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erikw | 10 months ago

Interesting... I asked o3 for help writing a flake so I could install the latest Webstorm on NixOS (since the one in the package repo is several months old), and it looks like it actually spun up a NixOS VM, downloaded the Webstorm package, wrote the Flake, calculated the SHA hash that NixOS needs, and wrote a test suite. The test suite indicates that it even did GUI testing- not sure whether that is a hallucination or not though. Nevertheless, it one-shotted the installation instructions for me, and I don't see how it could have calculated the package hash without downloading, so I think this indicates some very interesting new capabilities. Highly impressive.

discuss

danpalmer|10 months ago

Are you sure about all of this? You acknowledged it might be a hallucination, but you seem to mostly believe it? o3 doesn't have the ability to spin up a VM.

https://xcancel.com/TransluceAI/status/1912552046269771985 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43713502 is a discussion of these hallucinations.

As for the hash, could it have simply found a listing for the package with hashes provided and used that hash?

tymscar|10 months ago

Thats so different from my experience. I tried to have it switch a flake for a yarn package that works to npm and after 3 tries with all the hints I could give it it couldn’t do it

bool3max|10 months ago

I find that so incredibly unlikely. Granted I haven't been keeping up to date with the latest LLM developments - but has there even been any actual confirmation from OpenAI that these models have the ability to do such things in the background?

peterldowns|10 months ago

If it can write a nixos flake it's significantly smarter than the average programmer. Certainly smarter than me, one-shotting a flake is not something I'll ever be able to do — usually takes me about thirty shots and a few minutes to cool off from how mad I am at whoever designed this fucking idiotic language. That's awesome.

ZeroTalent|10 months ago

I was a major contributor of Flake. What in particular is so idiotic in your opinion?

unknown|10 months ago

[deleted]

brailsafe|10 months ago

I mean, a smart programmer still has to learn what NixOs and Flakes are, and based on your description and some cursory searching, a smart programmer would just go do literally anything else. Perfect thing to delegate to a machine that doesn't have to worry about motivation.

Just jokes, idk anything about either.

ai-christianson|10 months ago

> Interesting... I asked o3 for help writing...

What tool were you using for this?