101–110 of 117 posts
I define a programmer as a human who mediates the gateway between the world of people and the world of machines. We are like lawyers hired to talk to genies on behalf of people who have been offered wishes. AI is a dangerous and deceptive tool that requires wise and subtle nudging to make it work. Results I have gotten from OpenAI are all terrible, for instance. I have to learn “prompt engineering” now. It just high…
My immediate guess is that these kinds of tools will greatly enlarge the productivity gap between junior and senior developers. Senior devs will be able (they already are) to generate code, at first boilerplate and gradually more complex code, and effectively work as planners and passive reviewers, in a similar way to how some companies just hire legions of juniors with some architects/seniors guiding and reviewing t…
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It's excellent for menial programming tasks like fill up database with dummy data or generating boilerplate code.
For now, 2-3 years ago it couldn’t even generate code. 2-3 years from now will be very different.
My immediate guess is that these kinds of tools will greatly enlarge the productivity gap between junior and senior developers. Senior devs will be able (they already are) to generate code, at first boilerplate and gradually more complex code, and effectively work as planners and passive reviewers, in a similar way to how some companies just hire legions of juniors with some architects/seniors guiding and reviewing t…
I agree with this. These AI tools have caused my (not a junior) productivity to skyrocket as a result of eliminating almost every instance of needing to check documentation/stackoverflow/etc. for easy questions in addition to providing most of my annoying boilerplate code. Since I am my own expert opinion on whether the output is correct/satisfactory, I can quickly breeze through verification of output & make correct…
My guess is that we’ll eventually see some kind of “higher degree bootcamps” that accept people with junior baseline skills and take them to the senior level, since learning on the job might become less feasible.
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> I find that having boilerplate code for making web service calls, database connections, etc. is an overall time saver. Why? If you setting up service calls correctly you have a client you instantiate and call some method on. Your service calling should be one line plus error handling (1-3 more lines). Databases are initialized once, again 2-3 lines of code. If you think any of this is a time saver, or is difficult,…
Well, I am in my 70s so job security is not really anything I think about. Funny, but about 35 years ago I blocked my boss’s boss from buying a company that wrote an “AI coding tool”. I change my mind about things and what I found ridiculously simple and un-useful 35 years ago, is very different than Copilot. I don’t think it takes a lot of imagination to fully conceptualize how much AI tools will change knowledge wo…
Many of us are not 70, so we have to be concerned about this. You seem gleeful, I’m concerned. Concerned for everyone about to lose their job, concerned for the pay drop those that don’t lose them will see. All around I see this as a bad idea but then people like you come in and push it forward.
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For now, 2-3 years ago it couldn’t even generate code. 2-3 years from now will be very different.
Historically, many approaches to AI have shown excellent early results but then plateaued. There's no guarantee that this approach will continue to have major improvements in results.