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A coder considers the waning days of the craft

newyorker.com

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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#131

Post by al_borland »

fisherjeff wrote: post #41
cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. While GPT4 is incredible, it fails OFTEN. And it fails in ways that aren’t very clear. And it fails harder when there’s clearly not enough training resources on the subject matter. But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of t…

Also, I think we are quite a ways out from a tool being able to devise a solution to a complex high-level problem without online precedent, which is where I find the most satisfaction anyway. LLMs in particular can be a very fast, surprisingly decent (but, as you mention, very fallible) replacement for Stack Overflow, and, as such, a very good complement to a programmer's skills – seems to me like a net positive at l…

It's also where I find most of the work. There are plenty of off the shelf tools to solve all the needs of the company I work at. However, we still end up making a lot of our own stuff, because we want something that the off the shelf option doesn't do, or it can't scale to the level we need. Other times we buy two tools that can't talk to each other and need to write something to make them talk. I often hear people online say they simply copy/paste stuff together from Stack Overflow, but that has never been something I could do at my job.

My concern isn't about an LLM replacing me. My concern is our CIO will think it can, firing first, and thinking later.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#132

Post by Groxx »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #72
swatcoder wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at its best, GPT promises the opposite: streamlining the least arcane tasks so that experts don’t need to waste so much time on them. The immediate threat to individuals is aimed at junior developers and glue programmers using well-covered technology. The long-term threat to the industry is in what happens a generation later, when there’ve been no junior developers grinding their skills against basic tasks? In th…

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"

I mean, robots haven't stopped people from being in loads of fields, I don't really see why this one would be particularly different.

What they do mostly-consistently do is lower the cost floor. Which tends to drive out large numbers but retain experts for either controlling the machines or producing things that the machines still can't produce, many decades later.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#133

Post by golergka »

labster wrote: post #9
betaby wrote: post #3

Article itself feels like it was written by LLM - unnecessarily long, pretentious and boring without much of a substance. But hey, folks from this forum aren't the target audience for 'Newyorker'!

I’m pretty sure New Yorker writer is the first job that LLMs will replace.

Writers and musicians wont be replaced with AI because the authors persona is part of the product.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#134

Post by gymbeaux »

hiddencost wrote: post #130

> 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…

Yeah it’s not a challenging problem, but the specific code example isn’t the point. Replace his example with “at one point, we wanted a command that would convert a PNG to a JPG….” most of us couldn’t do that without Google.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#135

Post by bdangubic »

swatcoder wrote: post #99
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"

LLM’s synthesize new material that looks most like material they’ve been trained on. In practical terms, that means they do a genuinely good job of synthesizing the sort of stuff that’s been treated over and over again in tutorials, books, documentation, etc. The more times something’s been covered. the greater variety in which it’s been covered, and the greater similarity it has to other things that have already bee…

Every senior person thinks just like you do... The fact that you "earned (y)our senior roles rather than just aged into them" has nothing to do whether or not your skills can be replaced technology like LLM's. Chances are that you most likely earned your senior role in a specific company / field and your seniority has less to do with your technical skills but more with domain knowledge.

Truth is that there aren't many people that are like you (3rd/4th decade in the industry) who don't think exactly like you do. And truth is that most of you are very wrong ;)

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#136

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

commandlinefan wrote: post #50
cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. While GPT4 is incredible, it fails OFTEN. And it fails in ways that aren’t very clear. And it fails harder when there’s clearly not enough training resources on the subject matter. But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of t…

> There’s so much of the world that would be better off if GOOD software was cheaper and easier to make. But… we’d need far, far fewer programmers. And programming was the last thing humans were supposed to be able to do to ear a living.

I disagree. For every 100 problems that would be convenient to solve in software, maybe 1 is important enough to the whims of the market that there are actually programmers working on it. If software becomes 100x easier to make, then you don't end up with fewer programmers, you end up with more problems being solved.

And once 100% of the problems that can be solved with software are already solved with software... that's pretty much post-scarcity, isn't it?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#138

Post by c2occnw »

commandlinefan wrote: post #50
cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. While GPT4 is incredible, it fails OFTEN. And it fails in ways that aren’t very clear. And it fails harder when there’s clearly not enough training resources on the subject matter. But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of t…

> There’s so much of the world that would be better off if GOOD software was cheaper and easier to make. But… we’d need far, far fewer programmers. And programming was the last thing humans were supposed to be able to do to ear a living.

When we get to that point -- beyond a machine regurgitating reasonable facsimiles of code based on human examples, but actually designing and implementing novel systems from the ground up -- we'll need far, far fewer workers in general.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#140

Post by [deleted] »

jelsisi wrote: post #77

The article came to a romantic end that doesn't satisfy how I feel about the workplace now. I have to admit a dirty truth, that I joined this field because of the pay and job stability, not simply for a love of programming. Because of this I feel distressed for its future. No longer can someone walk into a job slightly under qualified and grow with time. Companies will opt for smaller teams of 10xers that with the co…

[deleted]
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