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Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

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Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#121

Post by guluarte »

tivert wrote: post #11

> 2. I no longer feel the need to hire juniors. This is a short-term positive and maybe a long-term negative. > A lot of stuff I used to delegate to fellow humans are now being delegated to ChatGPT. And I can get the results immediately and at any time I want. I agree that it cannot operate on its own. I still need to review and correct things. I have do that even when working with other humans. The only difference i…

> more senior-level people has been shut down (like the OP is doing).

I am already seeing this, companies are desperate for senior developers but at the same time they don't want to hire juniors.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#122

Post by kragen »

jprete wrote: post #119
kragen wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Previous "software dev productivity increases" happened as computing saturation itself increased from a handful of mainframes to one in every office, then at every desk, then a few in every home, and later one in every hand. Now it's at 100% or close. previous 'computing saturation is at 100% or close' pronouncements go back to 01953 https://geekhistory.com/content/urban-legend-i-think-there-w... this human body we…

Are you by any chance a paperclip factory? /s

ask again in 53 years

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#123

Post by dzhar11 »

I am in my late 30s ;) I understand you. We are... singularity. This good feeling when ChatGPT does what I want. I am working on my pet project and struggling to convince my friends and coworkers how cool my project is, but ChatGPT understands what I am doing and is ready to help. It reminds me of my addiction to online video games: World of Tanks, Team Fortress 2, PUBG, Dead by Daylight... It is a shot of dopamine when I win and anger when I lose. Burnout after some time... can't play anymore, but I have to... Oh, I have wasted (or invested) a few full years (like when you add all hours on Steam and divide by hours in a year) in video games (instead of sleep). At least now I can feel when burnout is coming. I have learned when to stop. No magic. Just time.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#124

Post by fallat »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #105
kfarr wrote: post #17

I’m reminded of the difference between being efficient vs effective. So much of the example use cases I see people — including myself — using GPT for are unimportant short-term tasks that necessarily take away head space and time from long-term important tasks. Those long-term important tasks are the hard ones requiring existing application context where I experience LLMs struggling. If we’re not careful we’ll get DD…

OTOH, chatGPT can make a good rubber duck if you want to talk through a problem. It's advice is often useless (which is fine) but occasionally it may say something useful.

I find ChatGPT is scary BAD for rubber ducking. You have to already have an idea of what's right and wrong to verify. It is insane how often ChatGPT is wrong when I ask it things. like 90% of the time it is wrong. It's probably because everything I ask is way too specific and because it's just pattern matching on roids and not reasoning, it's impossible for it.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#125

Post by keithnz »

fleeno wrote: post #30

Can you elaborate on how you're actually using ChatGPT? I'm a developer and I haven't felt any need to use ChatGPT constantly. What tasks are you delegating to ChatGPT that were previously done by humans? Most of my input from others is regarding current information specific to the task at hand. I don't see how ChatGPT would have any idea what I'm talking about. Do you have some specific examples you could share?

I've been coding 40+ years and I use it reasonably regularly, for things that are trivial time waster type stuff. Like I need some powershell command to automate something that I know will be automatable. Less so for coding, but I have a IDE AI code generator (Codeium) that is often good at predicting what you want to do next, especially for boilerplate type stuff. Then there's the times you are heading into unknown and just need a starting point, for instance I asked it to write a discord bot that did X Y and Z, and it pretty much gave me a good shell of a program. Didn't really have to refer to any other documentation. It's often good at finding ways to do obscure things. Quite often I find it most useful with TSQL stuff, not so much for basic queries, but there's lots of inbuilt toys I've just never come across nor care to spend the time researching. I can't see how it would replace a junior developer though. If anything, it makes it easier for junior developers to get up to speed.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#126

Post by philwelch »

> I no longer feel the need to hire juniors. This is a short-term positive and maybe a long-term negative…. A lot of stuff I used to delegate to fellow humans are now being delegated to ChatGPT. And I can get the results immediately and at any time I want.

In college, one of the classes I took was a basic digital circuit design class. How to build a CPU out of logic gates and things of that nature. A large part of the class was about minimizing a circuit using Karnaugh maps. The professor pointed out, however, that no one in industry actually does this anymore since the introduction of ESPRESSO in the 80’s. Before ESPRESSO, any chip designer would have some junior engineers slaving over Karnaugh maps all day to optimize their designs, but these engineers were replaced overnight by an algorithm.

Did this actually reduce the number of EE’s working in chip design? Maybe it did; I wouldn’t know. And obviously, GPT-4 is a much more general system than ESPRESSO. But it struck me as an interesting parallel.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#127

Post by LukeLambert »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #74
simonw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a bunch of examples myself. Here's a good recent one (prompts are linked about half way down the post): https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations... A few more: - "Write a Python script with no extra dependencies which can take a list of URLs and use a HEAD request to find the size of each one and then add those all up" https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/3/weird-world-of-llms/#us... - "Show…

I dunno what you do for a job but if that is your hard problems or even medium problems then I think you lucked out big time.

I think Simon has a lot of experience solving hard problems: https://simonwillison.net/about/

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#128

Post by blitzball »

I am a lawyer who uses ChatGPT to assist in drafting documents. My clients are familiar with it too, but at the end of the day, clients are lazy, and would rely on the lawyer to draft something as simple as a cover letter or HR form. For those clients who pre-generate contracts and legal documents through ChatGPT, the result is astoundingly bad, such that I still had to overhaul their outputs.

Laziness and human incompetence -- these are the reasons why I exist.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#129

Post by philwelch »

coldtea wrote: post #55
dragonwriter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM are not mere increased productivity or the computer operator, but automation of productivity so that it can happen without an operator (or with much fewer). Enabling the same production with fewer workers (or, equivalently, greater production with the same number of workers) is the definition of a productivity increase, not something that constitutes a difference in kind from a normal productivity increase. > M…

> Enabling the same production with fewer workers (or, equivalently, greater production with the same number of workers) is the definition of a productivity increase, not something that constitutes a difference in kind from a normal productivity increase. Of course. But "greater production with the same number of workers" vs "the same production with fewer workers" is already a difference in quantity (of both product…

Yes, but you’re just reiterating the basic Luddite argument, and taking IMO a blinkered perspective by looking at it from the perspective of a single firm rather than the economy as a whole. Often, increasing labor productivity in a given category actually increases the total quantity of such labor demanded in the economy due to the Jevons effect. If you increase output per worker by 10x, sometimes the product becomes cheap enough that the quantity demanded goes up by 100x and the economy ends up needing 10x as many workers. (Numbers for purpose of illustration of course.)

In other words, sure, there’s a limiting factor in terms of how much software the world actually wants, but the more software we can produce per programmer, the cheaper software gets and the more software the world wants. There is still eventually a limit here, but it is a lot farther away than it looks.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#130

Post by keiferski »

Is ChatGPT 4 significantly better than 3.5? Because I am seeing it make basic, common sense errors that a person would never make. Things like, “Only give me results that fit this certain criteria.” Or “remove any results that are about X.” It repeatedly does the same mistakes over and over again, even after I point them out. This is in addition to just getting basic facts wrong.

And that’s not even mentioning the constant milquetoast disclaimer it has to give at the end of each answer - again, which it refuses to stop saying, even when I explicitly tell it to stop.

At this point I wouldn’t trust it to make me a cup of coffee, so I am a bit baffled by these threads. I have primarily found it to be useful when you’re using it as “text calculator” to reformat text, add commas to CSVs, etc. and even then it takes a lot of trial and error.

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