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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

#571

Post by lolinder »

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…

Agreed. A programmer's job is to become intimately familiar with a particular domain and encode its rules and processes.

This means that an AI capable of completely replacing programmers is by definition an artificial general intelligence. I don't think we're at that point and I don't think we will be for a long time, but if we were there would be no point in worrying about our own joblessness. AGI would spell the end of the economy as we know it today, and it would be very hard to predict and prepare for what comes next.

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

#572

Post by Zetice »

asah wrote: post #465

First off, there's a lot of people shooting off their mouths - ignore anyone who hasn't used ChatGPT extensively: it takes some training to learn to use it. Several senior developer friends have been using ChatGPT quite a bit and it seems to work well in lots of places: - isolated algorithms and fiddly bits - it writes complex SQL statements in seconds, for example. LLMs should makes quick work of fussy config files.…

Sorry but no, ChatGPT can only do some very specific and specialized tasks, it doesn’t save meaningful time. It’s a tool in the toolbox, but it’s not a game changing tool; just one more thing to reach for when you need a complex transformation, or when you need to unblock yourself.

Zero developers will lose their jobs due to LLMs. That’s just yet more needless hype and expectation.

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

#574

Post by ilaksh »

execveat wrote: post #541
sebzim4500 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried it? If you copy the errors back into the chat I could imagine it working quite well. Certainly you can give it contradictory instructions and it makes a decent effort at following them.

Yes, I'm subscribed to poe.com and am playing with all public models. They all suck at debugging issues with no known answers (I'm talking about typical problems every software developer, DevOps or infosec person solves every day). You need a real ability to reason and preserve context beyond inherent context window somehow (we humans do it by keeping notes, writing emails, and filing JIRA tickets). So while this doe…

If you think that the average public LLM is equivalent to ChatGPT or GPT-4 then you are completely mistaken. By a factor of say 500-10000%.

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

#575

Post by qsort »

Jupe wrote: post #534
qsort wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? This is the doomsday argument. What would I do if there's a nuclear apocalypse before lunch? I guess I'll die like everyone else. An AI sufficiently advanced to do that is also sufficiently advanced to run the entire business in the first place, and also argue cases in court, do my taxes, run for president and so on.…

Isn't the "Chat" part of ChatGPT already doing something close to this? I mean the clarification comes from the end-user, not from the AI, but with enough of this stuff to feed upon, perhaps AIs could "get there" at some point? For example, this guy was able to do some amazing stuff with ChatGPT. He even managed to get a (mostly working) GPU-accelerated version of his little sample "race" problem. See: https://youtu.…

> Isn't the "Chat" part of ChatGPT already doing something close to this?

No, the amount of handholding you have to do to get it to work effectively presumes you already know how to solve the problem in the first place.

The best way to use it is the opposite everyone is busy selling: as a linter of sorts that puts blue squiggles below my code saying stuff like "hey stupid human, you're leaking memory here", or even "you're using snake case, the project uses camel case, fix that".

That would actually lower my cognitive load and be an effective copilot.

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

#576

Post by 6510 »

josephg wrote: post #419
Simran-B wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until managers realize that their jobs are a lot easier to automate away with AI than the jobs of software developers.

What makes you think that’s true?

I learn in a different topic on HN that with a sophisticated chat bot lurkers dare ask support questions. As many developers I've often asked people how to do things. Before asking I try to find answers in google (as asking questions easily googled is lame) but if the chat channel is busy and I've already asked for help in the last 30 minutes I do more google searches. Each next question feels more expensive. Technically I apparently prefer to ask google first. If there is a chat bot fit for the question I should logically go "bother" that before asking humans for help.

Asking a human manager for anything is many orders of magnitude more frightening. It's not that I don't have questions! I have many, of which a lot are dumb questions, questions that I should be able to figure out without help.

Say i'm pondering taking a day off, with the human I would make up my mind, pick the day and ask for the day off. With a bot I would ask which day would be ideal before making up my mind. A human manager would think you've gone insane if you asked 20 such questions. You either want a day off, you don't or you say nothing.

I might like a different brand of coffee while we are trying to meet the deadline. I'm sure that question is going to go down well with an overworked human manager.

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

#578

Post by 6510 »

ryandrake wrote: post #558
jtwebman wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a project managers job not a engineering managers job.

OP said “product manager” which is also wrong. Funny how these three very different roles constantly get mixed up by smart engineers.

It would make things a lot easier if it was all one big AI. Lets refer to it as The company.

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

#579

Post by ilaksh »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #221
kybernetikos wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have some meticulous API docs I've written, which I tried to get ChatGPT to convert into swagger It failed spectacularly I wonder if it's because the API is quite large, and I had to paste in ~10 messages worth of API docs before I was finished. It kept repeating segments of the same routes/paths and wasn't able to provide anything cohesive or useful to me. Was your API pretty small? Or were your docs pretty concis…

It can accept about 4k tokens, maybe 3000 words or 3500.

GPT-4 can now accept 8k or 32k. The 32k version is 8 times larger than the one you tried.

And these advances have come in a matter of a few months.

Over the next several years we should expect at least one, quite easily two or more orders of magnitude improvements.

I don't believe that this stuff can necessarily get a million times smarter. But 10 times? 100? In a few months the memory increased by a factor of 8.

Pretty quickly we are going to get to the point where we have to question the wisdom of every advanced primate having a platoon of supergeniuses at their disposal.

Probably as soon as the hardware scales out, or we get large scale memristor systems or whatever the next thing is which will be 1000 times more performant and efficient. Without exaggeration. Within about 10 years.

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

#580

Post by DanHulton »

ryandrake wrote: post #570
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that truly fair though. I have no exposure to MBAs and it may be all the negative talk about them is based on the conspicuously bad ones. I'm speaking as an IT person with very little experience of running a business, and it may be that a good MBA could be a great asset. I genuinely don't know. I'm reminded of reading about a Lisp machine company that ran into the ground because it was managed by techies. Their te…

MBAs are HN’s favorite punching bags. They are the only stereotype that it’s still ok to blanket-generalize about and dunk on here. Some MBAs are dumbasses. Some are brilliant business people. Some of them actually have tech skills and have been writing software longer than you’ve been alive. This is true for many degrees. I don’t know how some of the anti-MBA commenters think it works: A smart software engineer goes…

Because the promise of the MBA program was that you could be air-dropped into an industry that you had zero experience in, and your MBA education would automatically make you the smartest in the room. You (supposedly) didn't need that industry experience, applying MBA principles would be enough. And it destroyed enough companies that they developed a not-undeserved reputation.

Now, if you already had relevant experience, then went and took the MBA course, and were able to identify when to lean on which, great! But, of course, part of that education is telling you that you don't NEED that experience in the first place, and if it and MBA principles disagreed, you should rely on the MBA principles.

So, if you took the course truly to heart, then, well, yes, you would be somewhat "dumber", so long as you define that as "unable to make correct decisions."

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