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

Hard to figure out how to innovate on education (slow to change institutions) in the face of such rapid change.

I actually feel my university education prepared me well for what’s going on. I studied a mix of theoretical comp science, physics, philosophy, and mathematics (esp calculus and number theory). Very little of what I learned is obsoleted, and especially probability theory and NLP are turning out to be very valuable to know when working with even CoPilot.

But man, I feel bad for those studying “programming” as a trade rather than computer science as a scientific / engineering discipline.

I wait for the moment it gains consciousness it's AI and not us (ours).

ChatGPT's answer:

> While AI can enhance our productivity and efficiency, it cannot replace our ability to learn, grow, and adapt to new challenges.

> Therefore, it is important to view AI as a complement to our skills and knowledge

        As an AI language model, I do not have personal opinions or emotions. However, I can provide some insights on the topic of AI and its impact on the tech industry.

        It is understandable to feel discouraged or demotivated when faced with the capabilities of advanced AI models such as GPT-4. These models have demonstrated remarkable skills in various domains, including natural language processing, computer vision, and even software development. However, it is important to note that AI technology is still evolving and has its limitations. While AI can assist in automating certain tasks, it cannot replace human creativity, intuition, and problem-solving skills.

        Moreover, AI technology is not a substitute for continuous learning and personal development in the tech industry. The rapid pace of technological innovation requires professionals to stay up-to-date with the latest trends, standards, and best practices. While AI can enhance our productivity and efficiency, it cannot replace our ability to learn, grow, and adapt to new challenges.

        Therefore, it is important to view AI as a complement to our skills and knowledge, rather than a threat or a replacement. As the tech industry evolves, it will continue to create new opportunities and challenges for professionals to thrive and make a meaningful impact.

History is full of inventions that changed the game for the people in a specific industry. Sometimes they allowed one person managing the machines to replace a team previously doing manual labor. I don’t think that’s the right metaphor here, because programming is not manual labor. The parts of programming that are like manual labor will disappear, you’ll instruct the AI to do it for you. But you need to know what to prompt it with and how to verify its output and plumb it into your code. Speed of writing code is rarely the bottleneck, so speeding that part up doesn’t double your productivity. Still, it helps.

I’ve been programming with the assistance of copilot for a year now, and using ChatGPT as well since 3.5. These tools are amazing, I’m never going back. But to me they’ve only increased the value of the senior engineer with deep domain knowledge. It makes me more productive. But I have to come up with the requirements, correct the AIs code, do all the plumbing that it can’t do efficiently. A lot of the code it comes up with is pure garbage, I have to know enough to know the difference. It does kind of replace a junior developer a little, if you were giving them grunt work tasks, which could be an issue when starting out in this field.

There is so much more that software engineers do than just writing code. That’s really a minority of the time each day for me. If you’re familiar with Amdahl’s law, then you know there’s a mathematical limit to the productivity improvement here.