Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 829 posts

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

#641

Post by weatherlite »

anon7725 wrote: post #122
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…

> 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…

> I submit that we may reach a point where the AI is so compelling that we’ll reorganize teams/systems/businesses around it.

Sounds like me get reorganized out of a job though...what does it mean to reorganize everyone around the A.I if it does everything better than us?

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

#642

Post by Gunnerhead »

krsna wrote: post #469
jfvinueza wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "technical" aspect of djing will never be as important as the sense of what song should go next, and there's no shortcut for that.

Truthfully, picking what song goes next feels like a job well suited for an AI, or even just a basic recommendation system based on up and down votes. Of course there's a real time component to DJing as well. Paying attention to the crowd and how they're reacting to your mix. That's the magic that's harder to automate.

[dead]

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

#643

Post by marcosdumay »

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?

If you had an AI capable of writing the code you mean to without errors, the demand for software developers would be even larger than what it is today.

Deciding what problem to solve and how to solve it is hard enough to sustain more than the current population of developers. (But if you had an AI capable of deciding those, then yeah, that would be problem.)

Anyway, the current crop of highly hyped AIs are obviously structurally unable to do either. And it's not clear at all how far any AI is from solving any those (what usually means we are many decades away).

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

#644

Post by joseph8th »

mrits wrote: post #433
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…

What is a modern IDE? It seems like the more recent trend has moved away from bloated IDEs and more to a bring your editor and own plugins environment. From my perspective IDEs lost and things are now closer to how Vim users have been coding for decades.

Emacs. :)

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

#645

Post by cutler »

I predict Clojure and Ruby will experience a renaissance as they are the 2 most expressive languages and furthest removed from the machine. Seriously, though, won't low-level languages like C, C++ and Rust be the first to become obsolete for everything outside AI itself? Isn't it easier for something like ChatGPT to produce code which is close to the metal? Maybe Larry Wall was more of a visionary than we give him credit for when I tried to design a language which was context-driven and as close to English as possible.

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

#646

Post by weatherlite »

MartijnHols wrote: post #639
weatherlite wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's possible everything will speed up, and since the competitors are also speeding up some kinds of arms race on steroids will take place where not only are we all much more productive but we are also not cutting back on workers. I find it hard to believe but I concur it is possible.

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

#647

Post by flir »

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've got both running, and I find GPT4 more useful. Unless I'm using it wrong, Copilot is "better autocomplete" and saves some typing. GPT4 can help you reason about code, and has helpful suggestions about debugging. I'm probably going to bin Copilot.

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

#648

Post by eslaught »

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…

Let me take this even further.

We have systems, today, that take a specification and generate code from it (and will even do so in a provably correct manner). There are scalability issues with such systems, but they exist and have in some form for decades.

None of these systems have taken the world by storm.

If what ChatGPT and their ilk do is make it easier to spew out bulk spaghetti code that is essentially unverifiable, I don't think that's going to transform the industry nearly as much as anyone thinks it will. For boilerplate code, sure—but that's exactly where we should be using better abstractions anyway. For small code which you can verify by hand, sure. But for anything larger than that, we're just watching a trainwreck in slow motion.

Large code bases written by humans are already hard enough to understand. How much more difficult will it be when your AI can spit out a million lines of code in a second?

Without specifications, it's all worthless. But the specifications are the hard part.

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

#649

Post by throwaway4aday »

adnmcq999 wrote: post #626
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…

well that’s weirdly graphic

A long tradition, see footgun.

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

#650

Post by dang »

chrsw wrote: post #500

The title this post makes it seem like John Carmarck is concerned about AI making CS jobs obsolete. But that's not at all what this is. This is someone else asking Carmack about his thoughts on this topic.

Fixed now. Thanks!

(Submitted title was "John Carmack: From a DM, just in case anyone else needs to hear this". A mod changed it to "I’m concerned AI will make CS jobs obsolete" but yeah, that changed the meaning. Sorry!)

Post reply on HN