Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. There’s a lot of latent ot tacit knowledge about said system that chatgpt can’t ever guess but can bullshit about it a lot, throwing you to nearly endless deadend alleys. But I agree in a sense , for certain scenarios hiding behind complexity will become less and less of a cover.
If the ‘tacit’ knowledge can be discovered in code, docs, email, slack, recorded conversations, etc then LLMs can find it and integrate it in its responses. This makes you easier to replace
Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
151–160 of 183 posts
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a similar moment of existential career crisis as OP. I'm at the 20 year mark as well, in terms of developing software professionally. I've always felt like with new technology, I could grok at a high level how things worked. But LLMs like GPT seem like magic and I went through stages of initial astonishment -> despair realizing the potential impact it would have on the industry -> acceptance. While I still feel…
>> I've always felt like with new technology, I could grok at a high level how things worked. But LLMs like GPT seem like magic This is exactly how I feel. I felt so out of my depth looking at the ML architectures and I could not make any sense of it. I thought perhaps, they get inspired by neuroscience for the layers etc. But a friend who works on LLMs mentioned, the architecture of large ML models, are mostly exper…
If you held a gun to my head and asked me to tell you even at a sky-high architectural level (let alone in any detail) how ChatGPT worked, well... tell my family I love them. This is the first time in my 20+ year career I have felt like some computing thing is total unexplainable black magic.
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#153> I have been already working nearly at a burn-out level for many years ... Rent is sky high ... I don't feel comfortable taking on mortgage ... I am unable to enjoy any content, movie, tv show anymore ...
you are struggling with yourself here, not GPT4.
You're clearly stressed, you say 'near burn out' but being unable to enjoy things that you used to like is straight up depression, you know?
Have you considered seeing a counselor?
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#154The more I use GPT, the less I'm worried. It is a tool, and a good one, but not a replacement for the thought required to design an app that will function, scale, and have good UX to result in a marketable product. So use it and enjoy its benefits while letting it help you perform even better. As far as everything else you've said... oof, you need a break. You seem focused on money and ego. Maybe it is time to simpli…
yep that's where I'm at too. If you hand my boss Chat GPT and Copilot and tell him "okay there you go, make a website" - you're gonna come back the next day to find a mess of completely disconnected chunks of code which maybe kinda sorta work on their own, but haven't been tied together at all into any kind of viable thing. You'd have better luck sitting him down with Squarespace.
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#155Nothing I have seen from ChatGPT has made me worried for my job. If your job is producing 20 line snippets solving variations of common coding tasks, ChatGPT is the least threat to your job security. To be honest the far greater threat to your job is an increase in the ammount of programmers plus an increase in individual productivity, with an industry declining in growth. There is your threat.
> To be honest the far greater threat to your job is an increase in the ammount of programmers plus an increase in individual productivity That productivity increase by a level of magnitude is from AI tools or ChatGpt. The field is gonna get a whole lot more competitive, the salaries will suffer as well but maybe it will be for the better routing jobs to other fields other than programming. What Im worring most is in…
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#156There are a lot of developers in denial here. I write code for scientific applications. I used to hire/contract out some work to other devs. In the last 6 months I haven't needed to hire anybody else, doing so would have been a waste of money. This is 100% because of chatgpt. Many devs are hired by other devs and these people are aware enough to know they don't need you anymore. Other developers have been spoiled by…
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am honestly baffled — what kind of program are you working on that can be AI-programmed? In my experience most CRUD apps are ultra-trivial for the most part in a language with sane ecosystem, you literally just glue together things. That’s one day either with ChatGPT or without - the real benefit are the ecosystem (as per Brooks), that’s not the bottleneck (besides the occasional “this doesn’t work together with th…
I don't want to be too descriptive, but it's not a CRUD app - it's a multi-proc app where each process acts as both a client and server (obviously in separate threads) connected w/ gRPC bindings and has an internal DSL that must be abided to. A communication framework of sorts governed by some very specific rules. Also, why is there some notion it can only do simple things? My understanding is it's trained on a large…
It's still going to be subject to all the constraints of all ML techniques. Namely, it's really only capable of interpolating across its training set, not extrapolating from it. And it's going to fall on it's face whenever the distribution of the input data doesn't mirror the distribution of the training data. If it doesn't have lots of close-enough analogs to what you're trying to do in its training set such that the "right" code is tangibly represented in the distribution, you can feed errors back into it for infinity and it will never give you working code.
This might be controversial, but my belief is that if you find ChatGPT to be really good at doing your work for you, your work is likely closely mirroring a lot of code that exists publicly on the internet. Which would beg the question, is what you're doing not easily handled by just importing an existing library or something? Your application sounds relatively complex/niche, so maybe you are actually still doing a whole lot of higher level engineering and distilling your work down into trivial tasks that the model can handle.
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#158When google turned up (or before) we started to get more productive by being able to look up information and other people's code examples and so on. I couldn't have done my job properly in my whole career without search to help me. Anyone could look up an internet reference and copy some lines of code without being special. Or could download a python library that does what was needed and write almost no code. GPT is…
I've had the opposite experience. Not just google, but StackOverflow. Did these tools make me more "productive" in the immediate sense of closing feature request tickets? Sure, absolutely. But these are all crutches for the mind. I don't know about you, but my capability and skill as a developer has only ever been improved by meeting dead-ends, and doing the cognitively demanding work of actually understanding the sy…
I'm thinking of 2 special cases: 1) you can read manuals and get modules online. I lived in Africa in the days of 2400 modems and information was very hard to get - always in books which I could not buy. Now anyone in the world can get information so there's a way in which that allowed the software industry to expand but fortunately there was huge demand.
2) Bugs which other people have solved before - a particular error message from Anypoint Studio today was because I had run brew and I updated maven without realising it - past the version that Anypoint supports. Searching saved hours of frustration. When this works I think it's a true saving.
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the ‘tacit’ knowledge can be discovered in code, docs, email, slack, recorded conversations, etc then LLMs can find it and integrate it in its responses. This makes you easier to replace
Good luck with that and any hallucinatory tacit knowledge
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#160"...I use ChatGPT on a daily basis to build projects..." Really? What projects? I think its telling that you haven't replied to any of the comments here - is this post just BS? A take that really summed up how I feel about all this hysteria around LLMs and ChatGPT specifically: People are praying to it, treating it like an Oracle. Anything you can dream up, GPT can do. Its exhausting.
I didn’t expect this thread to blow up while I was away for lunch, hence no replies until now. I built 4 projects so far with it. Out of these 3, 1 is clone of an app that has been charging 65usd per year. Other one was rehash/improvement on an existing app that has been selling for 25usd. It took me under a day to build the prototype, a week to deploy/build installer. The only thing left is to actually put them out…