If you train LLMs on code from GitHub it will output what the average GitHub repo has in it. That is, "competent level", not expert or virtuoso.
And it will also carry over bugs found at the "competent" level.
A coder considers the waning days of the craft
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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#22Do people have problems with Leetcode stuff or something? Aside from generating code I already know how to write before hand quickly, I find AI super useless for coding. It's never been able to solve a single problem I have worked on - mostly involving infrastructure deployment and config.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#23I may be in the minority, but after the initial “wow” period, I have been underwhelmed with co-pilot.
Don’t get me wrong, there are few times it has really really impressed me. And there are a few things it really shines at, but most of the time I find it getting in the way.
I’m not so concerned about the craft of programming. But those that make a good living automating trivial tasks should be more worried.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#24I mean this in the least offensive way possible, but whenever one of these flowery ChatGPT pieces comes out, it's always written like this
"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 returned to the crossword project. Our puzzle generator printed its output in an ugly text format, with lines like "s""c""a""r""""k""u""n""i""s""" "a""r""e""a". I wanted to turn output like that into a pretty Web page that allowed me to explore the words in the grid, showing scoring information at a glance. But I knew the task would be tricky[...]
This man has written software professionally for 20 years? The last part of the article is at least correct. Code generation isn't going to replace programmers. Almost all SNES and NES games were written in Assembly. Modern game devs learn Unity and Unreal and visual scripting. Are there now more or fewer game devs? Writing a few lines of code that generate a metric ton of more code is what most of us have been doing for many years now. Abstraction and tooling does not change the nature of the profession and it certainly doesn't end it.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#25It's interesting and kind of a bummer that all this learning is made obsolete.
Which learning? If anything AI will render (highly) skilled humans even more relevant in most creative fields: the literature translator and it's ability to transfer emotion, the artist that can create art outside AI reach, the software engineer who can architect a solution, etc.
What is menaced is low to mid quality work, and less educated/skilled people. This is in my opinion where the real danger of AI lies: a world where it's so easy to let a program write an email that the sheer ability to think about it's content, then type it is lost to the majority. Some with anything requiring some effort the learn. This will exacerbate the divide between classes, with a handful people who can understand and act on the world, and those who don't.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#26Imagine a doctor 100 years post-Galen "considering the waning days of medicine". We are a young, young discipline.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#27[dead]
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#28Maybe 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.
i've fired a lot of negativity at people for treating the entropy monster as a trustworthy information source. it's a waste of my time to prove it wrong to their satisfaction. it's great at creativity and recall but shitty at accuracy, and sometimes accuracy is what counts most
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#29Maybe 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…
AI taking over one of the only professions able to afford someone a proper middle class existence is pretty shitty. It will be great for capitalists though.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#30Maybe 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…
It'll be amazing if anyone can request any basic program they want. Totally amazing if they can request any complex program. I cannot really envision a more empowering thing for the common person. It should really upset the balance of power. I think we'll see, soon, that we've only just started building with code. As a lifelong coder, I cannot wait to see the day when anyone can program anything.
they already could, they just had to debug it, which is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place