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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

#161

Post by the_only_law »

hellisothers wrote: post #140
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

I figured this was going to happen long before ChatGPT, but sadly I failed to find an good exit, because well… most everything else that doesn’t suck is already like that and the golden handcuffs were too tight.

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

#163

Post by obsoletedbygpt »

This might sound alarmist, but I would strongly advise you and anyone else reading this to try to make as much money as you can NOW, while you still can, and try to find investments that are AI-resistant. For example, I've been investing heavily in residential real estate, including mobile/modular homes. Do not count on Sam Altman or other tech bro billionaires coming to your or anyone else's rescue with UBI.

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

#164

Post by obsoletedbygpt »

frankie_t wrote: post #159

I've had similar thoughts, this development is completely disenheartening to me. I love computer science, self studying and the programming-as-solving-a-puzzle kind of occupation. It looks like the most interesting part of programming (for me) has been automated, while the parts I hate remain (at least for now?): gathering requirements, talking to people, understanding business, etc. I hoped to earn enough money thro…

> buy some land in the country and try living a quiet life off the farming?

I've seen repeated suggestions to this effect. Meanwhile, housing prices in the US are 40% above what they were per-pandemic.

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

#165

Post by uptownfunk »

I think all ChatGPT has done is to make saying "I don't know how to do this" obsolete for a significant proportion of tasks. People are still needed to do the work, to see it through, to know what pieces need to be put together, and to actually put them together.

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

#166

Post by lasagna_coder »

loudmax wrote: post #126
lasagna_coder wrote: post #19

Faster code writing still requires people who know what the code should do, what it should look like, etc, like you if it's true what you say you're capable of. It sounds like you sharpened the right skills: how the code should work, and didn't waste time, ie. practicing being faster with a keyboard. Now you're more a developer, and less a typist, that's all. We still use engineers to design bridges, despite much of…

I think the next phase will be to train GPT-type AIs to forego the compiler entirely and just write binary rather than C or code that's designed to be understood by humans. You should be able to point the AI to a binary executable file and tell it to produce a version with a slightly different behavior. Point the AI to say, /usr/bin/chromium, and tell it you'd like a version that displays tabs at the bottom of the pa…

What reasoning is this based on? I haven't seen any research into this area. My understanding would be that it would be more efficient to produce its own language-like abstractions and compilers to assembly/C, which would be faster for it to write with as well.

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

#167

Post by lasagna_coder »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #148
lasagna_coder wrote: post #19

Faster code writing still requires people who know what the code should do, what it should look like, etc, like you if it's true what you say you're capable of. It sounds like you sharpened the right skills: how the code should work, and didn't waste time, ie. practicing being faster with a keyboard. Now you're more a developer, and less a typist, that's all. We still use engineers to design bridges, despite much of…

Exactly. There is also the notion that making certain things easier/cheaper, will simply raise the ambition level for everyone. And you get to spend more time directing what the best outcome should look like rather than building it very slowly over a long period of time. It will be the kind of stuff you'd previously thought would be beyond your skills to do. But now you can. People expecting that their jobs never cha…

Exactly, look ahead and automate the new drudgery.

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

#168

Post by IshKebab »

tome wrote: post #119
IshKebab wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's all these AI tools are, better stack overflow searches. They have no ability to know what is correct or what is wrong, it lacks judgement, which is one of the most important skills to have as a software engineer. I keep seeing this idea, but have you actually used it? It clearly has the ability to problem solve. It's not just copying and pasting solutions. Ok granted it's not especially good at it yet and th…

> Ok granted it's not especially good at it yet and the bullshitting problem is a real issue, but how long do you think that will remain unsolved? I'm curious why some people seem to think it's going to be solved imminently. The last 1% is always the hardest (by far)!

Because recent progress has been extremely rapid and has crossed the threshold from "this is rubbish" to "woah this actually sort of works!" which is a really big deal.

It's already putting people out of jobs.

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

#169

Post by mejutoco »

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.

It might be stick on the last 10% garbage, just like self-driving cars. Clearly it is an important change, but for some fields 90% might not be enough.

Personally, I think we will do more and more complicated things instead of just being done with programming.

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

#170

Post by deterministic »

I am not worried at all about loosing my job to an “AI”. We already have ways to automate most of our software developer jobs: libraries, frameworks, code generators, compilers etc. And yet we are still needed to make all of those components work together to solve a business problem. So called “AI” is just another automation tools in our arsenal. Nothing more. Nothing less.
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