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Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

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Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#101

Post by nemothekid »

adventured wrote: post #57
brigadier132 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a different 10-year prediction. AI will become good enough to be useful for programmers but not good enough to run on its own and will remain an assistant. Given that there is a shortage of programmers, more software will be written than ever. More software will beget more software engineers. Because the output of software engineers will rise, each individual software engineer will become more valuable to thei…

10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet (that is, people writing actual code). That's not a risky prediction, that's very easily going to be the case. Those people have nowhere to go to match what they're earning now. Maybe support review roles (which won't pay particularly well), where they approve decisions by the AI that are held up for human approv…

>10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet (that is, people writing actual code). That's not a risky prediction, that's very easily going to be the case.

How is this not a risky prediction?

1. Are you talking about AI (i.e. AGI) or LLMs? If you think we will have AGI in 10 - 15 years maybe you are right, but AGI is always just around the corner.

2. LLMs don't seem to be the magic multiplying force people are insinuating. GPT-3 has been around for almost 3 years, and while great (I was an early adopter) it's just another tool for me.

Over the past 10 - 15 years software has gotten easier to develop. And make software easier to develop has just gone to serving greater and greater demand. The invention of C didn't reduce the number of engineers because it was simpler than ASM. The invention of Python didn't reduce the number of Java engineers. Every year CPUs get faster and faster (at an exponential rate almost), and yet software somehow manages to get slower and slower. No other tool in the short history of software development ever did anything close to "wipe out at least half of all software developers" despite newer tools because easier and easier.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#102

Post by mdorazio »

nemothekid wrote: post #55
greatpostman wrote: post #4

I really think the current paradigm of literally typing if else logic all day into programs, and then getting paid huge money to do so will go away. Programming is going to be much higher level and accessible, though still complex. It will take five years or so. Edit: My prediction is essentially that: You give it a set of requirements for an api, with edge conditions written in plain English. Test cases are provided…

> You give it a set of requirements for an api, with edge conditions written in plain English. Test cases are provided. And the vanilla api is generated. Sometimes I wonder where some of the posters here work or if I'm working in a dystopia. > You give it a set of requirements for an api with edge conditions written in plain English This part is the job! If my job was 100% writing logic, it would be infinitely easier…

> or if I'm working in a dystopia

Going to guess you're both young and working at a tech company as opposed to a big company that also does some tech things.

Prior to the rise of Agile and the decrease in waterfall-style development the role of Business Analyst was very popular. It still is at many companies that do need to do waterfall development, but less so these days. The Business Analyst (BA) role is semi-technical and requires some subject matter expertise, but generally doesn't do much actual writing of code. Instead it's focused on requirements gathering, wireframe creation, test case creation & running, bug logging, and status reporting. I know you're probably saying "that's at least half of my job!" and you're right, but now go and look at the difference in pay between a BA and a developer. It turns out that if you remove the "actually writes code" part of the job, it's not worth nearly as much and I think that's what the comment above is trying to express.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#103

Post by [deleted] »

adventured wrote: post #57
brigadier132 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a different 10-year prediction. AI will become good enough to be useful for programmers but not good enough to run on its own and will remain an assistant. Given that there is a shortage of programmers, more software will be written than ever. More software will beget more software engineers. Because the output of software engineers will rise, each individual software engineer will become more valuable to thei…

10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet (that is, people writing actual code). That's not a risky prediction, that's very easily going to be the case. Those people have nowhere to go to match what they're earning now. Maybe support review roles (which won't pay particularly well), where they approve decisions by the AI that are held up for human approv…

[deleted]

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#104

Post by balls187 »

pphysch wrote: post #53
balls187 wrote: post #9

The animated gif for the first example leaves a lot to be desired. The UX: Click a button, type in a prompt, click another button. The speed just to generate 2-3 lines of code. And AI generated code with no basic error handling.

That's the free UX. Paid users get a seamless Copilot-style autocomplete experience. Clever use of intentional UX friction IMO. It does cost money to run these models.

And, free users are providing training data back to Google for free.

Certainly google should monetize; but not off removing artificially bad UX.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#105

Post by yamazakiwi »

adventured wrote: post #85
brigadier132 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet This reminds me of self driving car predictions. It also ignores that "building" software encompasses many different tasks.

That's actually a great supporting point to why AI will wipe most developers out. What you're referring to is one of the AI systems that I mention that the top ~25% will still write code for directly. It's a governing AI system. Most software development doesn't involve tasks that can very easily kill people with N thousand pounds of fast moving metal. Most software development is trivial by comparison in terms of ch…

We have a lot of stages to go through before we achieve the level of development you're describing, and I don't think you can confidently argue 10-15 years vs 5-10 years vs 20-30 years.

As with most technology job predictions, it won't happen the way most predict. Yes what defines a developer/swe will change, but our history has shown us that we are likely to see an increase of jobs in technology for the long term. I remain optimistic that most people will find new roles as they emerge.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#106

Post by weatherlite »

adventured wrote: post #57
brigadier132 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a different 10-year prediction. AI will become good enough to be useful for programmers but not good enough to run on its own and will remain an assistant. Given that there is a shortage of programmers, more software will be written than ever. More software will beget more software engineers. Because the output of software engineers will rise, each individual software engineer will become more valuable to thei…

10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet (that is, people writing actual code). That's not a risky prediction, that's very easily going to be the case. Those people have nowhere to go to match what they're earning now. Maybe support review roles (which won't pay particularly well), where they approve decisions by the AI that are held up for human approv…

What you describe is true pretty much to all professions, even doctors who don't use their hands. 15 years is a lot in the current pace of things. Also, society will be completely transformed if this transpires, retraining will be completely normal. Not saying it's gonna be easy, I'm just saying this is much bigger than software developers.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#107

Post by oli5679 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #56
oli5679 wrote: post #49

I find VS-code running notebooks with Colab plugin installed pretty helpful for this type of thing already. (1) run notebook in VS-code https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/datascience/jupyter-noteb... (2) install Github Copilot extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.c... and then it can quite often achieve what you want with just a comment or some previous code snippets. Then if you load…

> I find VS-code running notebooks with Colab plugin installed pretty helpful for this type of thing already. I think you meant "with the Github Copilot plugin installed".

You’re completely right. It was a typo that causes confusion

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#108

Post by rustyminnow »

edgyquant wrote: post #99
rustyminnow wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that this comment adds absolutely nothing to the conversation. It could be posted under every comment that says "AI is (not)? going to revolutionize (the world|everything|this industry|my job)" Anybody making a prediction about the future might be right or might be wrong, and we won't know until it happens. This is just a snarky way of saying "nah dude you're wrong"

It could be posted under anything. I could claim that the earth is going to turn into a ball of cheese and then write off everyone with “only time will tell.”

Yes, but how SOON will time tell? For earthen ball of cheese I predict it will tell "pretty soon". But who knows? Only time will tell.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#109

Post by occamrazor »

LamaOfRuin wrote: post #60
tudorw wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having played a bit with coding with AI I like this view, it's powerful, but context will always be an issue, turning real world problems into working code is a skill in it's own right, that will not change, superpowered yes, for me it's all the 'dull' parts of typing stuff out that I look forward to missing, from an early study on impact in the workplace, using a 2 year study of a call centre, the result was large i…

Jesus, this just triggered another nightmare scenario I should have thought of earlier. People are going to have it write and/or comment a function whose purpose is non-trivial and not straight-forward. It will be not or imperfectly checked that the comment actually says what it should and the functionality matches. There will be no indication of what was written by AI, so the only option is to guess that both were w…

An AI may be more likely to hallucinate the wrong comment, but also much less likely to forget to update the comment when the code changes. The net result could be better comments.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#110

Post by boredemployee »

edgyquant wrote: post #99
rustyminnow wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that this comment adds absolutely nothing to the conversation. It could be posted under every comment that says "AI is (not)? going to revolutionize (the world|everything|this industry|my job)" Anybody making a prediction about the future might be right or might be wrong, and we won't know until it happens. This is just a snarky way of saying "nah dude you're wrong"

It could be posted under anything. I could claim that the earth is going to turn into a ball of cheese and then write off everyone with “only time will tell.”

Well... how about reading my text trying to interpret it and the world around us? In the sense that things are going so fast that we will soon have the answer and most probably _some_ jobs will be replaced yes (and that it won't take another 50 years as implied in the parent comment to have the definitive answer for it).
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