Comment by keeda
18 hours ago
The problem is, the low hanging fruit, the stuff it's good at, is 90% of all software. Maybe more.
And it's getting better at the other 10% too. Two years ago ChatGPT struggled to help me with race conditions in a C++ LD_PRELOAD library. It was a side project so I dropped it. Last week Codex churned away for 10 minutes and gave me a working version with tests.
I think that typescript is a language uniquely suited to LLMs though:
Contrast that with C/C++:
I'm not sure I agree that typescript is "90% of all software". I think it's 90% of what people on hacker news use. I think devs in different domains always overestimate the importance of their specific domain and underestimate the importance of other domains.
I wouldn't say TypeScript is 90% of all software exactly, but tons of apps on all kinds of technologies like Python / Django, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Wordpress, "enterprise" Java and the like, primarily doing CRUD and data plumbing especially for niche applications and internal LoB sites that we never see on the open Internet.
I agree C++ is harder, and I still occassionally find a missing free(), but Codex did crack my problem... including fixing a segfault! I had a bunch of strategically placed printfs gated behind an environment variable, it found those, added its own, set the environment variable, and examined the outputs to debug the issue.
I cannot emphasize how mindblowing this is, because years back I had spent an hour+ doing the same thing unsuccessfully before being pulled away.