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In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

cyberdemon.org

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Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#21

Post by throwbadubadu »

876978095789789 wrote: post #16
moonchrome wrote: post #13

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…

> all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations Are you using GPT3 or 4?

4 and full agree and still confusedly wondering.. I know I will be shouted down, but what are all you "tech guys" doing in your daily biz, just glueing hyperdocumented boilerplate together and spitting out the same textbook examples, I don't get it.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#22

Post by 13years »

moonchrome wrote: post #13

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…

That has been somewhat my experience as well. I found ChatGPT sometimes to useful to provide a hint for something I don't know how to do.

However, I never was able to get it to write a successful function for anything that would have been useful. It got it wrong every time.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#23

Post by livelielife »

msoad wrote: post #3

Much like the evolving layers of abstraction in technology, the necessity for individuals to master the intricate, underlying layers wanes as time progresses. The article brings to mind the analogy of Assembly programming; while there are undoubtedly experts in this domain whose contributions are indispensable, the majority of programmers can comfortably rely on higher-level abstractions without delving into the comp…

just makes me want to combine compilers with understanding of LLMs and how chatGPT does what it does to make real next-generation (but really next level) programing languages.

LLMs will make distinctions like functional, dynamic, procedural, ... become obsolete just like all assembly languages are now just assembly, but in fact used to vary by architecture (and even by each architecture's generation/version)

assembly -> C -> something made with a compiler which embeds chatGTP

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#24

Post by hgsgm »

dmazin wrote: post #8
13years wrote: post #6

I am an existentialist: I am perfectly comfortable in a world with no inherent meaning. Sheer existence and action brings me joy. I spend hours of my day tinkering with computers not because of utility, but for the pleasure it brings. I think if we could elicit this persons thoughts thoroughly we would find "meaning" underlying their perceived joy.

You can elicit my thoughts to your heart’s content. Of course there’s meaning. That’s different from inherent meaning (imbued into our world via a god or something).

Generic expression, if not god.

Satisfying my animalistic/primatistic/humanist emotional urges is the meaning of my life.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#25

Post by majormajor »

moonchrome wrote: post #13

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…

I think there's two camps of think-piece authors emerging - the ones who've tried a bunch of different examples of things and got passable-to-great-looking results; and the ones going deeper into specific areas and hitting the wall in terms of expertise and specificity. Using the GPT 4 API, I'm definitely often hitting limitations, especially around depth of information, and having to "prompt engineer" my way around them. After using a dozen prompt variants to try to prod it in the direction I want without seeing it reflect those changes, a bit of the magic wears off.

I'm bearish on the idea of long-term prompt engineering being a big skillset since I imagine the "understanding the prompt" side of the tools will get better, but I don't see it necessarily getting around the need for specificity of input. It feels like writing a task ticket and giving it to a junior person - what you get back might not be what you need, and a lot of time the true difficulty is knowing exactly what you need up front. Reducing that cycle time is wonderful, but doesn't replace the hard earned skills of knowing what to make.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#26

Post by hgsgm »

abledon wrote: post #11

Is every modern piece of software going to have `OPENAI_API_KEY` environment variable somewhere inside it ? uhoh

It's the same when you use FOSS backup software that asks you to input your S3 API key or your remote host ssh key.

The only crucial difference is that we currently lack competition and self-ownes versions.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#27

Post by xg15 »

msoad wrote: post #3

Much like the evolving layers of abstraction in technology, the necessity for individuals to master the intricate, underlying layers wanes as time progresses. The article brings to mind the analogy of Assembly programming; while there are undoubtedly experts in this domain whose contributions are indispensable, the majority of programmers can comfortably rely on higher-level abstractions without delving into the comp…

Yeah, and you can thank those abstractions that today, we have Microsoft bragging that they got the Teams chat client down to only 9 seconds loading time on a machine with several multi-GHz cores and gigabytes of RAM. But that's all fine I guess, because it's good enough.

Good enough for what? Good enough that people will grudgingly use it because instantly quitting their job over it would be overblown. Their life will only become a little bit worse through it.

I'm frankly scared how AI-created "good enough" software will look.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#28

Post by hgsgm »

ilaksh wrote: post #10

I feel the same way I think. These days, I am happy when I am able to use GPT4 to complete a task faster or easier, but am also happy when I write some code "by myself". However, as far as the conclusion of the article. This "age" started only a few months ago. If you are going to call it an age, then the conclusion doesn't hold up. In the long term, programming "by hand" is likely to be similar to wood carving today…

You don't even need antique examples like "wood carving".

Modern web app developers rarely write HTML by hand. They generate it from higher level language or templates.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#29

Post by 876978095789789 »

throwbadubadu wrote: post #21
876978095789789 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations Are you using GPT3 or 4?

4 and full agree and still confusedly wondering.. I know I will be shouted down, but what are all you "tech guys" doing in your daily biz, just glueing hyperdocumented boilerplate together and spitting out the same textbook examples, I don't get it.

I simply asked whether they were using 3 or 4. I don't have access to 4 yet.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#30

Post by mattcantstop »

I’ve been using AI to teach me concepts, and it’s great at it. It can sometimes be wrong, so having familiarity with the topic is important in letting it teach you. But OpenAI knows programming languages really well. It’s been amazing at teaching me concepts. Then I go test it to verify its teachings. It is certainly making me more productive at learning.
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