I felt a similar way about video games after learning about databases. Every action I did in the game was less real/meaningful because it was a just a db transaction.
Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4
21–30 of 177 posts
Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4
#22CS has always been too much about optimization and not enough about doing. Now all that's left is doing!
Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4
#23I feel your anguish, but I think you're being defeatist. There will still be a source of income in fixing the AI generated code. It won't be as fun though.
Maintenance maintenance maintenance… Software needs to evolve and be fixed. Bugs appearing after the fact are not something new afaik.
And maintenance by the way.
Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4
#24For what it’s worth, I’ve been trying to verify the claim from Microsoft and OpenAI that we would get more software in the future when the price of software would decrease. In other words, they claim that there is a supply problem for software and not a demand problem. So far, I find it a pretty extreme statement, but it appears true here in the Netherlands. Most employees that I talk to at various industries can imm…
There's already a whole industry of no-/low-code platforms that try to solve that very problem, Airtable etc. And a lot of companies have been very successful adopting them… or the last half dozen waves of digitalization.
But in my experience, there's some hard to solve bottlenecks for those sorts of organizations that still insist on largely paper-based workflows:
1. Their workflows are such a byzantine mess that either nobody understands them sufficiently to explain them (be it to a programmer, or to a no-code platform, or to an AI), or they're fundamentally broken and only fudged along by people who shouldn't be allowed to do their job, if the process was implemented "correctly"… or both.
2. It takes a special breed of people who have the necessary analytical skills to really pull off architecting automated workflows that work in practice. It comes natural to some managers and consultants, a lot of programmers, and a bunch of others, but it's not a widespread skill, and those individuals know their worth. People who already can't conceptualize the underlying problems won't be able to do so with the help of AI any time soon.
3. It still takes budget to implement such workflows, AI or not, and the affected orgs usually don't want to spend any money on improving themselves.
Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4
#25I have the opposite take... there's a program I use (and ties me to Windows) called WikidPad[1], it's a personal Wiki, written in Python. The win32 version works great, and because it's compiled (back in 2018), the binary should do so forever. The Linux distribution is source based, and broke when WxWidgets changed the name/nature of some key parameters to its calls. I'm a Pascal programmer, not a Python programmer..…
> his is the first time I've seen it applied to programming. Programming is just a means to an end. I've never considered programming to be an industry. C++ versus Pascal mindset. :) > This is the first time I've seen it applied to programming. Programming is just a means to an end. I've never considered programming to be an industry. Yes and no. It did not replace the good accountants who actually orchestrated the w…
> The junior devs whose whole job it is to translate architectural and design specifications into excessively verbose boilerplate code will struggle to survive, but the software architects above them will find a new means through which to express the analytical thinking, process planning and understanding of complex dependencies that they're paid for.
Which will, in turn, further drive shortages of good developer talent long term. The industry thinks there's a tech labor shortage now? Just wait until the ladder has been completely kicked over for young folks trying to find their career footing in tech.
We were all once juniors, doing work that could primarily/completely be replaced by AI. We had to do that grunt work to learn the lessons that make us architects today.
Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4
#26Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4
#27These GPT programs literally don't know what the code does (or the meaning of their output in general). They are Large Language Models. They just know (roughly) how to make responses in a particular language that make sense (english, C++, wingdings). They do not understand the "sense that is made" however.
This requires subject matter experts, like yourself, to use and implement.
These LLM are tools. They are not sentient.
Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4
#28I wouldn't worry. It's code output is 50% garbage. I'm not in fear of my job. All the hypsters assuming this will destroy lawyers, accountants, doctors etc clearly don't understand correctness isn't something they can just tag on to a prediction machine.
Next version will be 40% garbage. Then 30%, then 20%... And we got to the point where it has as much garbage as human code.
Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> his is the first time I've seen it applied to programming. Programming is just a means to an end. I've never considered programming to be an industry. C++ versus Pascal mindset. :) > This is the first time I've seen it applied to programming. Programming is just a means to an end. I've never considered programming to be an industry. Yes and no. It did not replace the good accountants who actually orchestrated the w…
I wonder how can the future architect get there, if going through the junior stages is suddenly not an option anymore. Because those all-understanding software architects don't just pop into existence.
There are new accountants being minted all the time, spreadsheets didn't stop that.
Artists didn't stop because the camera made it possible to do what otherwise took hours with a canvas and oils.
The nature of programming may change, but it's still about using computers to solve problems.
--- Putting on the old guy hat ---
You kids didn't learn programming from magazine articles typing in your favorite little game into a computer that went away when you powered it off.
You didn't have to toggle in a boot loader before you could use the computer.
You didn't dream of one day having a modem and being able to call BBSs, then dream of your own phone line that you didn't have to share.
Yet, ya'll turned out ok, despite all those changes.
It'll be ok, kid... it'll be OK.
Computer programs will always be complex beasties with bugs hiding in the corners. There will always be a class of people willing to find those bugs and make things easier to use. You are that type of person, right? Good!
Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4
#30Where is that tool I can use?