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A coder considers the waning days of the craft

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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#121

Post by jprete »

chii wrote: post #61
atleastoptimal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people I feel fear losing their siloed prestige built on arcane software knowledge. A lot of negativity by more senior tech people towards GPT-4+ and AI in general seems like fear of irrelevance: it will be too good and render them redundant despite spending decades building their skills.

At this moment, it is still not possible to do away with people in tech that have "senior" level knowledge and judgements. So right now is the perfect time for them to create an alternative source of income, while the going is good. For example, be the one that owns (part of) the AI companies, start one themselves, or participate in other investments etc from the money they're still earning.

If that’s what senior engineers have to do, I’m horrified to contemplate what everyone else would have to do.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#122

Post by hackertyper69 »

acscott wrote: post #78
stcroixx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If software dev is simplified to the point people working jobs like you describe are able to do it, wages will also plummet, so it’s not like their situation is going to improve.

If a developer making $1/hour produces $10 output (of something people buy), then if you add another developer making $1/hour produces $10 of output, you have $20 total product. Developer A and B can compete on their rate down to the point that it's not sustainable, and thus, an equilibrium will be struck. How is adding more developers going to reduce the output?

too many cooks in the kitchen

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#123

Post by TheBigSalad »

decasia wrote: post #52

I have been having the following debate with my friend who does AI and neural network stuff: Him: Coding will soon be obsolete, it will all be replaced by chatgpt-type code gen. Me: OK but the overwhelming majority of my job as a "senior engineer" is about communication, organizational leadership, and actually understanding all the product requirements and how they will interface with our systems. Yes, I write code,…

CEOs will be replaced before software engineers.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#124

Post by jprete »

golergka wrote: post #108
ryandrake wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real point. If the profits from AI (or robots) replacing Job X were distributed among the people who used to do Job X, I don't think anyone would mind. In fact it would be great for society! But that's not what's going to happen. The AI (and robots) will be owned by the Shrinking Few, all the profits and benefits will go to the owners, and the people who used to do Job X will have to re-skill to gamble on…

> If the profits from AI (or robots) replacing Job X were distributed among the people who used to do Job X, I don't think anyone would mind. Why on Earth would you expect something so unjust and unfair? Do you expect to pay a tax to former travel agents when you buy a plane ticket online? Do you pay to descendants of calculators (as in profession — the humans who did manual calculations) every time you use a modern…

AI is trained off the intellectual output of the people who did Job X, so it seems 100% fair to me.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#125

Post by unclebucknasty »

When using ChatGPT for some tedious challenges—say, select coding problems and infrastructure setup issues on AWS—I have more than once had the feeling that people weren't built for this kind of work anyway, and that it's exactly the kind for which computers were intended.

It wasn't always this way. Sure, programming has always been an exercise in precision and, thus, sometimes tedium. But, there's something in the way it has changed over the last decade or so. When I first started my career, I spent long hours solving problems of the algorithmic, logic, or control flow type. It was challenging mind work and called for creativity. There was real joy in making something work. It felt like creation.

Now, programming consists largely of wiring together pieces of code that you didn't write, and consulting StackOverflow to figure out why it doesn't work. It's following someone else's decisions in an opinionated framework. It's transpiling and tooling and configuration. And, now that programmers are expected to do much more, it's also using someone else's software for devops and tedious infrastructure buildouts, etc.

I'd say the joy in the software engineering role faded long before the arrival of ChatGPT. I'm actually hopeful that AI will help lighten the load of mundane tedium and help us return to the days when programming was fun.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#126

Post by jpatt »

waldohatesyou wrote: post #33

I feel like the headline does not match the article here. The headline implies that programming as a craft is to be replaced but the article ultimately argues that it will change significantly which matches my intuition as well. At the end of the day, the bar is being lowered. Is that a bad thing? From a selfish perspective, yes. From a societal perspective, no. At the risk of digressing, I think one of the issues th…

I don't really think law, medicine, and software engineering are the main drivers of wage inequality, though. If the lowest wage was minimum wage and the highest wage was a programmer salary, the Americas would be a very equitable economy.

Automating America's remaining paths to the middle class will only serve to widen the gap between capital owners who will own infrastructure for automation and those shoved into a shrinking piece of the unautomated pie.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#127

Post by tymscar »

nemo wrote: post #90
atleastoptimal wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think juniors are replaceable but seniors won't be in the near future? Is there some limit where AI just can't get better? That's like seeing the first prototype car ever built, which can go 20 miles per hour, and saying "Cars will never replace horses that can go 21 miles per hour"

>Is there some limit where AI just can't get better? Yes, without question. There must be, in fact. Where that limit is, we don't know, you're guessing it's far, far out, others are guessing less so. At this point the details of that future are unknowable.

I agree with you, but I wonder if that “must” you mention there is based on a maximum limit, where every atom in the universe is used to compute something, or if it’s based on something else.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#128

Post by TheRealPomax »

decasia wrote: post #52

I have been having the following debate with my friend who does AI and neural network stuff: Him: Coding will soon be obsolete, it will all be replaced by chatgpt-type code gen. Me: OK but the overwhelming majority of my job as a "senior engineer" is about communication, organizational leadership, and actually understanding all the product requirements and how they will interface with our systems. Yes, I write code,…

But now we introduce a junior engineer into the mix: _their_ job is none of those things, it's just to take the issues as filed, and implement them. They don't get the hard problems to solve, they get both the task and the acceptance criteria, and for them a future version of CodeGPT or whatever it'll be called will completely replace their programming skills. And then, 10 years later, they'll be the senior engineer. And then what?

Because today's seniors will be retired in a decade or two, and as they get replaced by people who actually benefited from automatic code generation, the concept of "coding" will (if this trend keeps up) absolutely become a thing that old timers used to do before we had machines to do it for us.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#129

Post by evilai »

dimgl wrote: post #18

I don't think it's that black and white. AI will get progressively better and sure, people will be faster to deliver things. But there still needs to be someone to be able to decipher it all. I've been using GPT-4 tons and it's great to help get to a certain destination, but it isn't able to arrive at that destination by itself a majority of times. Additionally I think that a lot of people will assume that once they…

I'm not sure why the downvotes, I think it's a reasonable opinion. But I disagree, I think what is being sought is automation close to intelligence, and if progress continues (which is questionable itself), this system could eventually supplant humans in varying degrees. Initially, this may manifest pragmatically with salary cuts and job losses. However, in the long term, it may evolve to a more real and comprehensive overhaul of our roles. I think the main difference in my understanding is that it is not a tool like a hammer, it is more a tool that has the potential to design other tools (so far very simple) but if its capacity increases, it could automate significant parts of our work.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#130

Post by hiddencost »

> 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, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly.

I mean ... IDK, if you can't write that on your own without research, I don't think you should be writing a eulogy for programming in the New Yorker.

(I just wrote two version, one using python's random.sample and the other more verbosely, to double check myself.)

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