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AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

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Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#391

Post by zamalek »

UncleMeat wrote: post #374
zamalek wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But tests have to be correct. From my experience, ChatGPT-3 has been pretty good at exercising all meaningful branches (I look at code coverage results, I don't care for percentages at all), in the least amount of tests, on the first go. I definitely have to modify each test quite a bit, because it frequently hallucinates API calls that don't exist, but the code that it produces is an incredible blueprint. And I ha…

If you write a unit test for each branch in your method and just put in the current behavior as the expectation, all you've done is created a test that says "the method does what it currently does."

> the method does what it currently does.

It isn't that stupid, and that was done at least a decade ago with static+control flow analysis. As for AI, I was recently writing tests for a VT push parser in Rust (which is novel code, so no parroting here) and it clearly knew enough about VT to write a, correctly, failing test. I had a bug in my parser, and the test that AI generated found it.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure why anyone would believe the critique of someone who hasn't used a tool in earnest.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#392

Post by asdfman123 »

gavinhoward wrote: post #382
asdfman123 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would do that if I could, but at my brand name tech company (and a lot of others) they seem to treat refactoring as completely wasted time.

That sucks. I'm sorry.

I manage to slip it in out of principle, but my whole career I've been cleaning up other people's messes and getting pushback.

I think the original "10x engineer" study showed that engineers that wrote clean code maximize everyone else's productivity. (It's debatable, but certainly a good argument in favor of writing good code.)

But most people seem to think that the most productive engineers are the ones who can create features as rapidly as possible.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#393

Post by shadowgovt »

gavinhoward wrote: post #277
shadowgovt wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly. This is certainly a pattern that works in other industries. I am aware of a local glass company with about 50 years of operation under its belt. They have tooling, but the process is heavily manual; no aspect of it is end-to-end automated. Their primary customers are those requiring high precision for industrial applications (electrical, aeronautics). They are forever capacity-capped because their model doe…

Yes, exactly. I don't want a business to make me filthy rich. I want a business that will feed my wife and me.

The asymmetry that, it seems, has crept into modern life is that the business you describe will not attract investors, and (because the Internet has flattened the marketplace geographically) the heavy investor-backed company doing what you do 90% as well at 300% the convenience will eventually put you out of business.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#394

Post by gavinhoward »

shadowgovt wrote: post #393
gavinhoward wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly. I don't want a business to make me filthy rich. I want a business that will feed my wife and me.

The asymmetry that, it seems, has crept into modern life is that the business you describe will not attract investors, and (because the Internet has flattened the marketplace geographically) the heavy investor-backed company doing what you do 90% as well at 300% the convenience will eventually put you out of business.

Sure, if they have 300% the convenience.

But I am pretty sure I will have more convenience. I'll have a Matrix server and website where customers, including their employees, can ask me questions. I'm pretty sure it will be maximally convenient for senior developers or a CTO helping to make the purchase if interns never ask them questions about my software.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#395

Post by philote »

buf wrote: post #2

There are two types of people: 1. People afraid AI will take their jobs 2. People using AI to take people's jobs

3. People who may want to try out AI to see if they're 1 or 2 but don't want to give ChatGPT their email and phone number to do so. Also, are people uploading their company's private code to ChatGPT to get its help? Wasn't there a big issue with ChatGPT leaking info recently?

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#396

Post by jmfldn »

gavinhoward wrote: post #380
jmfldn wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I wish you well in this approach, I just worry that ignoring this completely may be too costly. I'm just advocating a very cautious middle path. For now, these tools are just code helpers to me (and right now I barely use them for that), but the moment I sense a genuine advantage to using them in my job, and I don't think it undermines my engineering, I think I'll have to engage further. Undermining for me m…

Fair enough. > This doesn't need AGI This is where we disagree. Code is so complex that I believe, strongly, that anything less than AGI will not be good enough. Notice I said "good enough". Sure, something less might be able to do something, but not good enough to make it a part of my toolkit. Also, code is Turing-complete. These LLM's are not Turing-complete. How could something that is not Turing-complete hope to…

I sort of agree with you in the most extreme case, ie "computers taking our jobs" means AGI. I'm not even sure that LLMs take you to AGI fwiw. Obviously we also need to define what we mean by AGI too.

Anyway, all of that aside my point is this. AGI-aside, the current tools, scaled up and improved, will have a big impact on productivity eventually. When I think of the toil so much development involves now, especially for your average mid-level engineer, a lot of that could easily be eliminated. That's a lot of man hours right there. I can also see it as a knowledge base on steroids. Large orgs are so hampered by fragmented docs, misalignment etc, that this could really help to build business and domain insights.

I see any number of transformative business /dev products to start appearing soon. The level of investment, and the technical progress, make this inevitable.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#397

Post by m463 »

lolsowrong wrote: post #15
gavinhoward wrote: post #13

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

You’re an inspiration. I’m going to open an accounting firm and refuse to use calculators.

I'm going to open a law firm, and instead of using AI to generate volumes of documents, I will write them all, in cursive.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#398

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #144

I see this sentiment expressed frequently: > "The past decades have shown that the benefits of technology are unevenly distributed, with some rich becoming super-rich with a good portion of the people lagging behind. However, it is also fair to say that the average well being in the world has steadily increased." The average is far less important than the median , when it comes to social stability. You could argue th…

> If AI helps an employee finish what used to be a 12-hour job in just 6 hours, why not cut the employee's working hours in half while retaining the same salary, instead of giving the executive suite another million-dollar compensation boost?

Because that doesn't benefit the shareholders.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#399

Post by timr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #369
timr wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, here's one: this substack [1] was flying around a week or two ago, asserting that the marginal value of programmers will fall to zero by 2030. What a dream! No more annoying nerds! The code in the post is wrong. For this "trivial" example, if you just blindly copied it into your code, it would not do what you want it to do. I love this example not just because it's ironic, but because it's a perfect illustration…

OK, so we are 100% in agreement then? I absolutely don't believe the marginal value of programmers will fall to zero by 2030 (but, to clarify, the way you phrased your original sentence I thought it was that an LLM made this assertion, not some random VC dudes). I also highlighted in my posts that I use AI as an aid to my processes, "That is, for me, the output of ChatGPT or other AI tools is the starting point of my…

You asked for an example and I provided one that I thought illustrated the mistakes GPT makes in a vivid way -- mistakes that are already leading people astray. The fact that this particular example was coupled with a silly prediction is just gravy.

In short, I don't know if we "agree", but I think OP is/was correct that GPT generates lots of subtle mistakes. I'd go so far as to say that the folks filling this thread with "I don't see any problems!" comments are probably revealing that they're not very critical readers of the output.

Now for a wild prediction of my own: maybe the rise of GPT will finally mean the end of these absurd leetcode interview problems. The marginal value of remembering leetcode soltutions is falling to zero. The marginal value of detecting an error in code is shooting up. Completely different skills.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#400

Post by foobar_______ »

tosser0001 wrote: post #7

I'm not necessarily concerned that I will be entirely without a job because of AI. What I am concerned with is that the aspects of my job that I derive pleasure from will be replaced by AI.

Part of me can definitely sympathize with this feeling. Part of me thinks "lol our job is to provide business value using the tool that is software. Not 'getting enjoyment' out of manually twiddling bits." This is just a new layer of abstraction - I'm sure all the old school computer engineers felt slighted when the new software guys didnt even have to know how to solder flipflops and transitors together.
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