81–90 of 163 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bay Area, no: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...
That looks like bi-modal to me.
There is research [1] that suggests using GPS navigation could impact your brain function negatively. I wonder how this code generation “assistant” will impact the coding skills of its users in long term. As for the LLMs, stochastic parroting (hallucination), which is inherent to its design, makes it untrustworthy for precision work. Maybe some other architecture will prove more useful. LLMs can generate BS authorita…
Goddamn do I hate this industry. I work hard to sow dissent in my blue-chip, VC startup though. Guerrilla tactics. And I get to do it raking in a quarter mil a year in my underwear.
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I think it will be more like airline pilots with the addition of autopilot. Maybe you could write whole services, and networks of services with AI, but you need engineers to be the guiding hand. Engineers will always be better at using AI to build systems than non-developers. Also, it’s worth pointing out that AI is using existing data. If a new iOS API comes out, the AI will need code bases with it already implement…
depending on how advanced this AI will be, it could learn from a few samples and the API docs, possibly itself designed to be optimally consumed by AI. If I knew that AI would consume my custom programming language docs then I would make sure that each API is used once in some kind of sample code so it can give answers to everything. Plus, that's a sensible thing to do anyway.
Similar to how JavaScript libs publish a Typescript type def file for people using Typescript.
Chatgpt has been pretty transformative to my programming, probably surpassing the only other thing coming close of really leveraging powerful ides like IntelliJ. It can generate all the scaffolding I need by just inputting a couple of sketches of Plantuml or even just markdown lists. I can build tools, unit tests, test data, fuzz harnesses, admin uis, dashboards, all within a few hours. I can transform a couple of wo…
When I read that kinds of comments I always immediately wonder what people are writing that needs so much scaffolding. And then I remember my workplace's official architecture... that made my team a huge success case by refusing to follow it. Of those things you listed that you use it on, only test data need to take some non-trivial amount of time.
Overall the part of the codebase that is not some kind of scaffolding is like, computing taxes on an order item or something like that. The rest is just shuffling data around and ensuring it is tracked and validated properly.
It’s tempting to be clever and devise a killer tool that allows you to write a single data declaration and derive all the rest but that rarely survives an encounter with the real world.
Chatgpt has been pretty transformative to my programming, probably surpassing the only other thing coming close of really leveraging powerful ides like IntelliJ. It can generate all the scaffolding I need by just inputting a couple of sketches of Plantuml or even just markdown lists. I can build tools, unit tests, test data, fuzz harnesses, admin uis, dashboards, all within a few hours. I can transform a couple of wo…
May I ask how you're getting ChatGPT to be reliable enough as a service to get these results? I had a similar experience the first week, but now most times I try it is overloaded and inaccessible, and when it's not the hourly rate limiter makes it difficult to be very productive.
I think it will be more like airline pilots with the addition of autopilot. Maybe you could write whole services, and networks of services with AI, but you need engineers to be the guiding hand. Engineers will always be better at using AI to build systems than non-developers. Also, it’s worth pointing out that AI is using existing data. If a new iOS API comes out, the AI will need code bases with it already implement…
depending on how advanced this AI will be, it could learn from a few samples and the API docs, possibly itself designed to be optimally consumed by AI. If I knew that AI would consume my custom programming language docs then I would make sure that each API is used once in some kind of sample code so it can give answers to everything. Plus, that's a sensible thing to do anyway.
I'm going to be the optimist here and instead of AI killing engineering jobs it's going to turn most engineers into much better engineers and what tech company doesn't want a whole bunch of better engineers? Building applications right now is time intensive, it takes years to build products, months to build features, and maybe we change it to be weeks and days instead, respectively. Maybe it's all just upside.
Speed of feature is less compelling than quality. There is a saying about EHRs, that they propagate error at the speed of light. Likewise speeding up feature accrual seems as if all the worst ideas will be implemented first as the best ones need time to think through and acculturate. On the other hand, if the models can be Atkinson-like and produce -2000 lines of code [0], that is a day to which I would look forward.…
There is research [1] that suggests using GPS navigation could impact your brain function negatively. I wonder how this code generation “assistant” will impact the coding skills of its users in long term. As for the LLMs, stochastic parroting (hallucination), which is inherent to its design, makes it untrustworthy for precision work. Maybe some other architecture will prove more useful. LLMs can generate BS authorita…
Wrong, that research only shows that when you use a GPS, you don't learn routes as quickly. That is only equal to "impacts brain function negatively" in a narrow sense, which you should specify rather than use such a broad and scary-sounding phrase!
AI/ML will solve some great problems, many that are critical. Similar to how Wix solves your basic webpage for the average person. Does Wix solve anything for your typical enterprise or SAAS app? Even if it did, would these institutions not manage to add a new layer to the layer cake? It's kind of been one of my main critiques of companies like Palantir. You really can't just dump a company's data into the big ML tum…
Sometimes though we shouldn't have the AI write the code first. So many times, I look over things people copy and pasted piece by piece from blogs and stackoverflow, when if they thought about it for 5 minutes, they'd realize a simpler implementation would have worked and been easier to write in the end. AI, if chatgpt is any indication, is moving toward overly flowerly and long prose while telling lies, that is stuf…
BUT. Honestly I just see a lot of code review and refactoring of shitty AI-generated code in my future. And I think people who lean on this heavily are going to struggle to progress... Just like when I get the whiff of code copied verbatim from SO, it's going to put a sour taste in my mouth when I get a series of reviews with a bunch of poorly factored AI generated code.
But maybe it's more likely that old fogeys like me with our backwards beliefs are not long for this world. But I dunno, I haven't yet been replaced by the hordes of actual humans crowdsourcing this on SO, so color me a bit skeptical!