191–200 of 205 posts
> 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…
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>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…
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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.
> 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. History isn't math, dude. This time is always different from last time. The fallacy is making the claim that it's the same (conveniently ignoring all the differences that make it different). Another mistake is taking an aloof pe…
If someone wants to bring up some of those differences by all means. The reason i am unconvinced is because nobody ever does.
> Another mistake is taking an aloof perspective. A lot of changes that "turned out OK" from that perspective were pretty terrible for the people who actually had to live through them.
Sure, i'd agree. But this is moving goal posts quite a bit. If the claim was simply that some industries might experience some levels of short term disruption due to an emerging technology like AI and it will probably suck for the individuals being disrupted - I don't think anybody would disagree. It also wouldn't make AI exactly unique - short term disruptions in various industries due to changing conditions happen all the time.
I'm a software engineer and I don't find much value in ChatGPT. It provides a bit of help when writing very specific and short pieces of code for languages I know but don't use often. I'd be curious to have actual data on how other SWEs use it.
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> 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. History isn't math, dude. This time is always different from last time. The fallacy is making the claim that it's the same (conveniently ignoring all the differences that make it different). Another mistake is taking an aloof pe…
> (conveniently ignoring all the differences that make it different) If someone wants to bring up some of those differences by all means. The reason i am unconvinced is because nobody ever does. > Another mistake is taking an aloof perspective. A lot of changes that "turned out OK" from that perspective were pretty terrible for the people who actually had to live through them. Sure, i'd agree. But this is moving goal…
And then the automobile was invented. And over the next few decades the demand for horse labor tanked. Now the demand for horse labor is a tiny fraction of what it was a century ago.
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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.
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sorry but these examples are not impressive at all and by no means a representative of any serious programmer's workload. Programmers are paid not to bang out code, but rather to figure out the mess and crap of the existing codebase and how to selectively add one-two lines to change system's behavior and keep stability of the system.
Part of the trick of making the most of LLMs is figuring out what kind of things to apply them to. I wouldn't expect much from them for figuring out gnarly changes in huge existing codebases (at least not yet). But they've been actively encouraging me to write smaller, tighter tools - the good old Unix philosophy - for which they are extremely well suited.
Our existing tooling and helpers lack modularity to begin with. I'm now thinking it would be a better approach to start with having it build smaller tools and patch them together in more useful and interesting ways myself as opposed to being upset that it can't deliver complex, context aware solutions.
Still not buying into the hype that LLMs will replace all software engineers by 2030 due to thinking the nature of our work is not to write code but to solve problems, regardless of the tools we are using, but I definitely see potential productivity gains from using the tool with a different approach to what I have previously attempted.
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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 m…
The discussion was specifically about LLMs to write software. Not about university essays or articles or exams. Are you claiming GPT3.5 is better at writing bug-free software than the average software engineer?