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GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

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Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#61

Post by CityOfThrowaway »

tyfighter wrote: post #28
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #11

I have a feeling this person is using far-from-frontier models, totally disconnected from the development environment. Using, like, gpt-4o is extremely not useful for programming. But using Claude Code in your actual repo is insanely useful. Gotta use the right tool + model.

How is anyone just supposed to know that? It's not hard to find vim, but no one says, "You need to be running this extra special vim development branch where people are pushing vim to the limits!" Yes, it's fragmented, and changing fast, but it's not reasonable to expect people just wanting a tool to be following the cutting edge.

I agree that it might not be reasonable to expect people to keep up with the latest.

For this specific thing (LLM-assisted coding), we are still in nerd territory where there are tremendous gains to be had from keeping up and tinkering.

There's a lot of billions dollars being invested to give devs who don't want to do this the right tools. We aren't quite there yet, largely because the frontier is moving so fast.

I made my original comment because it was so far from my experience, and I assumed it was because I am using a totally different set of tools.

If somebody really doesn't want to be left behind, the solution is to do the unreasonable: read hacker news everyday and tinker.

Personally, I enjoy that labor. But it's certainly not for everybody.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#62

Post by bionhoward »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #58
avalys wrote: post #9

I have a degree in CS from MIT and did professional software engineering from 2004 - 2020. I recently started a company in another field and haven’t done any real development for about 4 years. Earlier this summer I took a vacation and decided to start a small software hobby project specific to my industry. I decided to try out Cursor for the first time. I found it incredibly helpful at saving time implementing all t…

For a hobby project that seems fine, but for commercially valuable work how do you handle privacy concerns?

Cursor has a privacy mode with zero data retention and no training

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#64

Post by 3vidence »

In a non-smug kind of way sometimes I just wonder if they types of problems I work on are just harder (at least for an LLM) than a lot of people.

Currently working at a FAANG on some very new tech, have access to all the latest and greatest but LLMs / agents really do not seem adequate working on absolutely massive codebases on entirely new platforms.

Maybe I will have to wait a few years for the stuff I'm working on to enter the mass market so the LLMs can be retrained on it.

I do find them very very useful as advanced search / stack overflow assistants.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#65

Post by gronglo »

siscia wrote: post #6
dumbmrblah wrote: post #4

I really wish posts like this included the parameters that they were using. What model? What was the question? How many shots? Etc etc You’re going to get vastly different responses if you’re using Opus versus 4o.

Do you really? Frontier models seems remarkably similar in performance. Yeah some nuances for sure, but the whole article could apply to every model.

Opus, in my opinion, is steps away from AGI. 4o doesn't come close.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#66

Post by astrange »

tyfighter wrote: post #28
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #11

I have a feeling this person is using far-from-frontier models, totally disconnected from the development environment. Using, like, gpt-4o is extremely not useful for programming. But using Claude Code in your actual repo is insanely useful. Gotta use the right tool + model.

How is anyone just supposed to know that? It's not hard to find vim, but no one says, "You need to be running this extra special vim development branch where people are pushing vim to the limits!" Yes, it's fragmented, and changing fast, but it's not reasonable to expect people just wanting a tool to be following the cutting edge.

That's what people always seemed to say about emacs, that you haven't used it unless you've learned 300 incredibly complicated key bindings and have replaced half the program with a mail reader.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#67

Post by lsy »

I think the wide variance in responses here is explainable by tool preference and the circumstance of what you want to work on. You might also have felt "behind" not knowing or wanting to use Dreamweaver, or React, or Ruby on Rails, or Visual Studio + .NET, all tools that allowed developers at the time to accelerate their tasks greatly. But you'll note that probably most programmers today who are successful never learned those tools, so the fact that they accelerated certain tasks didn't result in a massive gap between users and non-users.

People shouldn't worry about getting "left behind" because influencers and bloggers are overindexing on specific tech rather than more generalist skills. At the end of the day the learning curve on these things is not that steep - that's why so many people online can post about it. When the need arises and it makes sense, the IDE/framework/tooling du jour will be there and you can learn it then in a few weeks. And if past is prologue in this industry, the people who have spent all their time fiddling with version N will need to reskill for version N+1 anyways.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#68

Post by nurettin »

In my experience, AI assistance can't really do what you can't. Sure, you can force it, but the result will be a discardable mess.

Yesterday I used Gemini and Claude cli to create a symbolic regression library in C++ with added state of the art features (hobby). Gemini is there to assist when Claude runs out of context. It took me six hours. I cannot imagine how anyone could do this without being an expert in these fields.

The initial code generation was pretty much on the spot, with a few subtle bugs here and there, few inefficient choices.

As I made them add features, there were so many bad decisions that would break the initial interface simplicity, add shared states, constantly switch between SoA and AoS without a plan, introduce circular deps for no reason. I fought back, keeping code concise and functional, removed randomly introduced oop features, added low hanging optimizations. I hand fixed some of the compilation errors and warnings myself to prevent them from using up unnecessary context like a taxi driver who takes you to the long route.

How would anyone who doesn't know what they are doing accomplish all this? They would have to learn.

Sure, the bar is lower. This is a task that would have taken me a few weekends of hard work. And mind you this is a hobby project. I would've lost a significant amount of hair if I was fighting AI assistance while under pressure at work.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#69

Post by mort96 »

bionhoward wrote: post #62
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a hobby project that seems fine, but for commercially valuable work how do you handle privacy concerns?

Cursor has a privacy mode with zero data retention and no training

And you're working in a context where you're comfortable shipping all your (employer's? client's?) code to some random US company based on their promises?

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#70

Post by chrisco255 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #35

I spend a fair amount of time on open source and one thing I noticed is that in real pieces of software it doesn't look like all these 10x and 100x AI engineers are anywhere to be found. VLC has like 4000 open issues. Why aren't the AI geniuses fixing these? Nobody has ever any actual code to show, and if they do it's "here's an LED that blinks every time my dog farts, I could've never done it on my own!". I'm feelin…

This is something I've been thinking about too. I think lower skill devs seem to feel the most ecstatic about LLMs as are able to prompt something into existence that is beyond their skill level, and that feels like magic. It very quickly becomes a crutch, however, and a junior developer may struggle to become a senior in skill level with too much dependency on Cursor and tools like it. They definitely lose their edge on complex products.

I find it can be a great time saver for language reference and for rapid fire questions, but it isn't able to, as of yet, operate at an expert level on a complex novel codebase.

Maybe it gets there in another year or two. But it currently makes enough mistakes at that level that it isn't worth it.

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