, that'll solve everything. [edit] unfortunately I think I need to point out the above is sarcasm. Because there really are people using AI to review AI-generated code, and they do not see the problem with this approach.

jrochkind1 2y ago

I am no partiuclar fan of AI (and actually haven't used copilot or similar myself ever), but the real problem here is not AI but: > I’ve gotten a number of angry messages from customers who essentially want me to build their whole app for free. I guess AI maybe encourages more people to think they can build something without knowing what they are doing. i can believe that for sure. There was plenty of that before AI too. Must be even worse now.

lacoolj 2y ago

lol this is just like trying to help people in programming discords that are literally using AI on screen to write and rewrite the entire app as they go. then they run into an issue, ask for help, and don't understand when you say "there's a memory leak 50 lines down" or "you have to define that variable first". AI is a great tool to help someone start an idea. When it goes past that, please don't ask us for help until you know what the code is doing that you just generated.

zzz95 2y ago

Every problem hides opportunities! I can see a future where documentation will be replaced by a plugin to an AI code service. Instead of providing users with documentation on how to use the package, devs will be training an LLM on how to assist the user in generating the interface code. An elaborate Chat GPT prompt for instance.

darepublic 2y ago

I often think about code when I'm driving. I've thought about a way to brainstorm code ideas out loud and have the llm generate a code file with my idea. I'm talking about a fairly granular level, where I'm specifying individual if blocks and the like. Then when I have my hands available I can correct the code and run my idea

jameslk 2y ago

> Often, though, the customer is envisioning a more complex application, and I just have to tell them, “Sorry, you’re going to have to hire a professional developer for this.” Welcome to enterprise sales, where building custom solutions atop of your sprawling BaaS empire is exactly what you do. Your customers have a need and you’re basically turning down an upsell opportunity that also buys you lock in to your platform. Another way to look at it: are they all trying to build something similar or something with similar components? Maybe it’s time to expand the features of your product to reduce the amount of work they need to do.

julianeon 2y ago

I'm wondering if he could just adjust the API to give an error message that an LLM (or a person) could understand and then correct. It might be worth putting some effort into beefing that up, to cut down the support requests.

aussieguy1234 2y ago

and they thought AI would put SWE's out of work... If there are more people able to prototype their ideas with AI, sooner or later they will need a real engineer to maintain/improve that code. That will lead to more jobs and higher demand for SWE's.

yawaramin 2y ago

The customer support issue with selling SaaS is not just about AI, I think. It's widespread across the industry. There are customers who have almost no idea about how their software works, and expect you to guide them through their own specific setups. One issue we regularly have is people complain that our TLS certificate keeps changing and that they want us to notify them in advance of any change. We try to tell them that two/three-month duration TLS certificates is a best practice and that they should ensure that their trust store knows about standard root certificates. Then it turns out their software only supports one root cert at a time and they want us to jump into a call and guide them through changing it in their software.