211–220 of 886 posts
If there will be actual AGI (or super intelligence), none of these arguments hold. The machines will just be better than any programmer money can buy. Of course at that point every knowledge worker is probably unemployable anyway.
What if AGI is extremely expensive to run?
We have fired all our programmers. However, the AI is hard to work with, it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected. We have hired people with expertise in the specific language needed to transmit our specifications to the AI with more precision.
I think people aren't getting your joke.
There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…
Yes. I think part of the problem is how good it is at starting from a blank slate and putting together an MVP type app. As a developer, I have been thoroughly impressed by this. Then non-devs see this and must think software engineers are doomed. What they don't see is how terrible LLMs are at working with complex, mature codebases and the hallucinations and endless feedback loops that go with that.
I am of course talking about
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There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…
The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep.
Somebody needs to write that operating system the LLM runs on. Or your bank's backend system that securely stores your money. Or the mission critical systems powering this airplane you're flying next week... to pretend like this will all be handled by LLMs is so insanely out of touch with reality.
There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…
> It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase The COBOL crisis at Y2K comes to mind.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366588232/Cobol-knowledg...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of the problem is that many working developers are still in companies that don't allow experimentation with the bleeding edge of AI on their code base, so their experiences come from headlines and from playing around on personal projects. And on the first 10,000 lines of code, the best in class tools are actually pretty good. Since they can help define the structure of the code, it ends up shaped in a way that w…
My company allowed us to use it but most developers around me didn't reach out to the correct people to be able to use it. Yes I find it incredibly helpful and try to tell them. But it's only helpful in small contexts, auto completing things, small snippets, generating small functions. Any large scale changes like most of these AI companies try to push them being capable of doing it just falls straight on its face. I…
There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…
I envision software engineering ending up in the same pit of mediocrity as all the other engineering disciplines.
The author mentions "systems programming" and "high-performance computing". Do you have any resources for that (whether it be books, videos, courses)?