Does AI Have Tech Bias? | AI All The Things

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Show Notes

Introduction

• New episode type where we will cover the latest in AI topics
• AI evolves extremely rapidly and we figured the industry needs to constantly be told what’s here and what's coming to keep themselves ready for the next phase

AI autocomplete has evolved

• Tools like Copilot and tab nine were created as just a simple autocomplete, where you are typing something and it would fill in the next line or two, or next code block for you
• This worked well but companies started to try to figure out how to expand this.
• Cursor came along to provide an entire IDE based off of VS code that enables it to manipulate not just the next few lines, but most of the files in your codebase
• Supermaven has this capability as well within vscode and as of a couple weeks ago, copilot has deputed their competitor which allows for multifile creation/manipulation
• Pros
  • Allow for rapid development
  • High knowledge about the whole codebase so better suggestions
  • Easier to chat with and get directly contextual answers and suggestions based on the codebase
• Cons
  • Easier to let a mistake though as instead of reviewing a few lines you’re reviewing several files that were generated at once
  • You’ll have less knowledge of your codebase because the decision-making was all done by AI

AI has tech bias 

• Another set of tools has also arisen, which is complete component and project generation tools
• Bolt.new from Stackblitz, V0 from vercel, and GitHub spark are good examples
• These tools can take a regular text prompt and generate an entire full-stack application for you
• These applications can have authentication, a backend, a database, integrations, really anything you can correctly prompt for
• I created a little rss reader/parser that would take our html all the things rss feed, parse it and create a podcast website with all our episodes and the ability to search them (bolt.new)
• One major thing I have noticed is that these systems so far have serious tech bias
  • Because these were trained on open source code that means that the more popular a framework or library is, the more chance it has of getting the implementation right when using it
  • I tried the same app in both sveltekit and next js and was not surprised to see the next.js app to be implemented in a much better way then sveltekit
    • For example, it had trouble figuring out how to use sveltekit server routes, instead forcing everything to be an api which didn’t really work for the usecase
• This worries me because it’s another barrier for new tech to be created and adopted
  • Would you recommend someone new to use a framework that hasn’t been fully indexed by AI?
• Potentially to fix this maybe AI companies will allow of rapid indexing of new tech if submitted somewhere. 
  • New tech could create a bunch of examples and detailed documentation and pass that to AI to rapidly index and learn from so that it can be represented in the suggestions/completions

Status check on the future 

• With what you know today do you think AI will replace our jobs in the upcoming 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years?