LLMs are to programmers what calculators are to mathematicians. I think LLMs will augment programming skills, not make them obsolete.
Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
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Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#52> If I pivoted I'd still write code "The old fashioned way" for fun.
This, to me, is all the information you need (even though you are making this statement as an argument for the opposite viewpoint). You are studying an in demand field that you love. That makes it highly likely that it will pay your bills and then some.
The field will change. So will the tools. Possibly interfaces. You might leverage LLMs as your trade tools. They may replace google search for finding answers to well-formed queries the way google search replaced comp.lang.x . But unless humans stop having ideas we will always need human engineers that will transform them into an actual thing.
As a last thought, I would pick a decent knowledge in an adjacent domain that sounds fun (aerospace, biology, chemistry, mechanics, economics, EE, whatever). This will make your core CS skill even more in demand. My 2c.
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#53Is my understanding of GPT's "coding" ability wrong? From what I've seen, GPT isn't architecting systems. It writes code snippets--basically the stuff you can copy/paste off stack overflow. The only difference is now instead of Googling and searching for the code snippet, GPT will sometimes just give it to you. But once you need something unique, or something that's not just one little piece of the puzzle, it can't d…
They’re pretty good if you know what you’re asking and what they’re giving you as a response.
They’re pretty bad if you’re asking them about something you have no idea about.
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#54> I'm interested in physics and engineering, I think I could enjoy a career in either, and I've still got time to pivot to either.
> And yes, there's more to CS than programming, but not in a way that pays the bills
I'm curious what bill paying career you think is readily obtainable with a physics degree.
Moreover, while the GPT/LLM stuff is very exciting, it is coming out of the CS field. If you truly think it's transformative, that shows you the potential of CS and programming and is all the reason to pursue a CS degree.
Stick with CS if you like it—the career prospects aren't going anywhere. However, if you're just trying to get paid, there's always finance.
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#55Is my understanding of GPT's "coding" ability wrong? From what I've seen, GPT isn't architecting systems. It writes code snippets--basically the stuff you can copy/paste off stack overflow. The only difference is now instead of Googling and searching for the code snippet, GPT will sometimes just give it to you. But once you need something unique, or something that's not just one little piece of the puzzle, it can't d…
The thing is... we've only seen a few months of these LLMs. And it is not unknown in the world of software for the early versions to seem laughably primitive a few years later.
LLMs have scraped the internet for their "knowledge". Asking it to go from copying/pasting a code snippet that's more or less found elsewhere on the internet, to architecting a unique system is a massive leap. More breakthroughs are needed before there's any real significant threat to programmer jobs.
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#56Remember AI still cannot prove whether P=NP or not . So folks like Sienna (algorithm design manual) and their way of thinking will still be in high demand. If anything (thankfully?) Jobs where you write yet another crud service fronted by an app may go away so you can actually focus on hard problems instead of wasting prime years on crud problems.
Edit: another thing to remember. To be able write code better than gpt10 you need lot more rigor than going to a coding boot camp so folks like you will be even more valuable!
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#57My prediction is that in 20 years, we’ll have a shortage of programmers. Most of the hype seems to rest on the assumption that LLMs will eventually stop hallucinating falsities. But what if that doesn’t come to fruition?
I subscribe to the law of contrary public opinion: if the man on the street is saying one thing, bet the other way.
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming in the 2010s was nothing like programming in the 2000s, was nothing like programming in the 1990s, was nothing like programming in the 1980s , was nothing like programming in the 1970s... etc.. I personally experienced the paranoia of the "end of programming " when VisuslBasic was first released, and when UML code generation ('member Rational Rose?) Tools arrived. I'm still doing a good living with my pro…
> 'member Rational Rose? oh boy I do. Had a whole course in engineering school on it. Never touched it since. LLMs will just be another programming tool to help us be more productive, at most.
A meager defense of the Rational Rose universe, which I never touched, but kind of liked in principle some of the ideas/aspirational-vibes I was getting from... Having higher-level views & tools that can portray & show the abstractions of computing sound so interesting. Having higher-order control over code sounds so compelling & interesting. In practice it seemed impossible to have a two-way relationship between ideal & real code, but that never seemed like a "real" limitation, like a set-fact, just happenstance that the tools all kind of blew chunks.
Different subject, but in some ways, I think what would flip the bit for me in believing in machine-learned code-working is systems that can do really great refactoring things on instruction. Taking some human instruction & spitting out some html or js doesn't really impress me, to be honest. But if machine learning can take my code, create a builder pattern based off the current constructor, make a config file that allow programmatic defaults, that's a huge time saver of manual labor, not at generating boilerplate, but at helping me shift around what I have. Rational Rose & it's ilk were never particularly great at helping folks refactor systems, but ideologically they suggested that good code had graphical representation & that there was a bi-directional relationship; bringing out that promise doesn't take machine learning, but if machine learning got good at helping juggle code, could open the door to those ideas again, that would be powerful.
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#59Ignore all the hype about LLMs. They will automate a lot of jobs, and become critical to others, but it will be a very long time until there is no need, or even declining need for computer science majors.
It's disruption from below. It radically drops the cost of doing simple/forumlaic things, probably/possibly.
But so far, to me, these are all cool amazing demos, but none of them at all mirror the real challenges of working significant & interesting systems. There's a real chance that means significant job loss. Maybe this is a "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" mistake, and it has some ego to it, but I personally cant imagine wanting to do any of the work these systems have done.
Code tends to be kind of long journeys, iterative, and we've seen from ML what, so far to me, look mostly like boilerplate-generators and modest-tweakers. I cant imagine spending months building product with one, it being a coworker. We're in a new day, but I've been preaching a book that meant so much to me, After the Internet: Alien Intelligence (2001), which is pretty wild & course & miscellaneous & not super gripping, but sold an interesting core message to me of expert intelligences that are in their own realm. That have incredible powers, but which are unintelligble & vast & distant. Right now these coursely trained ML systems have a lot of embedded expertise, but whether they can show up again and again and become a useful ongoing part of workflow, can work with existing systems & ideas, is very much unknown & tbd.
So, yes, I agree:
> it will be a very long time until there is no need, or even declining need for computer science majors.
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#60Your choice should be whatever makes you happy!