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Post-GPT Computing

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#41

Post by imtringued »

PaulWaldman wrote: post #11

Current higher level programming languages are developed for humans to develop software closer to their natural language. If in the future humans will be writing and debugging little code, these LLMs will naturally evolve to directly writing Assembly. Scary to think about, but also makes me wonder how many non-technical people cope today with the "black box" of a computer. About twenty years ago, I had a professor ex…

I don't understand why it would write in assembly. That is not portable and it makes verification difficult and also assembly has less grammatic structure which LLMs rely upon.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#42

Post by imtringued »

dakial1 wrote: post #4

I don't get some coders/devs/software engineers surprised that LLM can now pretty much create a whole code out of a prompt. Wasn't this the final objective of the programming languages abstraction evolution? From Binary/Assembly to Natural Language Programming? I think it is awesome that more people will be able to create software/products as this accelerates innovation cycles a lot. And, for now, I believe devs that…

I am banging my head against a heisenbug. I wrote the code that works yesterday. I spent a lot of time rewriting it a dozen times. Now I am back to the original and it works for unexplainable reasons. I doubt that a chatbot could have sped this up.

I envy the people who are bottlenecked on their typing speed and benefit 10 times more from the chat bot than I do.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#43

Post by falcor84 »

dopeboy wrote: post #25
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want…

I mean this in the least snarky, most sympathetic way possible: it's time to level up. Countless roles have had to do this, it's now our turn.

This is easy to say, but I would argue that it's impossible to know what to level up in; the field is just moving too quickly now.

At this stage, the best advice I could formulate would be to learn LangChain and prompt engineering, but these too are fast moving targets, and who knows what's going to be relevant in 2024?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#44

Post by edgyquant »

margorczynski wrote: post #29
ChatGTP wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's time to build a business I guess? Others have said exactly what I'm thinking, welcome to the age of the micro-startup, 1-3 engineers, designers, product mangers building some very cool, albeit niche products.

And what that business will be worth when any random guy can create an identical one using a LLM? You remove the scarcity and the value plummets.

Any random guy can copy just about any startup already. It’s the domain expertise and insight into a potential market that builds companies not a few engineers throwing together a react app

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#45

Post by muffles »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #19
DethNinja wrote: post #14

I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It wil…

> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want…

> We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work.

Yikes. Productive work is not just a way to earn a living but also a way to achieve personal fulfillment and happiness. It's a means of creating value and contributing to society. A person who works just for the salary and does not find any meaning in his work is not living up to his full potential.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#46

Post by Jevon23 »

DethNinja wrote: post #14

I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It wil…

I really don’t want my productivity to increase.

Worst case scenario is that it gets SO good at writing code that software engineering teams are severely downsized or are made obsolete altogether, and I find myself out of a job. I’m not expecting UBI to start falling out of the sky any time soon, especially while there are still manual labor jobs that robots can’t do.

Alternative scenario is that individual developers get somewhere around a 2x-5x productivity increase, but why would I want that? That doesn’t give me more free time - that just means I’ll be expected to do more work. Non-technical management already expects ridiculous delivery timelines; now I’ll have to deal with them asking “why can’t you have the whole project done by tomorrow? Why can’t you just have the robot do it?”

It’s a lose-lose situation and none of us asked for this.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#47

Post by PaulWaldman »

imtringued wrote: post #41
PaulWaldman wrote: post #11

Current higher level programming languages are developed for humans to develop software closer to their natural language. If in the future humans will be writing and debugging little code, these LLMs will naturally evolve to directly writing Assembly. Scary to think about, but also makes me wonder how many non-technical people cope today with the "black box" of a computer. About twenty years ago, I had a professor ex…

I don't understand why it would write in assembly. That is not portable and it makes verification difficult and also assembly has less grammatic structure which LLMs rely upon.

If there was never a need for humans to understand code, are higher level languages really the most efficient?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#48

Post by edgyquant »

meghan_rain wrote: post #8
dakial1 wrote: post #4

I don't get some coders/devs/software engineers surprised that LLM can now pretty much create a whole code out of a prompt. Wasn't this the final objective of the programming languages abstraction evolution? From Binary/Assembly to Natural Language Programming? I think it is awesome that more people will be able to create software/products as this accelerates innovation cycles a lot. And, for now, I believe devs that…

[flagged]

No it isn’t and this isn’t a funny joke. If you can’t write optimal algorithms and come up with data structures that allow for mapping out problems you aren’t solving anything and your job has always been one innovation away from disappearing.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#49

Post by michaelmior »

edgyquant wrote: post #38
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want…

If your goal was to spend the rest of your life doing something you learn once and getting paid well for it you seriously picked the wrong industry. Engineers have been told to constantly learn new things, know multiple languages etc since the dawn of programming. I’ve worked with tons of programmers like you describe. I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we shoul…

> I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we should not be fighting with.

Maybe we shouldn't be, but it's still a problem that regularly needs to be solved.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#50

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #19
DethNinja wrote: post #14

I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It wil…

> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want…

Personally I'm excited whenever an opportunity to wholesale replace a part of my job comes up. I got in to technology because I wanted to make people's lives better, and in theory removing demands on their time does that.

The only problem is that we live in a system that directs the gains upward and any costs downwards, and in so doing creates perverse incentives against people welcoming their redundancy.

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