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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

#631

Post by krisoft »

wizofaus wrote: post #262
krisoft wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If programmers can be replaced by AI, so can every other white collar job If programmers can be replaced by AI, so can it replace even the blue collar jobs. Because if it can’t that is what this developer here will be working on.

I'm pretty sure the reason human physical labour hasn't been replaced yet in many areas isn't because AI tech hasn't advanced sufficiently - there are real engineering challenges in automating physical interactions with the real world that it's hard to see how ever more advanced LLMs will help much with (though they could certainly assist in the design process). That humans are still needed to cook/assemble burgers o…

> physical labour hasn't been replaced yet in many areas isn't because AI tech hasn't advanced sufficiently

I’m a robotics engineer. There are two options. AI can either replace all jobs or it can’t.

If it can then we are all out of a job, and then the next project is how to organise society such that everyone can live a good and fulfilling life in harmony.

If it can’t, for whatever reason, then that is the next thing I will be personally working on. Simple as that.

Because of this I don’t see how would it be possible to run out of programing jobs before running out of all the other jobs first.

You are talking about ChatGPT, and LLMs, but what i am saying transcends particular technologies.

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

#632

Post by bm-rf »

jghn wrote: post #628
gavinray wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might also consider buying your son a Github Copilot license, it's $10/mo and I would easily pay $50/mo for the value it provides.

How does it compare to ChatGPT in terms of code quality?

Github Copilot uses a different model than chatgpt, with a tokenizer more fit for code rather than plain english language.

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

#633

Post by weatherlite »

antupis wrote: post #553
josephg wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that’s true?

if GPT or copilot make developer 5-50x more productive then you need just 2 good programmers instead of team of 10-100 person, so out of window goes all formalized agile processes, safes etc so you don't need anymore those managers who are doing communicating, process planning and other big business stuff. Of course this will also affect for developers but I bet less because there is huge need for software developers…

I don't disagree we just don't know yet. I do think these 2 guys will be overworked as f** and constantly context switching to the point they barely know what they're doing anymore...hope we don't get there.

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

#634

Post by rabuse »

jghn wrote: post #628
gavinray wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might also consider buying your son a Github Copilot license, it's $10/mo and I would easily pay $50/mo for the value it provides.

How does it compare to ChatGPT in terms of code quality?

It's a substantial improvement when actually coding on the fly, since copilot will also analyze code in your codebase. It just makes coding the BS parts less tedious.

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

#635

Post by windexh8er »

irrational wrote: post #618
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language. This. I started programming in Machine Code, where the "editor" was a pad of graph paper. I've watched management- and business-focused people sneer at us geeks for my entire career, and watched them drool over the thought of finally getting rid of us. Hasn't happened yet. > I'd be surprised if the next st…

> If your managers could specify what they need in a manner that no-code tools, or now AI, can generate the code they want, they will have to be extremely exact in their language. So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language. This is also one of the main reasons why all programming jobs were not outsourced to India.

Couldn't agree more with this sentiment. And to expand on it - the great outsourcing events we saw in the mid-2000s didn't work out for many of the things outside of programming: IT consulting in general, support and operations, call centers and things like design and architecture. The barrier was not always technical, but often a misunderstanding of how BaU works in the vs offshore and/or what the ask/expectations were. There's a lot of waste that happens when needing to be overly explicit and still having the message misinterpreted, interpreted too literally or simply failure to understand.

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

#636

Post by nilsbunger »

In 2003, I had a vigorous debate with someone advising their nephews not to go into CS because outsourcing to India would commoditize it.

I don’t know if the AI stuff will play out similarly, there are some differences.

But it seems to me there is an infinite amount of software to build, and when we increase the productivity of software development, we just build fancier software, faster.

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

#637

Post by lordnacho »

jghn wrote: post #628
gavinray wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might also consider buying your son a Github Copilot license, it's $10/mo and I would easily pay $50/mo for the value it provides.

How does it compare to ChatGPT in terms of code quality?

I think you get copilot because you don't end up having to cut and paste stuff into a browser.

Have to say I'm very happy with copilot, it's definitely worth the 10 bucks a month.

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

#638

Post by cloudking »

osigurdson wrote: post #600

I’m personally experiencing a bit of a honeymoon-over moment with ChatGPT (even 4). It seems to be better in the exploratory phase of a project - show me something about x or y. However, I thought / hoped it would be better at doing things that I know how to do but don’t feel like writing them or using a library (which then becomes a curation problem) since they should be I really struggled with it for example to wri…

What prompts did you try? This would be a good challenge for folks in the thread

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

#639

Post by MartijnHols »

weatherlite wrote: post #621
linsomniac wrote: post #584

30 years ago I got tired of writing the same code over and over, so I went looking for something to cut out the repetition. Around a decade later I got tired of rewriting libraries or programs to make them exactly fit my needs. I used to really enjoy just coding for the sake of coding. But I started to value my time much more. I called this phase "losing my immortality". Any code that ChatGPT can write, I don't want…

How many people doing this job do we need compared to the tens of millions of people building programs by hand we have today?

How many companies will want new or bigger apps that they can finally afford if it requires fewer developers?

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

#640

Post by pessimizer »

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #199
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…

I am actually finding amusing that managers will generate 100k lines project with AI and then will start figuring out that it does not work as they want to. Then they figured out actual developers are needed to fix it, either in a very strict way telling AI what should happen (i.e. higher level programming) or directly fixing code generated by AI.

I know a small financial agency in the 00's that laid off their one-person IT department because they thought the computers would run themselves. It's honestly great that they're overselling AI, lots of messes to clean up.

edit: Ultimately there are going to be iterative pipelines with traditional programmers in the loop rearranging things and reprompting. Math skills are going to be deemphasized a bit and domain skill value increased a bit. Also, I think there's going to be a rise in static analysis along with the new safe languages, giving us more tools to safely evaluate and clean up output.

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