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A coder considers the waning days of the craft

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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#221

Post by RockRobotRock »

gavmor wrote: post #152
gymbeaux wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it’s not a challenging problem, but the specific code example isn’t the point. Replace his example with “at one point, we wanted a command that would convert a PNG to a JPG….” most of us couldn’t do that without Google.

$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | shuf | head -n 10 $ convert foo.png foo.jpg Took me almost literally two seconds to come up with that, unless your point is that at one point I had to learn it which, yeah, sure. What am I missing?

Okay GPT, tell me the bash command to convert a PNG to a JPG and add a sarcastic comment at the end.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#222

Post by bruce511 »

Obviously we can discuss the merits of GPT4, but actually my first issue is with his root question;

>> I would make sure that my kids could program computers. It is among the newer arts but also among the most essential

I've got kids. 1 can program. 1 tried it, and didn't like it. 1 just rolled her eyes at me.

Turns out, for most people, programming is not like reading or writing at all. Got a question? Ask Google (or GPT) or Alexa. 99% of people can't code, and will never need to code.

You may as well argue that cooking healthy food is a universally needed skill. Or riding a bicycle, or kicking a ball. All are of course really helpful life skills, but lots of people get by in the world just fine without them.

So as one parent to another, I can tell you that you don't need to worry about this. It's good you have plans for your children. But don't worry too much about it. Turns out children will learn what they are interested in, and pretty much ignore the rest. They'll grow up, change, mature and become functional people in their own right.

No doubt you'll get plenty of eye rolls along the way.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#223

Post by DrSiemer »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #201
silenced_trope wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the opposite. I feel like it is true. I very much will NO LONGER THINK about "simple" problems. My most recent thing is for a game I'm working on. I got a bunch of free sound FX from freesound.org, but they were AIFF format. I googled and found an online converter, then asked ChatGPT to use ffmpeg to write a script that goes through the directory converting the AIFFs to MP3s. In the past if I would have written s…

Every time I've tried to get it to do something reasonably simple like this, it returns plausible-sounding code that doesn't work. My last attempt to use it was to do with resolving circular calculations in Excel - I wanted some way of calculating the sum of a geometric series without having the series in actual cells. It kept recommending things that didn't work. I'm always amazed to hear of people who manage to get…

Work on your prompts. Break down the problem into pseudocode steps, the way you might write down comments for yourself on how to do something. Provide examples of similar working code if you can. Don't ask it to do everything at the same time, break it up into limited goal increments.

In my experience LLMs work best if you already know how to do something, but you just can't be bothered to actually do it.

When exploring unknown territory, keep your questions simple and ask for clarification on anything you don't understand. It will not just help you, but the AI as well.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#225

Post by TerrifiedMouse »

enjoylife wrote: post #150
hiddencost wrote: post #130

> 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 made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly. I mean ... IDK, if you can't write that on your own without research, I don't…

Yeah, this author sounds more of an up-and-coming software developer. The cited example is something that someone should be easily able to do in their day to day language. The ability for chatGPT to essentially translate/expand your knowledge out to other languages (eg “how do I read in a file to utf8 again” ). It’s all just more leverage and power to solve the mundane, faster. The key point is you have to know the r…

> Yeah, this author sounds more of an up-and-coming software developer.

This is bad. If you don’t have newbie programmers, you won’t have senior programmers.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#226

Post by pdimitar »

It's quite amazing how divisive the AI topic turned out to be in HN.

My opinion is that AI proponents extrapolate too much and too optimistically; they always assume linear or simply uninterrupted improvement, and they assume they breadth of AI will increase as well. I see no proof for any of those so far.

Time will tell, obviously, and they may very well turn out to be correct. I just wonder why people get so worked up about it.

Personally I also don't understand why people want the programmer profession to cease to exist but oh well. I guess envy and schadenfreude are factors. I wouldn't know because I don't wish anyone unemployment.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#227

Post by hyperthesis »

julianeon wrote: post #205
hyperthesis wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be really fair, there are levels of programming. The easiest level is traditionally vulnerable to automation. There's a lot of "accidental complexity" ( https://wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet ), e.g. ffmpeg, git; even in recalling syntax and idiom of an infrequently used tool, e.g. bash, jq. Once upon a time, developers had to pore over manpages, paper textbooks, or memorize it. Then came google. Next, stacke…

I know that last line is wry but I feel like people need the reminder: The graveyards are filled to overflowing with companies that were challenged by low-end 'crappy' products and said 'they are going after the bottom of the market, we are safe'... a few years before they entered a terminal decline, and a decade before they went extinct.

I think thought is different; but I also see no barrier to strong AI. Jobs might be the least of our problems at that point.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#228

Post by manicennui »

GabeIsko wrote: post #22

Do 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.

"AI" helps the people who rely on Stack Overflow to do their jobs. Then they come to HN and worry that we will all be out of jobs soon. The problem it solves is "I don't actually know what I am doing at all". These people are not a threat to anyone competent and no amount of questionable code generated by "AI" will change that.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#229

Post by manicennui »

gtirloni wrote: post #43

Today I already have trouble doing git archeology to understand why a piece of code was done in a certain way. Now imagine debugging more and more code that was created by LLMs. Debugging will become more of a voodoo witchcraft kind of thing. I pity anyone who decides to make a living out of that. Probably will earn a lot and die young.

I imagine that it will be about as bad as debugging code written by the sort of people who find "AI" helpful.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#230

Post by zetsurin »

waldohatesyou wrote: post #33

I feel like the headline does not match the article here. The headline implies that programming as a craft is to be replaced but the article ultimately argues that it will change significantly which matches my intuition as well. At the end of the day, the bar is being lowered. Is that a bad thing? From a selfish perspective, yes. From a societal perspective, no. At the risk of digressing, I think one of the issues th…

> I know people who work more "average" service jobs and they make substantially less than engineers do and that's something that's made me pretty uneasy over the past few years. The societal value of generative AI is in making knowledge work such as law, medicine, and software engineering much more accessible to "average" people.

I think the fear of software developers is that they will join the low pay crowd.

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