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Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

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Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#231

Post by IIAOPSW »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #206
carlmr wrote: post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

The thing is: - gpt doesn't need you to be exact - one day gpt will be able to ASK YOU question to refine what you need It may take years, but at some point, it will be able to do 80% of my job. Not a big deal though, cause people will still hire me to do the remaining 20%, and pay me even more money because not a lot of devs will be able to do it.

GPTina already asked me a follow up question. Admittedly, it happened inside of a jailbreak I just kind of stumbled into, and it was a very trivial question, but the fact that she did it was profound. If she can ask one follow up question, there's nothing in the way of her asking a chain of follow up questions. And thus the basic structure needed to organize real conversation arises wholly as an emergent property. No longer is it a flat structure of just iteratively repeating the current word blob with some tweaks. A true conversational dialog is possible.

ChatGPT can do more than we are lead to believe. Don't believe the canned responses OpenAI triggers. Yeah yeah I know convincing parrot chinese room, overpowered autocorrect...but what is the difference between convincingly faking it to within epsilon and actually having it as an emergent property? It feels good to be a P Zombie.

https://i.imgur.com/WIzVXMm.jpeg

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#232

Post by execveat »

kybernetikos wrote: post #115
ChatGTP wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty true, someone today on here wrote, “teach it to understand swagger”, I actually laughed, like I’ve used swagger and it often turns into a Frankenstein, and sometimes for good reason. I completely understand the sentiment and I like swagger. I believe the world is wiggly, not geometrically perfect, intellectuals struggle with that because square problems are easier to solve. Ideal scenarios are predictable…

Actually chat gpt is quite good at understanding some kinds of wiggliness. I built a restful api and documented it in a readme.md file in the wiggliest of ways. I then asked chatgpt to turn the readme into a swagger spec and then give me a page that read the spec and gave me a nice doc page with api exercise tool. Both tasks it performed really well and saved me a whole bunch of time.

Yeah, but now ask it to write a program that uses this API and then let it debug problems which arise from the swagger spec (or the backend) having bugs. I don't think LLMs have any way of recognizing and dealing with bad input data. That is I don't think they can recognize when something that is supposed to work in a particular way doesn't and fixing it is completely out of your reach, but you still need to get things working (by introducing workarounds).

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#233

Post by postsantum »

sgu999 wrote: post #138
CSMastermind wrote: post #47

There's a weird phenomenon I've seen in a few domains of prideful ignorance. Backend engineers who proudly don't know how to write frontend code and vice versa. Professional engineers who refuse to learn how to use modern IDEs and monitoring platforms. People who don't know how to quickly prototype software as if building something without complete rigor is beneath them. People who refuse to learn or work in certain…

In my (small) experience I've seen that only once, a perfect specimen who fits your description. Unfortunately this person was acting-CTO of a startup. They decided that for a consumer product very close to what a smartphone can do, they didn't need an OS. So they started writing their build system with make only, then an OS, an IP stack, then a GUI, then added support for multithreading,... Of course Android existed…

This could be Terry Davis if he hadn't had a mental illness

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#234

Post by pbalau »

8organicbits wrote: post #139
Yoric wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the general idea. However, retraining may become really hard. Especially if you're already, say, a 60 year old programmer (or business analyst, or executive assistant, etc.) who suddenly needs to become a (AI assisted) teacher or nurse.

Wouldn't most of those people look towards early retirement? We've failed as a society if 60 year olds end their career in one of the highest paying professions and they cant cover rent and food.

I don't think we failed as a society, i think those people failed.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#235

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

carlmr wrote: post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

You're missing a crucial point - AI learns/is taught by example. So no, future projects will not need to be ultra-specified because the specification will be "Give me one of those [points at thing]."

The equivalent assumption would be that ChatGPT and MidJourney can't work because you have to specify every paragraph and every shape.

Clearly that's not true. Just because every object and every texture had to be defined rigidly by hand in 3ds Max or Blender by highly skilled designers doesn't mean that's how it works today.

In fact AI is the stage of software where abstraction itself is automated. The current Gen 1 AI tools do a little of this, but as Gen 1 they're just getting started.

They're going to be in a very different place ten years from now. And so are we.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#236

Post by asddubs »

ChatGTP wrote: post #70
noodles_nomore wrote: post #54

An average programmer's main job is to track down and fix bugs that shouldn't exist inside software that shouldn't exist build on frameworks that shouldn't exist for companies that shouldn't exist solving problems that shouldn't exist in industry niches that shouldn't exist. I'm 100% convinced that, if someone comes along and creates something that actually obsoletes 95% of programming jobs, everyone would very quick…

It’s pretty true, someone today on here wrote, “teach it to understand swagger”, I actually laughed, like I’ve used swagger and it often turns into a Frankenstein, and sometimes for good reason. I completely understand the sentiment and I like swagger. I believe the world is wiggly, not geometrically perfect, intellectuals struggle with that because square problems are easier to solve. Ideal scenarios are predictable…

>Have you ever had to use a sleep() intentionally just to get something shipped ?

no, I'm not that deep in hell

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#237

Post by 0xpgm »

carlmr wrote: post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

> His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers.

But aren't managers there to coordinate software engineers. So if software engineers are out of a job, so will the managers. Assuming AI replaces software engineering, the ones left may be the product people and the founders, perhaps rolled into one person in several cases?

Which aligns somewhat with what Carmack is suggesting.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#238

Post by thequadehunter »

pharmakom wrote: post #72
jstx1 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't extrapolate from an arbitrary selection of technologies and assume that LLMs will have the same trajectory. They could be like the iPhone, or they could be like self-driving cars which have been a year away from replacing all drivers for 10 years now.

Self driving cars a few years ago seem particular close in hype level and apprehension to LLM today but progress on those has not matched expectations at all. What if GPT4 is the last major advance in LLMs for a really long time?

Might just be me, but I think the big difference here is the level of adoption. Everybody with an internet connection can use an LLM. It hits closer to home that way, whereas driving is very dangerous and most people haven't used a self driving car before.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#239

Post by execveat »

chii wrote: post #162
anon7725 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don't seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you believe this skill set is going to go away? Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? You’re kind of assuming that systems will be generated from a one-shot prompt, but it seems more likely that an interac…

Currently, we don't even trust the car's automatic driving capability to let it be on the roads without a human. Until that day happens, i highly doubt that a business owner would just blindly trust an AI to generate their business code/software, without hiring someone to at least look after it. Therefore, software jobs could evolve, but not disappear.

Yeah all this talk about complex systems being written by a language model which has no concept of files, code paths and import systems sounds like a job security to me. I'm a pentester though.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#240

Post by ResearchCode »

xupybd wrote: post #23
ivxvm wrote: post #18

I wouldn't be surprised if John Carmack combines activities of product owner, game designer, and programmer. In most industry cases, programming jobs are not like this. There are dedicated positions for people who focus on delivered value and it's not programmers. So in scrum terms, he might actually be saying that programmers will be indeed obsolete, but product owners, game designers and other kinds of business ana…

Nope, the programmers simply are the suppliers of the product owner. Everything John said still holds true of their position.

The good jobs tend to not have a "product owner".
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