As someone who bounces back and forth between I will be okay to anxiety that I am doomed. I have no idea how to prepare for this future...
A coder considers the waning days of the craft
191–200 of 1001 posts
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#192I 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.
Which company and board of directors do you see doing that first?
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#193I think one of the undervalued things is the hack-iness/curiosity nature of (good) developers which will be hard to replace. I imagine there'll be a very short time where developers are in even more demand than they are now and that will quickly wane as everyone realises that the only job is entrepreneurship.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#194Maybe 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…
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.
Can you blame them? Cushy tech jobs are the jackpot in this life. Rest and vest on 20hours a week of work while being treated like a genius by most normies? Sign me up!
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#195> 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…
Every time I hear coding referred to as a craft I sort of hate it. On one hand I love the idea of it being a highly skilled craft - knowing the intricacies of the language and the machine to solve any problem, being a respected expert, producing a product worthy of pride. On the other hand, most of what we do is display [some content] on [some page] (probably sloppily due to deadlines), or print 100 random entries from a file...
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#196this is by james somers! long arc from 'there's a gold rush and I'm the shovel' back in the day
I guess you mean this article from 2013 https://aeon.co/essays/dad-s-company-made-burgers-mine-just-... ?
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#197Maybe 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…
I’ve never found GPT-4 capable of producing a useful solution in my niche of engineering. When I’m stumped, it’s usually on a complex and very multi-faceted problem where the full scope doesn’t fit into the human brain very well. And for these problems, GPT will produce some borderline unworkable solutions. It’s like a jack of all trades and master of none in code. It’s knowledge seems a mile wide and an inch deep. G…
What’s your niche?
I think much of using it well is understanding what it can and can’t do (though of course this is a moving target).
It’s great when the limiting factor is knowledge of APIs, best practices, or common algorithms. When the limiting factor is architectural complexity or understanding how many different components of a system fit together, it’s less useful.
Still, I find I can often save time on more difficult tasks by figuring out the structure and then having GPT-4 fill in the blanks. It’s a much better programmer once you get it started down the right path.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#198> 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, when I read that I also tried the first thing that popped into my mind - extremely crude/slow but works in bash and only took like 20 seconds without looking anything up: cat /usr/share/dict/words | while read LINE; do echo "$RANDOM $LINE"; done | sort -h | head -n 100 | awk '{ print $2 }'
sort -R is fairly widely supported, although arguably that's cheating.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#199> 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…
Every time I hear coding referred to as a craft I sort of hate it. On one hand I love the idea of it being a highly skilled craft - knowing the intricacies of the language and the machine to solve any problem, being a respected expert, producing a product worthy of pride. On the other hand, most of what we do is display [some content] on [some page] (probably sloppily due to deadlines), or print 100 random entries fr…
well, in that regard you're a fancy carpenter assembling IKEA dressers. Carpentry is still a craft.... most people just need IKEA. :)
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | shuf | head -n 10 $ convert foo.png foo.jpg Took me almost literally two seconds to come up with that, unless your point is that at one point I had to learn it which, yeah, sure. What am I missing?
As the parent comment says, the specifics of the example are irrelevant. Pretend you didn’t know that the dictionary file existed, or where it was stored, or that cat/shuf/head existed, or even how to compose programs in your shell.