Simon Willison: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah, sure. Thank you. I, I haven't actually gotten a chance to use it yet. But we were doing similar things in the early days of perplexity. Like we, we, in the Twitter search bird sequel thing that we released, we already allowed people to make plots and things like that. Like, you could plot the distribution of your followers, or you could generate a graph of your number of likes over years and things like that. So, I'm pretty familiar with like, the challenges of making this really work, and so I'm actually gonna try it out. I expected to work really well with GPT four. Back then we were working with Codex. So that said, I, I'm pretty skeptical of the real value being added to people who really know how to code here, right? It's definitely gonna be useful to a lot of people who. Don't, don't wanna interrupt your thought process. I will just point out before you stepped in we have Simon here who some people can say Simon knows how to code, and Simon also highlighted some things that he did that he wouldn't otherwise be able to do. Yeah, so Mike, basically, code interpreter makes, it's as with all g, PT four and everything, it makes me more ambitious. It makes me take on more ambitious coding projects because, so I've got a great example. The other day I published a tutorial for, for my dataset project, and it had H one, H two, and H three headings, and I decided I wanted to add a table of contents at the top, you know, a little nested list with the different headings in. And I've messed, I've done nested lists so many times in my past, and I know that it's kind of irritating just figuring out the nig, the, the sort of, the details of the code to turn a, a sequence of, of, of headers into a proper nested list, and then rendered that as html. So I got code, I got code interpreted to do it. I just, I chucked in a paragraph of text, explained what I needed to do, threw in some example code, and it wrote me like a sort of 15 lines of Python that did exactly what I needed it to do, but it took. 30 seconds and it would've taken me five to 10 minutes of writing quite tedious, boring code that I didn't, that I don't particularly enjoy working on. So that became, that that table of contents might have been something I just didn't add to my website because who can be bothered? You know? I don't want to spend five or 10 minutes tediously debugging my way through it, through a, a nested list algorithm, but I'm happy for code interpreter to, to go ahead and do that. And in fact, when it wrote the code, I watched it make the exact same mistakes I would've made, like forgetting, getting off one off by one errors and all that kind of thing. And then it output the exam, the, the results and was like, oh, I made a mistake. I should fix that. So it pretty much did, it did. Wrote the code the exact way I would've written the code, except that it churns through it really quickly and I just got to, to sit back and watch it do its job. And that's kind of cool, right? I like having, it's like, again, it's like having an intern who will do the tedious code problems that you don't want to do and takes infinite coaching. You can say, no, I don't want it like that. I've changed my mind. Use a def, use a ordered list and send unordered list, all of that kind of stuff. But then at the much more sophisticated end is the project I did with the Python a s t library, where I wanted to actually like pass Python code into an abstract syntax tree and use that to find symbols matching things. And that's the kind of thing where it would've taken me a full day of messing around and learning how to use Python. The Python, a asst module. But Co GPT4 has seen thousands of examples of how that module works. It can generate working code for that and make a few mistakes. Code interpreter can try that code and see what the mistakes are and debug them and, and iterate and, and fix that for me. So I actually built a pretty sophisticated tool that's now available. It's open source. Anyone can install it. e and see what the mistakes are and debug them and, and iterate and, and fix that for me. So I actually built a pretty sophisticated tool that's now available. It's open source. Anyone can install it. It's called Synex, S Y M B E X, by getting code interpreter to solve the sort of irritating problems where I honestly don't have the patience to spend a full day figuring out how to do abstract, abstract syntax tree manipulation in Python. But I'm quite happy to let code interpreter figure out those sort of frustrating, repetitive details so that I can then, then take that and use that as part of the biggest software that I'm building.…

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