AI is doing nothing but raising expectations, and so it should. Stop crying and adapt!
A coder considers the waning days of the craft
791–800 of 1001 posts
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#792> At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather,
If this is the skill level of the coder then I’m not surprised that they are worried about GPT. However they should be stoked GPT can help them code at a much higher level
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#793I have a simple front-end test that I give to junior devs. Every few months I see if ChatGPT can pass it. It hasn’t. It can’t. It isn’t even close. It answers questions confidently but with subtle inaccuracies. The code that it produces is the same kind of non-sense that you get from recent bootcamp devs who’ve “mastered” the 50 technologies on their eight page résumé. If it’s gotten better, I haven’t noticed. Self-d…
I was on a team developing a critical public safety system on a tight deadline a few years ago, and i had to translate some wireframes for the admin back-end into CSS. I did a passable job but it wasn’t a perfect match. I was asked to redo it by the team-lead. It had zero business value, but such was the state of our team…being pixel perfect was a source of pride. It was one of the incidents that made me to stop fron…
Would you give the critical public safety system bit to ChatGPT?
This scenario reminds me of:
If a job's worth doing, do it yourself. If it's not worth doing, give it to Rimmer.
Except now it's "give it to ChatGPT"
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#794Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may think it did a good job because of your limited CSS ability. I'd be amazed if ChatGPT can create pixel-perfect animations and transitions along with reusable clean CSS code which supports all of the browser requirements at your org. I've seen the similar claims made on Twitter by people with zero programming ability claiming they've used ChatGPT to build an app. Although 99% of the time what they've actually…
Here’s the thing though: If a new version of the app can be generated on the fly in minutes, why would we need to worry about reusability? GPT generated software can be disposable . Why even check the source code in to git - the original source artifact is the prompt after all.
Let me know how you get on with a disposable financial system, safety system or electoral voting system.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#795Earlier quoted context omitted.
I encountered this with particular problem in python. Seemed like GPT wanted to always answer with something that had a lot of examples on the web, even if most answers were not correct. So garbage in, garbage out problem. I'm bit worried that the LLM's will continue to degrade as the web has increasing amount of LLM generated content. Seems to already be occurring.
Why do people that hand wave away the entire concept of LLMs because of one instance of it doing one thing poorly that they could do better, and yet always seem to fail to just show us their concrete example?
Technically the garbage in/garbage out, problem is not being hand waved away.
I've seen a lot of articles on this, or sometimes called a degrading feedback loop. The more of the web that is LLM generated, then the more new models will be trained on generated data, and will fuzz out. Or 'drift'.
For a specific example. Sorry, I didn't grab screen shots at the time. It had to do with updating a datafame in pandas. It gave me solution that generated an error, I'd continue to ask it to change steps to fix previous errors, and it would go in a circle, fix it, but generate other warnings, and further changes to eliminate warnings, and it would recommend the same thing that originally caused an error.
Also. I'm a big fan. Use GPT-4 all the time. SO not waving away, but kind of curious how it sometimes fails in un-expected ways.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#796I’m not going to use gpt, at least not for coding. That’s not something I’m hearing other programmers say, at least not often. They may say it’s not good enough, yet, or that they as a senior dev don’t have any use for it. These strike me as cope. What I say is that I’m just not going to use it. I’m not sure if it’s a political decision I’ve made, but I’m sure it’s the right decision for me. I will simply change careers or go homeless before I try and compete with these great new efficiencies. I won’t take part in the disruption. It’s clearly degenerate.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#797Reading the responses on this page reminds of the quote
“it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#798Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I recently asked ChatGPT to produce similar CSS and it did so flawlessly. I use ChatGPT every day for many tasks in my work and find it very helpful, but I simply do not believe this. > The article points this out: middling generalists can now compete with specialists. I'd say it might allow novices to compete with middling generalists, but even that is a stretch. On the contrary, ChatGPT is actually best suited to…
That's about my experience. The worst dev on my team uses ChatGPT a lot, and its facilitated him producing more bad code more quickly. I'm not sure it's a win for anyone, and he's still unlikely to be with the team in a year. It allows a dev who doesn't care about their craft or improving to generate code without learning anything. The code they generate today or a year from today is the same quality. Part of it is t…
> ChatGPT is not going to tell you how to design a system, architect properly, automate, package, test, deploy, etc.
If you ask the right questions it absolutely can.
I’ve found that most people thinking ChatGPT is a rube are expecting too much extrapolation from vague prompts. “Make me a RESTful service that provides music data.” ChatGPT will give you something that does that. And then you’ll proceed to come to hacker news and talk about all the dumb things it did.
But, if you have a conversation with it. Tell it more of the things you’re considering. Some of the trades off you’re making—how the schema might grow over time, it’s kind of remarkable.
You need to treat it like a real whiteboarding session.
I also find it incredibly useful for getting my code into more mainstream shape. I have my own quirks that I’ve developed over time learning a million different things in a dozen different programming languages. It’s nice to be able to hand your code to ChatGPT and simply ask “is this idiomatic for this language?”
I think the people most disappointed with ChatGPT are trying to treat it like a Unix CLI instead of another developer to whiteboard with.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#799Earlier quoted context omitted.
4th option. They're trying to enter the market and get a good job, but some companies consider them less experienced but more expensive than Copilot.
Fewer but more senior resources seems possible. I have already seen the impact of AI systems, reducing the number of junior coding positions and outsourcing. On the other hand, anyone who actually takes the time to get good with AI coding tools can be performing at senior levels, much more quickly, so there’s that too. I’m not convinced that it’s some kind of apocalypse as much as it is a massive shift that is going…
> get good with AI coding tools can be performing at senior levels
No. They are orthogonal modes of thinking. That said, getting good at prompting LLM is already making people better communicators. That will be a big benefit to seniors as they can use their prompting skills to direct junior staff more efficiently. But better at thinking about the trade offs that senior devs need to think about, nope.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#800How can a field that is less than 80 years old wane?
Y’all’s recency bias shows way too strongly. Your definition of junior and senior is purely anecdotal and based around what the brass at your companies “award”. Not to mention the arbitrary conflation of algorithm design and the actual process of writing sustainable code. It’s a show fair of “my way is best”, and science waits for no opinions as such.