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Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#211

Post by jabradoodle »

kromem wrote: post #201
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…

Oh, it will improve by several orders of magnitude. But even then, it's not 'replacing' you. It's just going to let you spend less time on BS and more time on the things that are your maximal value contributions to a project. If I had a dozen junior or mid level devs you could hand work off to, would that save you time? Would you kick back and not review what they were doing, particularly around business critical par…

For sure it will still mostly make sense to have a division of labour where you have people who are focused on building software.

The question is if generative AI is powerful enough to reduce the number of programmers needed to achieve a task, without creating enough opportunities to replace those programmers.

Before we are all replaced there could be a moment where demand for software engineers is 10x less.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#212

Post by wxce »

epylar wrote: post #126
skeeter2020 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting take, ignoring the fact there will be far less people to pay into your magical UBI pool. How do you reconcile a huge glut of unemployed people and the resources to hand out extensive welfare benefits?

I think the idea behind UBI is the corporations will pay most of the taxes required.

But then who would pay the corporations, if most of the population is on UBI? If only a subset of the population makes money (<30%), would that be enough to feed the rest of the population and to help them live a life without poverty?

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#213

Post by strus »

If you worry about "staying ahead of generative AI" in it's current state, then I think you are not a good coder and you should learn more instead of worrying about that.

LLMs are only good in writing new code without surrounding context. They are pretty useless in legacy codebases and in codebases with a lot of internal solutions. I've used Copilot for 2 months at work and maybe 10% of suggestions were useful, and from that 10% maybe 10% did not contain bugs.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#214

Post by IanCal »

kromem wrote: post #204
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.

Integration with linters is going to be the next stage in generative coding. It should suggest, lint the suggestion in the background, and if it passes offer the suggestion and if not provide the linting issues output to rework the suggestion. In general, token costs going down will in turn increase the number of multi-pass generation systems over single-pass systems, which is going to improve dramatically. Combine a…

> It should suggest, lint the suggestion in the background

This makes a big difference, I'm making code writing stuff at the moment.

Injecting results from a language server while it's generating would be huge imo - same as giving humans autocomplete & hints.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#215

Post by jabradoodle »

oofsa wrote: post #36

The current AI may improve coder performance by only 5%, but it can improve non-coders' learning speed by 1000%. Learning to code has become significantly easier because of ChatGPT, and many university students are already using it for learning. Not only can they let ChatGPT write boilerplate code, but they can also let ChatGPT write comments for code snippets they don't understand and explain unfamiliar syntax. I wo…

It's going to be interesting to see this play out.

I personally am glad I learned to code without LLMs and think I would struggle with them. They let you get a lot done without understanding any of it, and then suddenly you hit a wall.

Also, I wonder how many people may choose not to learn to code in the first place, because they think it is about to be automated.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#216

Post by strus »

Kiro wrote: post #100
DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did read it, but the whole premise is flawed due to an apparently incomplete understanding of how LLMs work. Including code samples in your prompt won't have the effect you think it will. LLMs are trained to produce results that are statistically likely to be syntactically well-formed according to assumptions made about how "language" works. So when you provide code samples, the model incorporates those into the re…

If it works it works and it definitely works for me. I've been using Copilot for about a year and I can't imagine coding without it again. I cannot recall any bugs slipping by because of it. If anything it makes me write less bugs, since it has no problem taking tedious edge cases into account.

> I've been using Copilot for about a year and I can't imagine coding without it again

I for example used Copilot for 2 months at work and wouldn't pay for it. Most suggestions where either useless or buggy. But I work in a huge C++ codebase, maybe that's hard for it as C++ is also hard for ChatGPT.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#217

Post by quickthrower2 »

WA wrote: post #194
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.…

One shot code translation is very… September 2023

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#218

Post by jabradoodle »

irrational wrote: post #77

I work for a Fortune 100 company. Recently an email was sent to all 100,000 employees saying that nobody was allowed to use DALL-E 2, ChatGPT, Codex, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Microsoft’s Copilot, and GitHub Copilot, etc. due to concerns about those tools using other people’s IP (meaning our company might end up illegally using their IP) or the potential that the tools might get a hold of our IP through our use o…

I'm not a maximalist who is thinking we are all about to be automated; but I do question the logic of "the AI can't do my job so I'm safe".

Maybe the AI can't do your job, but maybe it can do the job of many people who would have the skills to do your job.

If this happens and the new capabilities don't create enough new jobs, then the risk to software engineers is supply and demand.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#219

Post by 3np »

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…

Indeed. "AI will only do the boiler-plate and crud, while us senior engineers won't be replaced any time soon". Sure, you get yours.

But what about the next generation of devs and engineers - where do we source the senior engineers replacing us when 90+% of all entry-level and junior positions which actually involve writing repetitive boilerplate to a large extent are gone, and the few remaining are offshored and outsourced?

Many (most?) of us did a lot of automatable work in order to get the experience required to be able to proficiently actually automate the work, including managing LLM-generated code. If we replace our juniors with machines, we won't have many seniors down the road.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#220

Post by misja111 »

yawnxyz wrote: post #132

LLM-based regex generation is probably my absolute favorite thing. I give it a bunch of examples and say "create a regex of that" Does it hallucinate? Probably! Do I "hallucinate" while trying to clobber together terrible regexes? Absolutely

I try to avoid using regexes for exactly that reason.
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