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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

#691

Post by RivieraKid »

mdorazio wrote: post #441
RivieraKid wrote: post #283

Here's my current thinking on the impact of GPT-4 on the developer job market: - I expect developer productivity to go up 1.5x - 15x over the next several years assuming GTP-4 based tooling is integrated into IDEs. - There will be two opposing forces acting on developer wages. First, developers will be more productive, therefore the price of one hour of work should go up. But - the supply of developer output will inc…

I think you have two common misconceptions here. 1) Wages have very little to do with value/productivity in a free market. They are almost entirely determined by supply and demand. Value simply places a ceiling on compensation. Thus, if far more people can perform a "programming" job because of GPT-X, unless the demand for those jobs rises significantly the net result will be wage reduction. 2) There's this weird thi…

1) Economic theory says that marginal product of labor (value) is equal to wages, at least in simple models.

2) With GPT-4 you still need to know how to program. A product manager can't replace you.

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

#692

Post by horns4lyfe »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #444
gumballindie wrote: post #12

Just avoid careers in software development. These are not high paying, if you factor in total time invested and spent working; and you have to waste your life away sitting in an office chasing tickets. Nothing engineery about it. It’s modern day assembly line work.

Not to mention how it destroys your ability to date. Women don't like STEMlords. Watch a girl's face at a bar when she asks you how much you make, and watch as you follow up, say the 6 figure+ amount, and then watch the exact moment that you mention you code. Coding is an "ick" for an awful lot of people. I don't blame them. I gave up on an awful lot of social skills so that I could escape the worst of capitalist exp…

Does this happen often? If your first response to a woman asking that question is a direct answer, you lost already. And if she demands a direct answer you should run away.

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

#693

Post by _gmax0 »

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…

Great points.

To reach the point where no-code is a no-brainer further implies inflexibility in the capabilities of applications and moreover, fungibility in their fundamental uses. The question to ask is are the upper layers of abstraction reducible to what's analogous to the outputs of a parse tree.

If we reach this point where creativity and actual innovation is lost and we're all simply attempting to make the next 'facebook for dogs', I anticipate my future personal career switch to starring in geriatric pornographic films.

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

#694

Post by weatherlite »

latency-guy2 wrote: post #682
lucidlive wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling yourself a polymath is akin to calling your self a genius.

There's nothing wrong with being confident with your skills. Humbleness is only seen as a virtue because people have an ego and don't like to be reminded that they are unskilled.

Let me guess, not doing great socially?

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

#695

Post by steve_adams_86 »

I think we’re well within an era in which AI is only truly useful to people who know what they need the AI to do, and that is still an incredibly limited subset of the population. For that reason alone, learning to code isn’t a waste of time; you need to do it so you can tell an AI how to, or catch when it does it wrong. You won’t get far without that ability. You should even go deep into debugging and testing trenches because we'll still need an excellent grasp on how to do that properly for as long as I can imagine. AIs will make mistakes, and we will continue to as well.

I made ChatGPT generate some genuinely useful boilerplate for the Connect library by Buf, and that was totally neat, but I had to know which part of the documentation to prompt GPT with, which language to ask for, how the existing server and routing worked, the shape of the data I was working with, to specify what would be streaming and what wouldn’t, etc. I had to coerce it to make several corrections along the way, and actually hooking it all up and running it required a lot of knowledge and some mental/keyboard labour to get something running.

It worked and I’m stoked that I managed to make it useful, but that’s just it; I had to prime the system and adjust it along the way just so, otherwise it wouldn’t have been useful.

As Carmack suggests, this could be a perfectly useful tool, but what matters in the end is 1. Did it save time and 2. Did it deliver something better than or equivalent to what I could have done alone.

If it doesn’t satisfy at least both of those it’s not really relevant yet. And we’re very far from AI accomplishing that without significant assistance.

My takeaway is that as software devs we should learn to use these systems, we should try to leverage them to save time and improve quality, but I agree completely that in the end it only matters how much it improves the end result and how long it takes to deliver it. For that reason we still need to code well, we still need to understand our systems and tools well — that won’t change much. In fact, understanding how your AI works is an important aspect of understanding your tooling, and as such, knowing what you’re teaching it will require a great understanding of it as well as the subject matter.

I do think a certain class of development work could be mostly eliminated by tooling based on AI. Not the entire industry, though, and not in 10-15 years. Even so, I worry about the people essentially regurgitating code which text-based AIs will rapidly become capable of reproducing at massive scales. They will need to skill up.

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

#696

Post by carapace »

lumb63 wrote: post #678
carapace wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It's pretty obvious that any software that can be written by machine should be. (It's almost tautological, eh?) Otherwise you're doing what David Graeber famously called "Bullshit Jobs": pointless work that only serves to establish your position in the economic structure. The immediate issues are: who decides the boundaries of (publicly) acceptable thought -and- who profits? I think you touch on the deeper and…

“Can answer” is doing a lot of work, too. I can write you a program that “can answer“ any question you throw at it. I can assure you the answer won’t be correct in most cases. This is a hyperbole for ChatGPT, but my point is that designing a system that can answer correctly, rather than can answer, is a far more worthwhile effort than retooling humans to be lie detectors, IMO. We can see from how hard it is to find c…

> designing a system that can answer correctly

I think the solution is obvious: connect the computers to empirical feedback devices and make them scientists. Humans hallucinate too if they spend too much time in a sensory deprivation tank. Give the computers sensory inputs and they will naturally become scientists.

> find consensus on trivial topics (are eggs good for you?) amongst experts who study these matters day after day

Leaving aside the question of how reliable current soft science really are, this is exactly the problem that these machines can help with, once they have the data. Consider the modified form of the question: Are eggs good for me? At this stage in my life? At this time of day? Given what I ate for dinner last night? And millions of intricate details about my medical history, and my family, and DNA, and "exposome", etc. (I worked very briefly for a medical sensing startup, our chief Doctor would wax lyrical about the possibilities for personalized medicine and nutrition-- once we have the data.)

> the public, who does not [study these matters], is left confused

To some extent, being able to do things without understanding how they are carried out "under the hood" is a measure of the advancement of civilization, eh? (But please don't mistake me as arguing in favor of ignorance!)

> when there is no rationalization for answers given.

We can ask the computers to show their reasoning (soon, if not now), we can ask them to summarize the current state of knowledge, including the grey areas and disputes, eh?

> How many people ... are stuck ...

I think it's clear that these machines will rapidly become perfect salesmen and perfect therapists. It's less clear to me what we will do with that.

> We are very poorly equipped to be vetting answers from a fallible machine.

I don't think the machines will be fallible once we connect them to sensory systems, but I do think that lots of people will try to do silly "Dr. Evil" things like try to mass-program their subjects/citizens. And I think lots of people will let them raise their children, that will probably have mixed results.

> I’d rather we learn how to solve the more complex problems so that we can do it and understand it rather than take guesses at which of a number of generated options is correct.

Selecting from the options the computer generates is the only complex problem left, see "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223 by Douglas C. Engelbart, October 1962 https://dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

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

#697

Post by Jupe »

qsort wrote: post #575
Jupe wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fair enough - assuming steady state, but the acceleration is the curve I'm most curious about.

The point I was alluding to above was that the prompts themselves will be recursively mined over time. Eventually, except for truly novel problems, the AI interpretation of the prompts will become more along the lines of "that's what I wanted".

Some things to think about: What happens when an entire company's slack history is mined in this fashion? Or email history? Or GIT commit history, with corresponding links to Jira tickets? Or the corporate wiki? There are, I'd guess, hundreds of thousands to millions of project charter documents to be mined; all locked behind an "intranet" - but at some point, businesses will be motivated to, at the least, explore the "what if" implications.

Given enough data to feed upon, and some additional code/logic/extensions to the current state of the art, I think every knowledge worker should consider the impact of this technology.

I'm not advocating for it (to be honest, it scares the hell out of me) - but this is where I see the overall trend heading.

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

#698

Post by ReptileMan »

jfvinueza wrote: post #394
joenot443 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty funny example because if you follow the DJ scene much, you know the barrier for entry is literally on the floor now. A 10 year old with an iPad app can beat-match and “DJ” a 2h mix together in a way that 20 years ago required thousands of dollars of gear. The tragic part is that unless someone’s got some familiarity with what “good” mixing sounds like, they wouldn’t be able to tell they’re listening…

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.

We found shortcuts to writing poems in Shakespearian style ...

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

#699

Post by grugagag »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #663
admissionsguy wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PhD students and postdocs are mostly fungible, though. PIs are not, if only by the virtue of their position in the system. The same reason why menial workers earn so little relative to how hard they work. It would appear that both credit and money flow to those who enable things to happen rather than those who execute.

Interestingly, that's probably another area where a language model could be put into service. Consider, every workman with access to say GPT-6 now has an expert lawyer, MBA, secretary, manager, etc. at his beck and call. What happens when every individual can navigate the system as well as an entire team of professionals? I'm imagining headless corporations where the only humans involved are those engaged in physical…

That sounds like a playfield leveller but most likely won’t happen. But it surely would be nice

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

#700

Post by 88913527 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #521
mdorazio wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have two common misconceptions here. 1) Wages have very little to do with value/productivity in a free market. They are almost entirely determined by supply and demand. Value simply places a ceiling on compensation. Thus, if far more people can perform a "programming" job because of GPT-X, unless the demand for those jobs rises significantly the net result will be wage reduction. 2) There's this weird thi…

The developer can prompt for a solution with specific storage/performance requirements by specifying an algorithm, and specific scalability requirements using by specifying an architecture. Imagine a business analyst prompting for an app, and getting a ruby on rails monolith with O(N^2) performance for the core behavior for a service that is expected to have millions of requests daily.

The follow-on prompts would be to refactor the existing system to solve the scalability issues. You'd need to be able to feed in the existing codebase for that, though.
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