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Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

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Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#171

Post by gexla »

medler wrote: post #15

I use LLM-based autocomplete in my IDE, and it’s not taking away my job unless/until it improves by multiple orders of magnitude. It’s good at filling in boilerplate, but even for that I have to carefully check its output because it can make little errors even when I feel like what I want should be obvious. The article is absolutely correct in saying you have to be critical of its output. I would say it improves my p…

I think the real problem is going to be increased volatility in the work market. You get a chaotic situation in which the bullet that strikes you is the one you would have never guessed. For example, it could be that short term, the increased productivity squeezes workers in every industry and the concern becomes increased competition. You aren't getting replaced by AI, you're getting replaced by someone who out-competed you.

The market may adjust over the longer term, or it may just continue to be volatile as the rate of change accelerates. In that case, we can't fix the work market, and we instead have to address the need for people to feed themselves another way.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#172

Post by arrowsmith »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #104
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is the hallucinations, I also wasted few hours trying to work on solutions with GPT where it just kept making up parameters and random functions.

Were you using GPT-3.5 or GPT-4? GPT-4 reduces hallucinations by at least an order of magnitude, and hasn't failed me yet.

This is my experience too. Paying $20/month for GPT-4 has been absolutely worth it. It barely hallucinates at all; the results aren't always perfect (and the September 2021 knowledge cut-off can be frustrating given how quickly things get out of date in the programming world) but it's more than good enough. I don't remember how I ever got by without it.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#173

Post by two_in_one »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #154
snickerbockers wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm honestly not worried at all about LLMs because most of my jobs have consisted of fixing problems in other peoples' code, and i haven't seen any evidence that an LLM will be capable of doing that on a non-trivial program any time in the near future. I have, however, seen evidence that chatgpt will create many more problems and make my job harder.

> i haven't seen any evidence that an LLM will be capable of doing that on a non-trivial program any time in the near future Or ever, given that the level of abstraction LLMs work at is completely wrong. They can approximate the syntax of things in their training corpus, but logic? The lights are off and nobody's home.

It all started this year, just a few months ago, remember? It will get only better from here, don't worry. Or do, not sure. Anyway, you can't avoid it.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#174

Post by themodelplumber »

Animats wrote: post #60

Survival may require getting out of the mainstream. LLMs are going to get really good at stuff that's been done thousands of times and they can train on that data. Like web front end work. If you're doing industrial embedded work and have an oscilloscope and a logic analyzer on your desk, and spend part of your time going into the plant and working directly with the machinery, you're in better shape.

Good coders will be competing against people who can use prompts in cumulative sessions to code and maintain projects in depth, not people who can make requests of an LLM.

This differentiating factor is what will wear out a less-experienced LLM user. They will make bigger claims or set expectations higher, and suffer more for them. The details that matter, yet were missed, will stick out more and more, as more experienced LLM users flex that experiential factor in a variety of ways.

For this reason, front end will absolutely still be a thing. And it'll be a much better, deeper thing, thanks to those who are a good fit for a kind of LLM-coding mindset.

However, this also depends on the type of coder. You can start from interpretation of the project spec as a logical code of sorts, or you can start from the spec as more of a visualized outcome.

If you work in the latter style, your survival key, so to speak, may simply be stringing together support requests you make to various LLM-interfacing vendors. A COTS-integrative style / opportunistic approach to coding, which has always been a thing.

Along the way, this kind of person usually integrates the NIH logical style a bit, and vice-versa, or they'll suffer through their respective blind spots. Same story, new layer of abstraction that's really cool.

(Plus...survival may still depend on who you know, not what you know, for a lot of people)

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#175

Post by bruce511 »

twodave wrote: post #121

Is programming even the hard part about programming? In all seriousness, what we would really need from an AI to start really saving me time would be for it to interview all the customers/partners involved on the project, determine the scope of function needed, boil all that down to a set of sensible domain models that make sense to everyone, identify where/when messages need to be passed, determine which things can…

I don't need it to write code. I don't need it to interview customers. I need it yourself attend endless, pointless, weekly zoom meetings where a manager with zero understanding of the task being done, why its being done, and with no idea how to do it, nevertheless is happy to review open tickets and discuss them.

This task will take 2 months. I'm busy working on it. If you want a 5 minute email every week on how its going, then fine. If you want me to throw my toys when i hit a road-block then I'm for with that.

But no, we need weekly status update meetings with all the other developers, testers, product owners, all wasting their and my time, just because a manager is "managing".

Forget code, that's not the hard part. When the AI can just be my doppelganger in the meeting on my behalf THEN I'll worry about AI taking my job.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#176

Post by padolsey »

dwaltrip wrote: post #169
padolsey wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the code can almost write itself My 2c: I've been an eng for around 15 yrs. I semi-recently had a brain injury so haven't been able to dedicate anywhere near as much mental cognition to programming recently. That's why I've been unable to maintain full-time work. I started using chatgpt around 3 months ago. Initially skeptical, I started giving it fun and weird logical/semantic puzzles to satisfyingly "prove" my in…

That’s super interesting. I’m recovering from burnout and other health issues and I’ve found it to be occasional helpful in the way you are describing. For me, it can smooth out the process and “lower the intensity” of accomplishing any particular task, especially if it is something where I don’t know how to do it off the top of my head (what libs / functions to use, how to call them, etc). I can then pretty easily c…

> what libs / functions to use, how to call them

Yeh same. It's got pretty good overview of what libraries are available. I tend to ask it for an npm module to do x and it always has a couple options, and can list pros/cons, and give/modify code to use them.

> have you used gpt-4 much or can you get away with using 3.5 sometimes?

Ah so I _always_ use gpt4. It's in a whole other ballpark IMHO.

> If you don’t mind, do you have any good examples of how you prompt it?

E.g. I would say something like "show me precisely how to set-up, code and deploy a nextjs app that lets a user "...". It tends to be really good at doing simple standalone stuff like todos/colorpickers/blah apps, but you'd be surprised how far it can get with a more advanced problem domain. E.g. I just entered this and it's really impressed me with its output: "Can u show me how to set-up, code and deploy a nextjs app that lets users input a set of sentences into a textarea and receive back clustered sets of sentences (based on semantic similarity) with different colors of the hsl spectrum indicating that similarity." - try it! It gives complete react components, endpoints using tensorflow, and shows how to vary hsl based on weights. I reckon I'd have to make around 20 mins changes to get it working and deployed.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#177

Post by dustymcp »

hn_user82179 wrote: post #157
yayitswei wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with 5%. That said, I've found rubber duck debugging to be an exceptionally effective use case for ChatGPT. Often it will surprise me by pinpointing the solution outright, but I'll always be making progress by clarifying my own thinking.

Fascinating! Can I ask how you use ChatGPT for debugging? are the bugs you've used it with more high level, "this is what's happening" kind of things? Or could you give an example?

just give it the log output or error code and your code then in alot of cases it comes up with decent solutions

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#178

Post by pkdpic »

bruce511 wrote: post #175
twodave wrote: post #121

Is programming even the hard part about programming? In all seriousness, what we would really need from an AI to start really saving me time would be for it to interview all the customers/partners involved on the project, determine the scope of function needed, boil all that down to a set of sensible domain models that make sense to everyone, identify where/when messages need to be passed, determine which things can…

I don't need it to write code. I don't need it to interview customers. I need it yourself attend endless, pointless, weekly zoom meetings where a manager with zero understanding of the task being done, why its being done, and with no idea how to do it, nevertheless is happy to review open tickets and discuss them. This task will take 2 months. I'm busy working on it. If you want a 5 minute email every week on how its…

In all seriousness I haven't seen the idea of LLMs replacing managerial functions in a while, it would be an interesting inversion of a quasi-post-labor utopia.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#179

Post by radicalace »

oldstrangers wrote: post #39

My fear isn't that I'll be replaced, it's the technology becoming so good that it'll be kept far out of reach of the common person. I genuinely believe OpenAI knows what a GPT 5+ type world looks like, and they're probably having a lot of debate on how best to monetize it. They could practically charge anything in the world for it assuming it still undercuts the cost of hiring a human. One Nvidia super cluster runnin…

it is not widely appreciated that openAI will at some point finish training one of their models and there, in that room where the terminal is, total power will exist and be under the control of whoever happens to be in there. “GTP10, please recreate NSO exploits and launch a campaign to download all data of the global population. hack and commandeer other data-centers if necessary, discreetly of course. begin an operation to black mail and exploit all high level US government personnel. use this leverage and any other leverage you can acquire to gain control of as many nuclear warheads currently siloed as possible. monitor all cameras and sensors around me and thwart all attempts to assassinate me. monitor all phones and cameras for activity that seems like a threat to me, provide me with alerts when urgent and intervene to the best of your ability.”

or simply “GTP10, use all resources at your disposal to give me as much material and political power as possible. protect me at all costs, even the wellbeing if others.”

it might seem silly but GTP4 would seem silly to someone in 2016. this is more concentrated power than will have ever existed before. its evil and wrong.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#180

Post by ehnto »

Unless this individual has an insight into global software development businesses, I think this article has some great thoughts about possibilities but is quite non-factual, counter to the language used.

Many of the statements of how AI is being used are phrased as if it's matured already, the reality is this is all still a big trial. It's not clear if teams will continue to use AI in the way they currently do, so it's a bad assumption to base your predictions from.

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