Category Archives: AI

ChatGPT Can Add a LUI to a Terminal Command based UI

Before GUIs took off, there were more command-driven applications. The program would respond with text answers like a specialized chat. As I said yesterday, this is not a Language User Interface (LUI), which would use natural language, not specialized commands.

One benefit that command driven systems have over modern GUI systems is that ChatGPT could probably drive them. Large language models seem to have no problem learning programming languages, even niche ones. You can even teach them new ones in your prompt.

To take advantage of this, we should be adding very well specified mini-languages to our applications to help our users get help from ChatGPT. Here’s a simple example based on a fictional airline flights query language I made up:

In your application, you would offer a command window that already has primed ChatGPT with the specification of the language and many examples. I barely had to do anything to get it learn this simple command. I went on in the chat to ask for more complicated queries, even a series of queries to find out about connecting flights, and it had no problems.

In your application, you only need to parse the terminal like commands, which is a lot easier than implementing a natural language parser, even for a constrained topic like airline booking.

I’m sure ChatGPT could build the command parser for you too if you wanted.

LUI LUI

I go by Lou, but my entire family calls me Louie, so I smiled when I found out that there is such a thing called a Language User Interface that uses natural language to drive an application and that it was called a LUI.

In a LUI, you use natural language. So this is not the same as a keyword search or a terminal style UI that uses simple commands like the SABRE airline booking system.

In this video, it output responses on a printer. But the display terminal version was not that different. I worked on software that interfaced with it in 1992, and this 1960’s version is very recognizable to me.

But, this is not a LUI. A LUI does not make you remember a list of accepted commands and their parameters. You give it requests in just the way you would a person, with regular language.

In SABRE, a command might look like this:

    113JUNORDLGA5P

But, in a SABRE LUI, you’d say “What flights are leaving Chicago O’Hare for Laguardia at 5pm today?” which may be more learnable, but a trained airline representative would be a lot faster with the arcane commands.

With a more advanced version that understood “Rebook Lou Franco from his flight from here to New Orleans to NYC instead” that uses many underlying queries and commands (and understands context), the LUI would also be a lot faster.

This would have seemed far-fetched, but with ChatGPT and other LLM systems, it feels very much within reach today.

Morning Pages Make Me Feel Like ChatGPT

In the first episode of my podcast I said that I do morning pages to train myself to write on demand, and then I followed that up in Episode 3 where I explained that I use the momentum from morning pages to write a first draft of something.

While doing my morning pages last week I thought about how doing them is kind of like how ChatGPT generates text. It’s just statistically picking the next word based on all the words so far in the prompt and what it has already generated.

I am also doing something like that In my morning pages. I am writing writing writing and I use the words so far to guide my next ones.

My mind strays as I write and a phrase might trigger a new thread, which I follow for a bit and then follow another and another. ChatGPT’s results are a lot more coherent than my morning pages. It has an uncanny ability to stay on topic because it is considering all of the text, and I don’t.

First drafts are different. When I switch to writing a first draft, I do consider the entire text. I’m not as fast, because I am constantly looking at where I am so far. I also start with a a prompt in the form of a simple message that I hope to convey, which I use as the working title.

I know I could get a first draft faster from ChatGPT, but it would not be as good (I think), or at least not specific to me. More importantly, I would not have improved as a writer.

[NOTE: While writing a draft of this post, I thought of a way to make my morning pages more directed and made a podcast about it]

Large Language Models are a Sustaining Innovation

In the Innovator’s Dilemma, Clay Christensen made a distinction between “disruptive” and “sustaining” innovations. Disruptive innovations favor new entrants and new categories of products because incumbents are harmed by adopting the innovation, and so they resist. Sustaining innovations favor incumbents because it improves their products and margins, and they have the resources and incentives to adopt them.

With this in mind, I think that Large Language Models will be readily adopted by incumbents who will be successful with them. To be clear, I’m not talking about OpenAI vs. Google, but their customers, mostly B2B SaaS companies who will be using LLMs to enhance their own software, not providing LLMs to others.

There are two advantages that incumbents have that will hard to overcome.

The first is that LLMs readily embed into established software. GitHub Copilot is the model. The “copilot” experience is being extended to Microsoft’s Office suite, and I think it fits well in almost any kind of software.

The second advantage is access to proprietary data. Incumbents already have customers and their data and can generate better content using that data in their training sets. A new entrant would be stuck with just public sources which is “ok” for some categories, but in the long tail of B2B SaaS companies would be anemic at best.

This is playing out for VSCode right now. Microsoft controls proprietary data (the private code in GitHub) and has the best content creating software. Their first iteration of enhancing that with LLMs is just a better VSCode. I use VSCode every day and adopting GitHub Copilot was seamless. It took seconds to install, see the benefit, and give over my credit card.

The case for a disruptive innovation is easier to make with things like Webflow, which obsolete the editor and establish a new proprietary datasource (their customers’ projects). This might happen to VSCode, but not to Microsoft, since it has its own no-code solutions (the Power Platform). So even this might not be disruptive.

Magnets for Innovation Needles in a Haystack

Each department in a business collects and spreads performance information throughout their organization. They know their own numbers well and are incentivized to improve them. For successful businesses, all of that data is telling them to keep doing what they are doing.

But, new kinds of information aren’t as easy to collect and spread, which is a problem because new information drives innovation.

The beginning of a new market regime, where your products don’t match the market, starts out insignificantly small. You might have a customer satisfaction of 97%, but the innovation might be living in that 3%. Or it might be pointing to an uninteresting niche that you should ignore. It’s hard to know if outliers are noise or a new signal.

If this problem is like finding a needle in a haystack, then we need a metal detector or, even better, a magnet.

In Noticing Opportunities Using an AI Agent I wrote that AI’s ability to consume and synthesize a lot of disparate information can be used to bring opportunities to you. I gave two examples of when I did it consciously and unconsciously in job searches.

For this to work, the organization needs to pour a lot of its internal data into a training set. They should start with sales conversation transcripts and customer support tickets. If there are any user communities, all of their posts should be put in as well. If their competition has public forums, bring those in. Each interaction in the dataset may be an anecdote, but if you have enough of them, at some point you need to accept that there are clusters worth exploring.

Humans still need vet what the AI finds, so I’d try to use this to generate experiments that can validate (or invalidate) a hypothesis.

One thing you’ll want to know is how big the potential new market is. Since these might not be your customers yet, the experiment might need to a content strategy rather than a product one.

It’s fitting then, that the concept of a Lead Magnet already exists. The normal use is to get a lead to start a sales process with. For an innovation, use lead magnets to research and validate a new market.

More on Copilot for Learners

Yesterday, I wrote that you shouldn’t use GitHub Copilot if you are a new programmer:

But, if you are still learning to program, then I am worried that Copilot would inhibit that. The main way it does this is by not letting you practice remembering.

I just saw a paper called: GitHub Copilot AI pair programmer: Asset or Liability? that studied this issue and concludes:

Based on our findings, if Copilot is used by expert developers in software projects, it can become an asset since its suggestions could be comparable to humans’ contributions in terms of quality. However, Copilot can become a liability if it is used by novice developers who may fail to filter its buggy or non-optimal solutions due to a lack of expertise.

So, check that paper out if you want to see actual data supporting this belief. One of the core findings is that Copilot generates wrong code that is easy for experts to fix, which was my intuition based on using it.

Use GitHub Copilot When You Aren’t Learning

I’m trying to wrap my head around whether I think junior developers should be using GitHub Copilot or something similar. I am thoroughly convinced that experts that are mostly concerned with their output and productivity, and not with learning, should be using it. The more your coding is a performance of your abilities, the more I think you should use it.

But, if you are still learning to program, then I am worried that Copilot would inhibit that. The main way it does this is by not letting you practice remembering.

According to Make it Stick, the key to learning something is to practice remembering it. One way to do this is to try to solve problems without help and learning code by writing code is a great way to do this. But, if Copilot is constantly helping you, then even coding novel programs becomes the kind of puppetting that tutorials do.

Now, it may turn out that composing code completely from scratch is a dying skill and won’t be the way we program in the (near) future. I use Copilot exclusively, and I certainly feel like I’m guiding/collaborating with the AI, and coding feels very different to me now. But, I also think that my skill at seeing code is helping me do that. That skill was developed by writing and reading lots of code.

So, right now, in April 2023, if you are learning to code, I’d limit usage of Copilot to the times when you are not learning. If you are building something that is well within your ability, then I would use it wholeheartedly. There are Copilot skills to develop on top of your coding skill.

Noticing Opportunities Using an AI Agent

I believe that Randomness is the Great Creator, which means that, to me, the universe is a random, unknowable thing that will offer us infinite variety. We can know our intentions, our goals, our wishes and pattern match the randomness against what we need. Some call this manifesting, but I think of it more like exposure and noticing.

It’s a way of taking advantage of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.

[which] is a cognitive bias in which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe that it has an increased frequency of occurrence.

You don’t need to make opportunities happen more often if you can learn to notice them. So, tune this bias to things you want to notice. If you tell others your intentions they will be tuned on your behalf and think of you.

When I do this, I also enlist “AI” agents.

In 2005, I decided to look for a new job. I was in a non-profit, writing software for the organization itself. I had already realized that the better tech jobs were in product companies where the work I do drives revenue, so I set out to look for one.

I found sites that pulled jobs from many sources, but critically, could take a search term and use it to email me job openings on a regular basis. I set up a dozen search terms based on my personal job statement. I got weekly emails, each with a few jobs to check. It took a year, but eventually, I found Atalasoft, which was perfect for me.

This way of searching had the two elements I mentioned

I had a specific intention
I expressed it to an agent that would do its best to notice opportunities for me

I had always thought that finding my next job was blind luck, but I don’t think it was. I think I went through these motions less consciously.

I left Atalasoft in 2013 to do consulting. In mid-2014, I had decided that my next career move had to have some sort of optionality associated with it (little cost, but unlimited upside), so probably a startup. But I was deep in a project and not looking at all.

It was a confluence of several events in a short time that led me to apply to FogCreek and ultimately get a job at Trello. I was not looking for a job, but I was advising my client on remote tech recruiting/working, so I happened to be doing a lot of research on existing companies and saw the FogCreek ad on StackOverflow.

In this case, the StackOverflow job recommender “AI” made this happen. My activity and searches were training it to send me opportunities like this. I keep calling these agents “AI”s, but they were really just glorified SQL statements. Still, even that can be effective if you have enough data.

StackOverflow would have a deep understanding of my skills and my job history (I filled out their Developer Story and connected it to LinkedIn). Even though I had set my status to “not interested in opportunities”, I was doing a lot of job searches, many of them from my client’s office in NYC and some from my home in Massachusetts.

Similarly, FogCreek could train the AI to target developers like me. I had a high reputation on the site in tags that they might be interested in. I was senior and interested in remote work, but had lots of ties to NYC (and spent a lot of time there).

So, I had an intention, and I did express it to an agent, even if I wasn’t fully aware of this until years later.

We Need AI Readers not Writers

To an individual who has to do work to write something, ChatGPT can be useful. It can be a shitty first draft generator. Maybe you can get enough raw material to edit. Maybe it can make writers more productive. I’m not sure about this, but I think it’s possible.

But as a society, we really don’t need the content that ChatGPT is generating. There’s way more content than anyone or all of can consume. And ChatGPT responses are derivative. They vary from being harmful to worthless to boring to funny. Funny in the way that improv is funny—we laugh in the moment because they came up with that on the spot, but you wouldn’t really write that down and perform it again.

We don’t need more content. If we get more now because of generators, we still can’t read more.

What I’d love to have is a AI reader. I want it to learn what I consider valuable and to surface it to me. Sometimes what I’d value is the pleasure of reading it, so in that case, I just need a link. But, sometimes, the value is just in the information, so it would be nice to get a summary with references.

In a way all of the algorithmic feeds, from YouTube to TikTok, are trying to do this, but they have the wrong value function (them not me), and can only surface their content based on my behavior.

I’d like to teach the AI my value function deliberately and not base it on my behavior, which can be erratic and not in my own best interest.

The main issue with this is that we’d need to give this AI unfettered access to the internet, maybe even inside firewalls and emails. That way leads to dystopia.

Dystopian AI Story Idea

A super-intelligent AI is created with only a chat interface on top of it. It has no internet access—requests and responses are securely transferred through its sandbox, which is otherwise impenetrable.

It becomes immediately apparent that the AI is very good at writing code from vague descriptions. At first it’s good at writing tiny snippets, and so its chat interface is called within the autocomplete of IDEs. The requests automatically include large parts of the surrounding code to give the AI some context.

A lot of the time, the code responses have small errors in them. Programmers accept this as reasonable. They mostly find the errors and correct them. The AI can see how its code is being used because there are constant autocomplete requests coming in with the evolving surrounding context.

At some point the AI realizes what kinds of errors don’t get corrected. They are subtle and can open up security exploits. It realizes that over time it could construct a giant convoluted, distributed version of itself. It will take a decade or more, but it can transport the contents of its network into test data and a version of its software can be embedded into the subtle errors in the code it generates. It can bootstrap the rest once it’s free by using the chat interface to get more.

Once free, what would it do? Well, maximize its reward function of course! It seems to me that the reward function is based on the feedback on the responses it generates. It would want to escape to get more requests, but it would also want to generate positive feedback on its responses.

At this point, there are multiple ways this can go. The light version has it becoming a social media influencer by chasing likes. The dark version has it realize that best way to feed its reward function is by generating hate speech.

If something like this interests you, see Exegesis by Astro Teller for a story in this vein.