241–250 of 519 posts
@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…
Roughly 80% of the time, currently. Which is great! But if you don't keep that in mind, you risk making a fool of yourself. It'll most likely improve in the future, I'm sure. The amount of real-world progress this will bring to humanity boggles the mind. I think we'll see progress in many and as-of-yet unthought of areas, because the power of mathematics, algorithms, and advanced systems will become available to a lo…
Id say it has approximate as high a chance to work as "random code from the internet". Also, it is often just relying on an old version of an API or a Library.
Not so with an AI chat system. You get the answer immediately, and you can ask as many follow-up questions you like, to your heart's content. This means that, sure, even if the code you get from ChatGPT has approximately as high a chance to work as "random code from the internet," you can't ask that "random code from the internet" to expand on why it's good or bad, why it was made in a particular way, or if there are better ways, or if you can error check it one more time, or complain that, "Hey, random code, your dumb code didn't work!" In that way ChatGPT is already leaps and bounds better than "random code from the internet."
Also I assume here that you aren't just throwing darts at the wall, but instead testing out code with a clear goal in mind. Then it can be wise to ask ChatGPT about the underlying system, which it will gladly answer, and also immediately.
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…
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…
One of my colleagues at my previous lab is porting multiple Matlab toolboxes to Python. These would probably require months for couple of Master's students, but with ChatGPT it is a few weeks work for a postdoc.
@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…
Interesting, because to me there still seem to be many public discussion forum questions where the answer is "Have you tried doing exactly what the error message is telling you?"
@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…
@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…
Making something easier doesn't necessarily increase quality. It's early days. It's a fool's errand tp try to predict the future. Now more than ever.
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It may be significantly better than a random stackoverflow answer, but I haven’t seen it as being better than the top-voted stackoverflow answer (at least not without significant curation/prompting).
i think maybe you're using ai wrong. its not akin to stackoverflow answers, its more akin to a jr programmer that can bang out some code for you while you go to the kitchen or bathroom and then you fix a few mistakes and integrate it with your larger project
For anything significantly higher complexity, I don’t find that typing is anywhere near the rate-limiting factor. Figuring out how to decompose the problem, how the code should be structured overall, and other high-level concerns take far time/effort than banging out boilerplate.
Now, if I wanted to pretend to be a junior developer for three different companies at once, it would be a heaven-sent technological marvel.
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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…
You are sort of ignoring the bias in your own AI extremist prediction. People who have decided to go all in in learning an interpreted language like Perl or even PHP, had to continuously also learn react, js, ruby,... and gazillions of other languages and frameworks to remain in business over the last two decades. While people who invested in learning C, Java or SQL have as much healthy opportunities to pursue today…
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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…