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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

#191

Post by devjab »

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…

Some code writes itself, and I hope generative AI will help with it, but a lot of code doesn’t. Which is likely why generative AI is so terrible at writing good code.

Of course that doesn’t mean that generative AI won’t see widespread adoption by non-programmers in digitalisation in the coming decade. We already have a lot of “process people” making things with GPT, and those things work. Or at least, they sort of work, but they are also build so terrible that they won’t scale and won’t be maintainable. Which is fine for a while, and it’s probably even fine for the lifetime of some programs. Because let’s be honest, often the quality of the programs that are implemented in non-tech enterprise aren’t important. In fact, often excel “programmers” can frankly do wonders in terms creating business value on short lived automation that won’t need to scale or be maintained in the long run because it’s simply going to be replaced by the time it stops being useful because you’ll have grown to a size where you’re buying SAP or similar (regardless of whether it’s a good idea or not). I do think that a lot of us are going to spend a lot of time “cleaning up” after non-programmers doing GPT programming. Which will be lucrative and boring.

But writing good code for complicated problems? I’m not sure when/if generative AI will be able to handle that. I had hopes until GPT. We use it quite a lot mind you, it writes a lot of our documentation. We have high hopes it’ll eventually get good enough to write a lot of our unit tests as well, and obviously we’re already in a world where a lot of the “trivial” code can be auto-generated, but we were frankly able to do that before generative AI, but actual programming? Heh.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#193

Post by ynx »

xlii wrote: post #188
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…

...and makes your code public domain (you just admitted here that you're using it)- if anyone accesses app developed by you, they can use it freely without any license. Worst thing - you're feeding potentially not your code into GPT. That'd be a fireable offense to me (and a very expensive lawsuit for at least couple places I know). Not an issue if you're lone wolf, though. It's a dystopian thought, but I wouldn't be…

Even if it did - the current copyright regime is already so extortionate as to be dystopian, so is it truly a loss?

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#194

Post by WA »

dave333 wrote: post #54

Occurs to me as a retired 69 year old former coder that AI makes us old geezers and geezesses somewhat competitive again with our younger colleagues. Need to learn yet another new framework? Let AI do the nitty gritty bit. Capitalize on your experience and higher level know how.

It doesn't work. I asked GPT-4 to migrate the following PHP code to JS:

    $csv = array_map('str_getcsv', file($argv[1]));
And this is the result:

    const csv = readFileSync(filename, 'utf-8').split('\n').map(line => line.split(','));
You can't parse CSV this way, because you need to respect delimiters. Counter example:

    1,"1,5",2
"1,5" being the German notation for "1.5". Hence, a simple split(',') will break this thing.

PHP's str_getcsv is, of course, a proper CSV parser and not a string splitter. Unless your code uses basically zero stdlib API calls, you will have to double check everything.

Please note that this kind of bug isn't even easy to catch if you test CSV file doesn't contain a quoted entry.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#195

Post by devnull3 »

Writing code is just one part of the overall list of things that an engineer does. Infact, barring the early versions of product/project more time is spent elsewhere in subsequent versions. With code it is more reading than writing new code. Other things on which time is spent are:

1. What needs to be built? What is feasible?

2. Investigations (bug reports, production issues, performance issues, etc)

3. Quality control (code reviews, writing tests)

I am only listing things which require considerable thinking and multi-domain skills. So LLMs (as of now) really only helps with one part of overall things to do.

Also, Rate of code generation with AI >> Rate of effective code review. So the bottlenecks will still be humans.

PS: About quality control: I think AI writing code and generating the test code is not desirable. If the underlying LLM has issues even the test code will have issues. Generating boilerplate is one thing but the key things about the tests (i.e. inputs/scenario & things to check) needs much better curation. This needs human intervention.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#196

Post by DonHopkins »

xlii wrote: post #188
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…

...and makes your code public domain (you just admitted here that you're using it)- if anyone accesses app developed by you, they can use it freely without any license. Worst thing - you're feeding potentially not your code into GPT. That'd be a fireable offense to me (and a very expensive lawsuit for at least couple places I know). Not an issue if you're lone wolf, though. It's a dystopian thought, but I wouldn't be…

>...and makes your code public domain

Just what is your definition of "public domain"?

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#197

Post by iamflimflam1 »

xlii wrote: post #188
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…

...and makes your code public domain (you just admitted here that you're using it)- if anyone accesses app developed by you, they can use it freely without any license. Worst thing - you're feeding potentially not your code into GPT. That'd be a fireable offense to me (and a very expensive lawsuit for at least couple places I know). Not an issue if you're lone wolf, though. It's a dystopian thought, but I wouldn't be…

Can you explain your reasoning behind this statement? Why does it make you code “public domain”?

And why can anyone use an app developed by you “freely without any license”?

Not saying you are wrong, but sweeping claims need some kind of evidence.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#198

Post by jiggawatts »

bruce511 wrote: post #187
pkdpic wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AI would likely make great managers. Given competent staff. Alas while I rag on about incompetent managers, it's not uncommon to find staff who, charitably, need a lot of "management".

The best part of AI management would be that for the first time, the manager would understand what their direct reports are saying.

If I say something like “There may be a compatibility risk due to DNS apex records”, I’ll have to spend hours explaining this to a disinterested non-technical manager. The AI understands the concept and doesn’t need me to explain.

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