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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

simonwillison.net

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

#271

Post by swader999 »

jsty wrote: post #148
JimmyRuska wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having spent a lot of time with GPT-4 recently, it's possible the new generation will not have the same issues we did. For example they can write some code and say, "adjust for best practice". Then "explain why needs to be " Oh this is called , give me an example of it. Give me another example. Give me another example. Give me use cases where this would be better. Give me a short story where it was done my way but it…

> Then "explain why needs to be " It would be nice, but until there's a breakthrough on having LLMs / other models generate, maintain and walk the user through a representation of their reasoning, these explanations are likely no more reliable than a random StackOverflow answer - except without the benefit of other users scoring / picking holes in the answer

Yeah but you can run it, profile it and execute your test suite on it. If it passes and if it is more performant, aren't you done? I can try all the stack overflow answers and just pick the best one now.

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

#272

Post by norwalkbear »

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…

I'm even seeing hyper specialized AI doing game mods

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

#273

Post by Herval_freire »

deafpolygon wrote: post #170
koonsolo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Let say AI makes us 100x more productive. What would happen? 1. 99% of devs will be out of work and the current work will be done by 1%. 2. More and better software will be developed. About 100x effort more. I'm pretty confident the 2nd will happen. I already have lots of work that will take a long time, and more after that. 100x improvement on productivity would mean more, faster and better (because of more…

I'm of the thought that #2 will happen. #1 will never happen - there are simply not enough developers to go around. To use a relatively modern analogy, AI-enhanced development is to developers what Photoshop is to photographers. No one ever said Photoshop would put photographers out of business. Now Photoshop is a requirement for photographers. The pictures still need to get taken; likewise, for developers - the busi…

>To use a relatively modern analogy, AI-enhanced development is to developers what Photoshop is to photographers.

Photography as a job has been hit heavily by modern smart phone advances. Heavily. It's now very hard to get paid a living wage as a photographer. With mid journey it's now even harder. Photographers weren't completely replaced. I would say they were mostly replaced because now every Tom dick and Jane can take photos as good as any professional photographer.

>AI [in its current iteration] cannot do that.

All these changes happened within 6 months of progress. The technology has not stabilized. The current "iteration" will be obsolete very, very, very soon..

>As developers, our jobs are safe. Jobs will not be lost at a massive scale; only those unwilling to learn a new tool will be replaced.

Only for the current iteration of AI. Can you say the same for the next several iterations of chatGPT? No. Given the trendline, if it keeps continuing finding a job in software will be like finding a job in photography.

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

#274

Post by ak_111 »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #249
ak_111 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Reskilling has its upsides, you are exposed to many more paradigms and communities that do things completely differently which allows for a lot of cross pollination. living life on autopilot isn’t usually a source of great insights.

Reskilling is much more productive and fun when you are doing it for the intellectual journey and insight, rather than because you need to do it to find a job.

Indeed being able to auto-pilot your job allows you an amazing amount of time and freedom to learn new things deeply. See also the detrimental effects of "publish or perish" mindset in academia.

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

#275

Post by Riverheart »

deafpolygon wrote: post #16

> This doesn’t just make me more productive: it lowers my bar for when a project is worth investing time in at all. This is the real benefit here. AI isn't taking jobs, it's going to enhance them - once we learn how to use the tools we have available to us.

“AI isn’t taking jobs”

If by AI we mean things beyond just ChatGPT sure it will, it’s only a question of how long before it happens and how many new jobs will be created to replace the old jobs. For example, AI isn’t going to enhance customer service, you’ll just have better automated experiences and businesses will hesitate less to use them.

Edit: AI isn’t being created for the benefit of mankind. It’s being created in the pursuit of money. This isn’t a utopian fantasy world where we look out for everyone’s best interests, that’s just a side effect most of the time.

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

#276

Post by swader999 »

capableweb wrote: post #212
soco wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> However this knowledge does very little to improve road safety I think this would depend on the environment. If you live in a dry, relatively flat area and you mostly drive there, you're probably right, marginal difference in road safety. But if you live in a country that has long winters or lots of mountains, having control over the engine is a integral part of staying safe on the roads.

I live rural, wicked winters. I never buy a stick car because you need two arms and two feet to drive it. So if you get hurt, you are pretty stuck for a while until your arm or leg get better.

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

#277

Post by chatmasta »

pineaux wrote: post #201
opportune wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m thinking of things like the invention of the automobile, typewriters, calculators, even writing. Before those were invented people did things very differently - they walked or rode a horse, wrote manually, used slide rules or basic arithmetic algorithms like long division, memorized things and persisted them through story telling rather than persisting them in writing. People are still actively acquiring the know…

Socrates: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. This time its different... The written word might be able to write back. As a matter of fact, I already use chatgpt to learn new skills. Its a better way of acquiring knowledge.…

When I read Harry Potter as a child, I would feel a sort of melancholy when I finished the book and had to go back to a reality without magic. But as the years went by, I started to realize how much our world was starting to look like the magical world... it really is true that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Moving pictures in the newspaper? We have iPhones and tablets and tiny screens with interactive video...

Talking to people through the fireplace? We have video calls on our phones.

Writing words into a diary and having it write back to you? Well now we've got that too.

Now I'm just waiting for the flying broomsticks. Maybe we can do something with magnets inside an electrified metal Quidditch arena...

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

#278

Post by Herval_freire »

The evolution of comments here on HN are telling.

1 month ago people were saying there was no way AI could do their job and many were telling everyone to calm down as nothing would happen.

Now one month later this entire thread is about how chatGPT is an integral part of the development process. There are people even saying it replaces junior developers completely.

Can anyone venture to guess what the thread will look like in 1 more year?

"chatGPT can do the work of an entire team!"

And one more year after that?

"chatGPT can manage a team!"

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

#280

Post by swader999 »

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…

I mean yeah I read all those books and I've skimmed a few programming videos over the decades. But I've only really learned programming from working with a handful of exceptional mentors over the years. I've eaten a lot of crappy dog food on projects just to get to spend more time with those individuals.
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