AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects • Hacker News Board

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#191

Post by nibbleshifter » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 10:21 AM UTC

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #125

zamfi wrote: post #6

@Simon, I love this. And one day, in the not too distant future, a few old wizened graybeards, like you and I and the other folks on this site who have been writing code from scratch for 20 years, will be the magicians who walk the earth among mere mortals who only learned to code with the assistance of ChatGPT. We will be the ones with the preattentive syntax parsing in our brains that let us simply see basic syntax…

That would be nice for us, but it's unlikely. Knowing the subtlelties of memory management in the 80' didn't help the Ruby coders to create RoR and run Basecamp, or the Python coders to create Django and run the Washington Post. People jumped at ORM, CSS frameworks and JS wrappers, and won the day because they traded memory and CPU for what the user wanted. The new generation will do the same. They will figure out ho…

Electron is still an abomination.

I've gone from hating PHP for most of my career, to now having a grudging appreciation for it. Its a clusterfuck, but it works really well, and deployment barely gets simpler than "untar into webroot, done".

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#192

Post by ChatPGT » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 10:23 AM UTC

nibbleshifter wrote: post #190

This is one of the few times I've read a post about using GPT for dev work that has actually made a somewhat convincing argument. In my day job, there's been various attempts to use GPT to speed up some work, which has generally resulted in me having to fix "confidently incorrect" code. The outputs usually about half right when its usable. Using an LLM to basically auto complete trivial bits of code that are "just ty…

>> The outputs usually about half right when its usable.

For data projects/pocs/mvps using python its saving me lots of hours, you have some tiny mistakes, but once I have the idea in my head I just iterate and in 30min or less I have "written" the code for what would take me many hours.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#193

Post by bsenftner » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 10:27 AM UTC

withinboredom wrote: post #28

zamfi wrote: post #6

@Simon, I love this. And one day, in the not too distant future, a few old wizened graybeards, like you and I and the other folks on this site who have been writing code from scratch for 20 years, will be the magicians who walk the earth among mere mortals who only learned to code with the assistance of ChatGPT. We will be the ones with the preattentive syntax parsing in our brains that let us simply see basic syntax…

It’s crazy to think about. We are nearing the end of the age where people who have been programming for “20 years this year” and self-taught probably learned to program from books. In the next few years, people who have been “programming for 20 years” might start to include YouTube learners and boot campers. As someone who learned to program from two gigantic tomes of C/C+ with a Borland Compiler, there was no copy/p…

Yeah, I've been doing the coding crap for money for just a tad over 44 years. I've literally had 4 complete software careers, each lasting a over a decade, and each being riding one of the tech waves: early 70's-mid 80's 3D graphics, then console video games, then VFX for film, then facial recognition and now AI. Since getting my OpenAI key and working with my own implementation of static Diffusion I have to say my ambition has also increased. As someone with this span of experience, I want some type of youth syrum so I can see where this all goes and participate. It's fucking fun, amazing, daunting, and engaging.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#194

Post by bsenftner » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 10:32 AM UTC

abnercoimbre wrote: post #178

braveyellowtoad wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. However, it’s worthwhile also noting these represent a very small proportion of all jobs in software development.

I'm not sure how you quantify "very small" here? I'm running low-level conferences [0] and they're big enough for me to be a full-time organizer for them: with a job fair that's included Mozilla, real estate, nuclear defense and various game studios. [0] https://handmadecities.com

Thanks for the link, just learned of this and I'm impressed and interested.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#195

Post by soco » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 10:40 AM UTC

Technotroll wrote: post #128

throwaway049 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue seems to be many people don't learn even then.

And that is why we need AI assist in cars. With that said, where I'm from (Europe) most people drive "stick". That is, until recently. Now most new drivers are learning on auto or AI assisted vehicles. Is it better or worse? It'll definitively lead to fewer accidents. But driving stick is kinda cool tho, imho xD And I'm sure it also give you a better intuition about how a gear box actually works.

Technically very true, stick driving will give you a better feeling of what your engine actually can deliver. However this knowledge does very little to improve road safety, so my bet is still on AI support. Not sure of the English terminology but "basic" stuff like lane protection or tiredness detection helped me a few times - and finally taught me a lesson.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#196

Post by bsenftner » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 10:42 AM UTC

worldsayshi wrote: post #80

ihatepython wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many colleagues could you ask "Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus? I couldn't agree more. I work as a software engineer in the medical field (think MRI's, X-rays, that sort of thing). I've started using ChatGPT all the time to write the code, and then I just fix it up a bit. So far it's working great!

What holds me back the most from using these tools is the vagueness of the copyright situation. I wouldn't straight out want to use it at work. For hobby projects that I might want to use for something serious one day, I'm on the fence. Developers who use this for serious stuff, how goes your reasoning? Is it just a calculated risk? Reward is greater than the risk?

If I've learned one thing as an adult, it's do whatever the fuck ya what (that my morals allow) and if necessary ask permission later, if asked. Never ask for permission before, just do it.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#197

Post by seniorivn » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 10:42 AM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #176

ak_111 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With those new interpreted language that are easy to pick and have a low-barrier of entry you are constantly having to run faster than an influx of fresh energetic high school dropouts and boot camp graduates. With less fashionable language that require significant expertise and experience in picking them up like C (understanding the hardware level) and Java (understanding the JVM and OOP concepts) the barriers of en…

"Java (understanding the JVM and OOP concepts)" I am pretty sure that you can programm java without knowing details about the JVM and I would think, that most java programmers do exactly this. I think only in high performance scenarios knowing more is beneficial? But I have not touched java in a long time .. as I have indeed choosen the web as plattform. But I don't feel threatened by the high school kids coming from…

not feeling threatened doesn't mean you're not under threat.

It's entirely possible that between your skill level and those boot campers is a few(dozen) percents of workforce. But at the same time it's entirely possible that if you are not as quickly progressing as the growth of the industry, you could become a part of the same percentile as bootcampers in no time.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#198

Post by mistercow » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 10:47 AM UTC

ThePhysicist wrote: post #30

What I really love is the unbounded optimism of the AI. How many colleagues could you ask "Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus?" that would then just think for a second and go "Certainly! Let's start by ...". These people exist, but they're one in a thousand (or million?). ChatGPT basically does that for almost every prompt you throw at it. So…

I’ve actually found that ChatGPT 4 has some sense of realistic expectations about what it can accomplish in the context of a conversation. For example, I asked it to implement polygon triangulation supporting polygons with holes in it, and it was like “Whoa now, I can tell you all about ear clipping, but that’s too big and complex to implement here”.

ChatGPT 3.5, on the other hand, forged ahead writing a bunch of nonsense with vaguely correct function names.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#199

Post by BiteCode_dev » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 10:49 AM UTC

zer00eyz wrote: post #91

First of all chat GPT is great. It is all the magic of early google, and stack overflow... Not as many ads less bullshit. I have been coding for 25 years. Chat GPT + willing sr engineer means 2 less jr. dev's. I lived through the dot com bust, and now I can do a heroic amount of work with less effort. This raises two points: 1. It's clear that we have too much grunt work. Im not sure if this is a failure of language…

> It's clear that we have too much grunt work

Yes, architecture, medicine and metallurgy have been improved for millenniums. Next to that, IT is a baby that can barely walk. Of course we have too much grunt work.

But also because every time we remove grunt work, the customer expectation increase, the market adapts, and now you have to use new tools that are productive enough to do what the users want with the resource they are willing to pay.

So you don't have to hand write assembly but you do have to have an app that works on 16 screens ratios. You have amazing databases ready to handle your data, but you should update the UI live.

> We continue to narrow the path to get experience as an engineer.

Like in most industries, we are starting to move from "everyone needs to be an experts" to "90% of the daily tasks really just need good technicians". That's fine. That's how it is supposed to be.

At some point only experts could duplicate your house keys. Now you have convenience key stores everywhere.

We are on the right track.

Next stop, the equivalent of residential building codes, but for public facing apps.

Because IT is so new and can be done in your garage, we thought it was special. It was not.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#200

Post by neoromantique » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 10:50 AM UTC

dandellion wrote: post #174

Technotroll wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is why we need AI assist in cars. With that said, where I'm from (Europe) most people drive "stick". That is, until recently. Now most new drivers are learning on auto or AI assisted vehicles. Is it better or worse? It'll definitively lead to fewer accidents. But driving stick is kinda cool tho, imho xD And I'm sure it also give you a better intuition about how a gear box actually works.

Where I'm from most cars are also stick, but I got my license years ago but since then I've only driven twice: once with stick and once automatic, and I have to say, automatic is so much easier to learn that I don't know why we're all still getting licenses or buying manual cars. It must be stubbornness and the slight price difference because in reality automatic is just much more practical.

I own multiple cars and only one of them is an automatic, and I dread it to be honest. As in I quite often get thoughts about getting another manual instead of it, and arguably this automatic (BMW) I have is the nicest car I own, but transmission really makes it no justice.

To be fair, it is a bit older, so perhaps modern transmissions are significantly better, but any rentals I've driven were even worse, though they were lower class cars.