Earlier quoted context omitted.
High level IC at big tech can get you around that neighborhood
What does IC mean? Doesn't seem to be very googleable
An individual contributor, as opposed to a manager.
Command line functions around OpenAI
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Re: Command line functions around OpenAI
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#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your last sentence - but if churning out boilerplate is something any old engineer can now have an AI do, won't it up the chances that someone previously overlooked makes a brilliant call about what problem to tackle and actually has the resources to execute on that call?
I'm doubtful. Being effective as dev usually involves a conscious effort to focus on the context of where we are, where we're going, and what's needed to get there. Also, the ability to recognize and avoid rabbit holes.
Sure, but isn't zooming out to that 'big picture' perspective a very different skillset from the focus needed to write functional code?
Re: Command line functions around OpenAI
#216One can also decide to just be a https://1x.engineer
Or a grug brained engineer https://grugbrain.dev/
Re: Command line functions around OpenAI
#217Re: Command line functions around OpenAI
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to ask: how do you work as an eng who pulls in $1m/yr?
High level IC at big tech can get you around that neighborhood
Emphasis on "high level".
An org of a few hundred people at a big tech company many only have a couple of Individual Contributors making this much money.
Re: Command line functions around OpenAI
#219I tried chatpt and asked a few questions about doing something specific in a Rails project. It was so specific that I had already found the sources online that were avaiable. It summarized the sources into directly actionable steps. At first I thought that was odd and unhelpful, but perhaps I expected too much. So then I tried giving it a prompt about setting up the devise ruby gem in a new rails project. That's one…
> As far as I can tell, chatgpt performs the action of finding and simplifying the information needed to take the next step forward [...] But that's all it does at the moment.
ChatGPT's output is certainly limited by its input. If you ask questions that can be answered by finding and simplifying information, then that's the answer you'll get. However, if you treat ChatGPT like a functioning software engineer, describe the problem space, explain the requirements, and define the boundaries, then ChatGPT will do much more. From that point on, you can ask it to explain why it chose a certain data structure, or to adjust an implementation approach, among other things.
With 15 prompts in 2 hours, I was able to pair program a novel 200-line program in Go that used AST parsing, command execution, pattern matching, file parsing, and custom data structures for specific data processing. All to solve a problem one of my teams experienced in the industry. ChatGPT wrote 99% of the code; I tweaked 2 or 3 lines because it had problems correcting an error in a regex (most likely due to the fact that ChatGPT sees tokens not characters). The code compiled, ran, and produced the exact result I wanted.
Researching, prototyping, and writing this code by hand would have taken me a few days probably. That's why the project sat on my TODO list for months
Re: Command line functions around OpenAI
#220Being efficient at writing code can barely make someone a 5x engineer. A team of people who write code effectively is easy to do. Hyperproductivity in software is all about deciding what problems to tackle. Richard Hipp isn't worried about chipotle restaurant orders in golang, he's worried about how to store data reliably. That isn't a coding puzzle that ChatGTP is likely to help with. Either ChatGTP can do the whole…
I'm aware that I'm in the minority here, but I find that investing heavily in being able to type fast and handle the tools well actually changes what code I write and not just how quickly. The faster I've gotten at moving code around, the more subconsciously willing I've been to try something with a modest probability of working out, and more importantly the easier it's gotten to throw away a draft that isn't working…
I used to attend cross-team meetings with a guy (works for AWS now) who was a tech lead and meeting facilitator. He gathered the agenda, presented during the meeting, assembled notes during the meeting, and distributed the notes via email at meeting conclusion. He keyboarded the entire time, looking up at the projected display. Fastest touch typist I recall seeing.