251–260 of 1001 posts
I see this sort of take from a lot of people and I always tell them to do the same exercise. A cure for baseless fears. Pick an LLM. Any LLM. Ask it what the goat river crossing puzzle is. With luck, it will tell you about the puzzle involving a boatman, a goat, some vegetable, and some predator. If it doesn’t, it’s disqualified. Now ask it to do the same puzzle but with two goats and a cabbage (or whatever vegetable…
I see this sort of take from a lot of people and I always tell them to do the same exercise. A cure for baseless fears. Pick an LLM. Any LLM. Ask it what the goat river crossing puzzle is. With luck, it will tell you about the puzzle involving a boatman, a goat, some vegetable, and some predator. If it doesn’t, it’s disqualified. Now ask it to do the same puzzle but with two goats and a cabbage (or whatever vegetable…
My first try with o1. Seems right to me…what does this teach us about LLMs :)?
Maybe not today, and depending on your retirement date maybe you won’t be affected. But if your answer is “nothing” it is delusional. At a minimum you need to understand the failure modes of statistical models well enough to explain them to short-sighted upper management that sees you as a line in a spreadsheet. (And if your contention is you are seen as more than that, congrats on working for a unicorn.)
And if you’re making $250k today, don’t think they won’t jump at the chance to pay you half that and turn your role into a glorified (or not) prompt engineer. Your job is to find the failure modes and either mitigate them or flag them so the project doesn’t make insurmountable assumptions about “AI”.
And for the AI boosters:
I see the idea that AI will change nothing as just as delusional as the idea that “AI” will solve all of our problems. No it won’t. Many of our problems are people problems that even a perfect oracle couldn’t fix. If in 2015 you bought that self-driving cars would be here in 3 years, please see the above.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Your customers don't care how your code smells, as long as it solves their problem and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Software is interesting because if you buy a refrigerator, even an inexpensive one, you have certain expectations as to its basic functions. If the compressor were to cut out periodically in unexpected ways, affecting your food safety, you would return it. But in software customers seem to be condit…
Code quality does not affect final product quality IMHO. I worked in companies with terrible code, that deployed on an over-engineered cloud provider using custom containers hacked with a nail and a screwdriver, but the product was excellent. Had bugs here and there, but worked and delivered what needs to be delivered. SWEs need to realize that code doesn't really matter. For 70 years we are debating the best archite…
The day there is no need to debate systems architecture anymore is the heat death of the universe. Maybe before that AGI will be debating it for us, but it will be debated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time" That's why the question is future proof. Models get better with time, not worse.
If the last-mile problems of things like autonomous vehicles have been anything to go by, it seems the last mile problems of entrusting your entire business operations to complete black box software, or software written by a novices talking to complete black box, will be infinitely worse. There's plenty of low-code, no-code solutions around, and yet still lots of software. The slice of the pie will change, but it's v…
Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I have a job at a place I love and get more people in my direct network and extended contacting me about work than ever before in my 20 year career. And finally I keep myself sharp by always making sure I challenge myself creatively. I’m not afraid to delve into areas to understand them that might look “…
This is a fascinating comment, because it shows such a mis-reading of the history and point of technology (on a tech forum). Technological progress always leads to loss of skilled labor like your own, usually resulting in lower quality (but higher profits and often lower prices). Of COURSE an LLM won't be able to do work as well as you, just as industrial textile manufacturing could not, and still does not, produce t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a fascinating comment, because it shows such a mis-reading of the history and point of technology (on a tech forum). Technological progress always leads to loss of skilled labor like your own, usually resulting in lower quality (but higher profits and often lower prices). Of COURSE an LLM won't be able to do work as well as you, just as industrial textile manufacturing could not, and still does not, produce t…
This is a take that shows a completely lack of understanding on what software engineering is actually about.
It's likely we'll see LLMs used to build a lot of the cheap stuff that previously existed as arcane excel macros (I've already seen less technical folks use it to analyze spreadsheets) but there will remain hard problems that developers are needed to solve.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Code quality does not affect final product quality IMHO. I worked in companies with terrible code, that deployed on an over-engineered cloud provider using custom containers hacked with a nail and a screwdriver, but the product was excellent. Had bugs here and there, but worked and delivered what needs to be delivered. SWEs need to realize that code doesn't really matter. For 70 years we are debating the best archite…
> Code quality does not affect final product quality IMHO. What we need, admittedly, is more research and study around this. I know of one study which supports my position, but I'm happy to admit that the data is sparse. https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04374 From the abstract: "By analyzing activity in 30,737 files, we find that low quality code contains 15 times more defects than high quality code."
Most companies have no relation between their code and their products at all - a major food conglomerate will have hundreds or thousands of IT personnel and no direct link between defects in their business process automation code (which is the #1 employment of developers) and the quality of their products.
For companies where the product does have some tech component (e.g. refrigerators mentioned above) again, I'd bet that most of that companies developers don't work on any code that's intended to be in the product, in such a company there simply is far more programming work outside of that product than inside of one. The companies making a software-first product (like startups on hackernews) where a software defect implies a product defect are an exception, not the mainstream.