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Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

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Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#31

Post by creshal »

soco wrote: post #18
creshal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> his is the first time I've seen it applied to programming. Programming is just a means to an end. I've never considered programming to be an industry. C++ versus Pascal mindset. :) > This is the first time I've seen it applied to programming. Programming is just a means to an end. I've never considered programming to be an industry. Yes and no. It did not replace the good accountants who actually orchestrated the w…

I wonder how can the future architect get there, if going through the junior stages is suddenly not an option anymore. Because those all-understanding software architects don't just pop into existence.

Maybe we'll finally invest into a real education and training pipeline, instead of making people figure out everything on the job, like other professions.

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#32

Post by LapsangGuzzler »

soco wrote: post #18
creshal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> his is the first time I've seen it applied to programming. Programming is just a means to an end. I've never considered programming to be an industry. C++ versus Pascal mindset. :) > This is the first time I've seen it applied to programming. Programming is just a means to an end. I've never considered programming to be an industry. Yes and no. It did not replace the good accountants who actually orchestrated the w…

I wonder how can the future architect get there, if going through the junior stages is suddenly not an option anymore. Because those all-understanding software architects don't just pop into existence.

They can't. Period. It's the next level of prioritizing the short term at the expense of the long term.

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#34

Post by crop_rotation »

I have had similar reaction as you. It makes a lot of skills obsolete. I myself have been pondering the implications on the wider society. And I have found it to be great for almost all the problems I threw at it.

To those saying it will enable them to solve more problems, yes that is correct. It will give everyone "wings", but once everyone has wings the industry will be so different in terms of wage and employment.

To people saying GPT gives incorrect code, please try GPT4.

If your age and circumstance allow, you should think whether a career change is possible. Not a hard change right now, but atleast explore what options might be available. I am exploring the same myself.

To those talking of chess, that is not a correct comparison since people want to watch (and connect with) human players playing chess (thus the pro scene survives), and play it for their own joy. Due to tools like stockfish, it has become far easier for people to explore moves. If the aim in chess was to finish more and more games from random given positions, and people were paid per game (and some value was created finishing it), stockfish would easily drive it to 0. Chess survives not because humans do better than AI, but because nobody is interested in playing against AI or watching Stockfish v Stockfish (By nobody I mean a very small number). Most people want to play against real people and watch real people play.

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#36

Post by crop_rotation »

nprateem wrote: post #6

I wouldn't worry. It's code output is 50% garbage. I'm not in fear of my job. All the hypsters assuming this will destroy lawyers, accountants, doctors etc clearly don't understand correctness isn't something they can just tag on to a prediction machine.

Can you show me sample prompts where GPT4 gives garbage? I am yet to find one.

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#38

Post by febeling »

Kalanos wrote: post #21

I felt a similar way about video games after learning about databases. Every action I did in the game was less real/meaningful because it was a just a db transaction.

This resonates. There was a moment in history when, all of a sudden, everything was expected to be built on top of some framework, instead of solving it yourself. 2005-2007 timeframe. Felt disempowering, I guess that's the word. ChatGPT has that same quality.

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#39

Post by alpaca128 »

I haven't yet made up my mind about this; on one hand the current state is clearly not good enough, but considering the insane recent progress I'm certain it will fundamentally change parts of my job. I just hope I can use it more for debugging and fixing dependencies, that's a more interesting application imho than letting it write code and then manually check the code to make sure it's reasonable.

Meanwhile Stable Diffusion managed to motivate me more than anything to learn drawing. I always gave up in the past because it takes so much practice to get good results. Now I can draw something, throw it into Stable Diffusion as input (the only way to semi-reliably get what I want) and get a more satisfying result, and it's still bad/inconsistent enough that I'm motivated to do it better.

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#40

Post by crop_rotation »

300bps wrote: post #35
cvhashim04 wrote: post #8

We’ll all be prompt engineers just tweaking code the bot spits out to meet requirements.

So marginally different than the Google query engineers we all are today?

Google querying takes some degree of skill. The LLM takes it to next level. There are levels of improvement in productivity. At some level the technology just restructures the industry.
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