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Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

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Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#141

Post by duccinator »

CameronNemo wrote: post #112
obblekk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. Junior engineers will learn much much faster than the past (think about how much more effective GPT4 is as a learning tool than the "rubber ducky method" or manpages or even stackoverflow). And a part of their role will morph into prompting GPT4 (much like this senior engineer has started doing). If GPTx ends up in the narrow area where it's universally smarter than junior engs but definitely not ca…

You think GPT4 is more effective than learning how to read a manual? Or some of the best SO answers?

Yes, even GPT3.5 is better. I am in uni, and LLMs are probably the best teachers I have had the experience to learn from(and I have had some great teachers and professors). They work even better if you feed them the content of a book/manual/documentation as a reference.

They do suck at solving problems correctly, however if you give them an incorrect solution and ask them to spot mistakes, or just ask for a general method to do a problem, it works out.

However, they might not yet compare to the best of humans. The best SO answers probably represent 0.01% of the answers, which is a high bar. I am certain very amazing teachers and professors exist out there in the world whom LLMs can't beat yet but the average can't compete.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#142

Post by jstx1 »

bawolff wrote: post #137
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…

Computers have been putting people out of jobs since back when "computer" was a human job title and not a machine. Its always ended up creating more jobs than it eliminated in the end, i don't see why the future will be any different than the past.

Seems like a logical fallacy to assume that the past extrapolates cleanly into the future. "It was okay last time" isn't a good enough argument.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#143

Post by albert_e »

I have been staying mostly away from heavy use of ChatGPT so far. I have experimented and seen the potential. I also try to keep up on the tech news. Mostly been too busy with life and work to dabble seriously here so far.

But I am still experiencing the stress nevertheless.

The kind of burn-out I am experiencing is he probably opposite of yours in a way. I have been interested in Data and AI for a while since it is related to my area of work as well. Have been meaning to do a lot of hands on earning and experimentation in this space of GenAI ever since it blew up an year ago?

(But I, by nature, usually procrastinate on things and ideas, waiting for an ideal time -- where I am free of immediate priorities and distractions -- that rarely ever comes.)

The constant onslaught of new developments and new tools and frameworks and models keeps me feeling like I am stuck in quicksand with lead boots while all these developments are whizzing past me like a train I missed. This has been a cause of stress and mild anxiety for past many months, akin to burnout or helplessness.

(A part of me secretly wishes that the current flurry is just the initial mad rush with lot of trial and error -- and the real valuable learnings and fulfillment will come to those who start a little later -- once the dust settles and others burn themselves out. One can dream.)

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#144

Post by anonzzzies »

There is a lot of, let's say, whining, in different communities that chatgpt deteriorated. This may or may not be the case; I haven't noticed, but it could be. However copilot is really improving quite rapidly for us; now I rather expect it to write quite large swats of boring code for most of the team. And it does; often with an element of 'perceived magic', as in; I actually start typing something I have in my head only and it just gives me the code I was thinking of writing. Of course it gets that from context or clues, but even my colleagues with 3-4 years of experience don't quite do that and definitely not as fast.

It's great what small teams can do now because of this and the people who don't use / want to use / cannot use it will fall behind quickly.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#145

Post by midasz »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #104
obblekk wrote: post #28

I've experienced a very similar feeling. To me it feels exactly like finding wikipedia in 2005, or getting an iphone + wikipanion in 2008. The frontiers of my mind have been unleashed. A real bicycle for the mind. Here are some tactics I use to "turn off gpt": 1. It'll be there tomorrow. The great thing about their threaded model is you can easily find the convo and continue it tomorrow. Remind yourself of that consc…

>Don't worry about juniors. They'll still be hired because now they'll ramp up faster and produce better code So maybe the seniors should be worried, since we/they don't have much barrier to entry that means much more competition.

If you think writing code is the most important, or even the largest part of being a (senior) software engineer - sure. In my experience it's not though. It's being able to communicate clearly, understanding and translating requirements (sometimes to code), knowing boundaries and saying no, deep understanding of systems and knowing how to debug them.

Transitioning from junior to medior (for example) is much more than writing x% better code. It's the process of falling and getting back up. Being stumped and learning when to ask for help (and not just technical, what if the spec is 'wrong'?).

I definitely worry that we are leaving future generations in the dust and that there'll be an experience gap. It's a disservice to take away something from them that we enjoyed ourselves.

No sane company should run on juniors, they're an investment.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#146

Post by jokethrowaway »

I have a similar issue all my life because when I think about something I just start creating it.

There is a simple solution but it requires willpower and a good dose of optimistic nihilism.

Nothing of what we do is that important, focus on living life in a way that pleases your imperfect self, not on chasing the next million dollar trend. If I count of all the chances I've missed millions on I could write a book about failure. I'm still able to live a good life so, why should I care if I have 10M in the bank? You don't need anything, you just need to be content with what you have.

Even if AI plunges the developed world into chaos, you'll still have the chance to escape on some remote mountain and farm goats. It doesn't sound too bad.

Even if we get killed by an AI piloted robot army, did you really have a chance to make a difference? Enjoy not having problems when you're not existing anymore.

Once you're past your FOMO, controlling your screen time should be enough. It's very important especially at night so you don't wreck your sleep.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#147

Post by gandalfgreybeer »

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.

They’re probably not hard and medium problems but if you can take care of these easy and medium problems with chatgpt, that saves so much bandwidth to have time to tackle the fun and “hard” problems.

Also, take a look at the problems and projects simonw actually tackles.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#148

Post by gandalfgreybeer »

selestify wrote: post #36
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 would love to know this too. For me it’s involved too much manual copy-pasting of existing code for context, for it to feel like it’s doing much for me.

For cases like that, copilot (with chat for context) might be more of what you’re looking for. Chatgpt specifically, I’ve been using for very light context / general tasks that I modify. I always consider the trade off between how much time I’m saving by having to write the prompt full of context.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#149

Post by jokethrowaway »

CameronNemo wrote: post #112
obblekk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. Junior engineers will learn much much faster than the past (think about how much more effective GPT4 is as a learning tool than the "rubber ducky method" or manpages or even stackoverflow). And a part of their role will morph into prompting GPT4 (much like this senior engineer has started doing). If GPTx ends up in the narrow area where it's universally smarter than junior engs but definitely not ca…

You think GPT4 is more effective than learning how to read a manual? Or some of the best SO answers?

Yes, mainly because of the work of experts which went into GPT4.

For example, Llama is nowhere close (even if it's pretty good).

You can think of GPT4 as a way to flexibly access a lot of knowledge from domain experts. Sure, sometimes that flexibility hallucinates things, but it mostly works and we can verify a large part of it.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#150

Post by bawolff »

jstx1 wrote: post #142
bawolff wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computers have been putting people out of jobs since back when "computer" was a human job title and not a machine. Its always ended up creating more jobs than it eliminated in the end, i don't see why the future will be any different than the past.

Seems like a logical fallacy to assume that the past extrapolates cleanly into the future. "It was okay last time" isn't a good enough argument.

Well i mean unless someone comes up with a theory why this time is different from last time, then isn't my argument just modus tollens? That's pretty much the opposite of a logical fallacy.

This time may very well be different, but there would have to be some additional factor and nobody has given a compelling answer as to what that might be.

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