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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

#701

Post by jt2190 »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #381

As a self-taught polymath, I did a lot of research many years ago on how good teams create good products. I reached some unusual conclusions at the time, but they've stood the test of time. The main one in regards to John's tweet is this: desired behavior has to "force" out code and architecture. Typically teams and individual developers carry a lot of presumptions and assumptions into their solution space. They prob…

Can you clarify? Are the “things you do but don’t really think about” good, like good habits that have become ingrained, or bad because they’ve become mindless rote that are often unnecessary action?

(“Force me to write code” suggests that we’re looking to think deeply about what we’re doing and trying to minimize unnecessary action, so the rote actions are bad.)

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

#702

Post by myshpa »

naasking wrote: post #482
josephg wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that’s true?

Tell ChatGPT it's a product manager overseeing engineers and providing executive summaries. Create a system that feeds executive emails inquiring about project statuses into ChatGPT and emails the developers asking for updates. Developers reply with jargon-heavy details about tickets for next milestone, ChatGPT writes an executive summary that eliminates jargon and sends to executives. Not the full job, but it can pr…

And no emails are even necessary (it can scan all internal systems and repositories instead).

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

#703

Post by qsort »

Jupe wrote: post #697
qsort wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is the doomsday scenario again, though.

In a world where we have the technology to go from two lines of prompt in a textbox to a complete app, no questions asked, then the same technology can run the entire company. It's kind of hard to believe transformers models are capable of this, given we are already starting to see diminishing returns, but if that's what you believe they are, then you believe they can effectively do anything. It's the old concept of AI-complete.

If you need to formally specify behavior, at any point in the pipeline, then we're back to square one: you just invented a programming language, and a very bad one at that.

This remains true for any version of a language model, even an hypothetical future LLM that has "solved" natural language. I would not rather write natural language than formal language given the chance.

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

#704

Post by nico »

aws_ls wrote: post #544
nico wrote: post #531

When I was a little kid I asked my dad, an engineer, to teach me computer programming. He refused saying that when I grew up programmers would be unnecessary because “anyone would be able to program”, essentially the interfaces would be so easy/advanced that there wouldn’t be a need for programmers. As a kid I never really understood his point. When I finally understood, I dismissed it as extreme. Now I’m realizing m…

Just curious, so do you know how to program or not?

Hahah, of course I went against my dad’s advice. No I’m wondering if it was the right move.

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

#705

Post by wizofaus »

uh_uh wrote: post #495
wizofaus wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that the AI is even generating anything that will make sense to a human. It seems inevitable we'll reach the point that for SaaS the AI will do everything directly based some internal model it has of what it believes the requirements are (e.g. it will be capable of acting just like a live web server), whereas for desktop and mobile apps, while that paradigm still remains relevant, it will generate the…

> You're assuming that the AI is even generating anything that will make sense to a human. Why wouldn't it? It's trained on code generated by humans and already generates code that is more readable than the output of many humans me included.

But why would anyone bother with using AI to generate human readable code if the AI can generate the final desired behavior directly, either on-the-fly or as executable machine code?

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

#706

Post by sys_64738 »

Companies hate any skills set that can hold them hostage in the long run. Today that is the need for programming skills which is why salaries are so high. But the moment that a replacement for most programmers occurs, whether automation, AI, or zero code needed, employers will dump programmers before they can compile their last line of code successfully. In essence, this is the golden age for programming and the cliff could be just over the horizon.

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

#707

Post by wizofaus »

omnicognate wrote: post #447
wizofaus wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that the AI is even generating anything that will make sense to a human. It seems inevitable we'll reach the point that for SaaS the AI will do everything directly based some internal model it has of what it believes the requirements are (e.g. it will be capable of acting just like a live web server), whereas for desktop and mobile apps, while that paradigm still remains relevant, it will generate the…

Are you arguing that LLMs already provide the technology to do this or are you arguing that it "seems inevitable" to you in the sense that somebody might think it "seems inevitable" that humans will some day travel to the stars, despite doing so requiring technological capabilities significantly beyond what we have yet developed?

It doesn't strike me as being much of a leap from what we have already, certainly not compared with traveling to the stars.

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

#708

Post by selimthegrim »

boppo1 wrote: post #505
ricksunny wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One of the biggest differences that we saw from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 was this emergent ability to reason better," Mira Murati, OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer, told ABC News." https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-ai-r... I neither know how LLMs work nor how our brains work. And I don't know what could be parallel between these two. For my very very limited knowledge of how properties can emerge from…

Just because the guy said it doesn't make it true. "Emergent reasoning" is a great marketing hype-term that contains no technical specifications, like 'retina display'.

Murati is a she

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

#709

Post by sys_64738 »

DanHulton wrote: post #580
ryandrake wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 experie…

I have an MBA and a CS degree so responses like this make me chuckle. I generally don't bother to engage with those with an MBA-phobia who haven't done it themselves.

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

#710

Post by asah »

alphadog wrote: post #609
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.…

What prompts are they finding useful for creating SQL statements?

I tell it that I'm using and give it the relevant DDL statements (e.g. CREATE TABLE, etc) then ask it to write the query to do in plain English. It does surprisingly well.

But!!! the first response is rarely dead-on and instead, just like a junior eng I need to guide it: use (or don't use) SQL construct , make sure to use index , etc.

Example: to sum the values in a JSONB field, GPT desperately wanted to use a lateral join but that would have made for a very awkward set of VIEWs. So instead I directed it to create a function to perform the summation.

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