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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

#131

Post by CalRobert »

gundamdoubleO wrote: post #54
CalRobert wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were being paid to win chess matches I would certainly worry.

Why? Chess is more popular now than it has ever been and more people care about the human storylines and drama behind the players than the actual quality of their play, for better or for worse.

Similarly, some people take great pleasure in the intricate workings of Japanese joinery, but if I were a run of the mill furniture builder ~150 years ago I'd be greatly worried about the consequences of machinery.

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

#132

Post by Ekaros »

Funny thought, we all talk about Stack Overflow being replaced by these models...

But with the new stuff, who will write the answers for them to learn first from? Or will we be stuck with this level of knowledge forever now? In the case that no one will produced sufficient training data anymore to be fed in to them...

Maybe the future isn't so bleak. Or we just need to find suitable niches which won't be filled. Or where someone wants a human in loop.

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

#133

Post by Ekaros »

glimshe wrote: post #28
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.

Next version will be 40% garbage. Then 30%, then 20%... And we got to the point where it has as much garbage as human code.

What is lower bound of the garbage that we reach let's say in 20 years? Is it sufficiently low that you don't need someone to go over the output carefully? And if it fails that it won't destroy any lives?

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

#134

Post by John23832 »

crop_rotation wrote: post #120
John23832 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a large gulf between “LLM’s making my skills less valuable” (which I don’t even think is the case) and being jobless, not able to make a living. The OP is not going to be jobless anytime soon if they have the skills that they say they do. Hell. Someone with less knowledge who just leans on a LLM isn’t as capable. HUMAN experience is valuable.

The OP may not become jobless, but would lose motivation to learn more (same as a recent post on HN about a designer demotivated due to their work now centred around midjourney). As an analogy, people in robot (I use the term in a loose way for machines) assisted warehouse find the work far worse than one without robots, because the job becomes soulless and centred around the robots, making it much less fulfilling.

You've moved the goalpost multiple times. Are you concerned about the OP's ability to command top dollar for their current talents or that they have a job at all (you've expressed both), or the OP's feeling of fulfillment/motivation in what they do?

I go back to what I said before. If your fulfillment in life is centered around work, you need to re-evaluate. If the OP has no motivation to improve themselves for the sake of improving themselves, that's an OP problem that existed WAY before LLMs. Whether it's weightlifting, programing, or basketweaving, the OP needs to find some benchmarks for life that come from self motivation.

That being said, the OP will continue to be employed. Rather than miring in the existential crisis of "not being able to continue operating in the manner they do today", the OP needs to adapt and align their skills with this new tool. LLMs are tools.

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

#136

Post by nprateem »

yodon wrote: post #86
crop_rotation wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>Can you show me sample prompts where GPT4 gives garbage? I am yet to find one. Agreed. GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 commonly hallucinate. GPT-4 can certainly be made to behave badly, but on real questions I've put to GPT-4 it has a 0% hallucination rate. The few wrong answers it has given have been "sensibly wrong" in that it's highly likely an experienced human programmer would have made the same mistake (eg lots of Stack Ove…

I mean here's another example from right now regarding Terraform:

> Me: how to only run data "archive_file" if a path exists?

> GPT4: add: depends_on = [fileexists("/path/to/file")]

This is nonsense. Terraform tells me:

> A single static variable reference is required: only attribute access and indexing with constant keys. No calculations, function calls, template expressions, etc are allowed here

I just get this rubbish all too often to be afraid for my job.

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

#137

Post by creshal »

cudgy wrote: post #118
creshal wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've already seen much of this development pre-AI with the rise of no code / low code platforms. Even if you manage to put this particular genie back into the bottle, there's no escaping the increasing automation of programming. And so far it only increased the demand for software, because for anyone outside software development, cheaper software just means you can leverage your budget to get better faster.

No code/low code may increase demand for the software frameworks that empower the domain experts, but this does not mean it increases the demand for professional software developers.

Most of the successful deployments I've seen involved a lot of programmers regardless; either to advise the domain experts, or to customize the solution to the specific needs of the organization, be it with custom components, or interfaces to other systems. There's a lot of untapped demand for software solutions that'll keep programmers busy as total project costs fall due to increased automation.

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

#138

Post by jwestbury »

gmt2027 wrote: post #80

In light of the quote, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them," I agree that LLMs will undoubtedly transform the landscape of work. By automating tedious tasks, they'll enable engineers to become vastly more productive (10-100x), allowing them to focus on strategic and creative aspects of their projects while developing larger, more comp…

> they'll enable engineers to become vastly more productive (10-100x)

Will that come along with a 10-100x pay increase?

Why should I care about being so much more productive, when it won't come with any pay increase (and will likely come with a pay decrease)?

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

#139

Post by taylodl »

Meh. I thought the same thing when I saw Visual C++ in 1992. It was amazing - it could produce an entire Windows application - a Windows application! - with a few mouse clicks. Add in a little bit of logic and presto! You had a complete Windows application, ready to ship. Many of us thought it was all over for developers. The gold rush was over, we were all going to be out of work in a few short years.

How well did that play out?

It didn't. At all. In fact quite the opposite happened. But I would be lying if I said development wasn't transformed. A lot of menial labor, labor many here on HN have never dealt with, was no longer done.

I see the same thing happening with AI. What you need to be thinking about is what does an "AI app" look like? What does an app accelerated with "AI" look like? How are we going to use this technology to better serve our customer's needs? How will applications be integrated with AI? What even is an application in this new world?

Paradigm shifts are exciting times! Enjoy it!

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

#140

Post by hellisothers »

LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #25
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…

> The junior devs whose whole job it is to translate architectural and design specifications into excessively verbose boilerplate code will struggle to survive, but the software architects above them will find a new means through which to express the analytical thinking, process planning and understanding of complex dependencies that they're paid for. Which will, in turn, further drive shortages of good developer tal…

The entrenched elite will have finally come for software engineering, you’ll only get to do that cool high level work if you go to the right school, with the right degree, with the right certification. And before anybody says “it’s already like that”, it’s really not.
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