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A coder considers the waning days of the craft

newyorker.com

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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#231

Post by mock-possum »

decasia wrote: post #55
decasia wrote: post #52

I have been having the following debate with my friend who does AI and neural network stuff: Him: Coding will soon be obsolete, it will all be replaced by chatgpt-type code gen. Me: OK but the overwhelming majority of my job as a "senior engineer" is about communication, organizational leadership, and actually understanding all the product requirements and how they will interface with our systems. Yes, I write code,…

It kind of reminds me of this, except substitute coding for "hammering": https://www.buzzmaven.com/old-engineer-hammer-2/

If they don’t want to pay for the work, you can always undo it for them.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#232

Post by adastra22 »

pdimitar wrote: post #226

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…

AI proponent typically assume exponential growth. They'd consider linear to be pessimistic :)

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#233

Post by meindnoch »

kragen wrote: post #36
labster wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure New Yorker writer is the first job that LLMs will replace.

gladwell made a career out of compelling, convincing writing about things he didn't understand and came to the wrong conclusions about, like a human chatgpt, so probably; google 'igon value'

>google 'igon value'

Hahaha. Thanks for the laugh! I always thought the guy was a fraud.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#234

Post by Terr_ »

cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe 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…

There's also a split between fresh ("green-field") projects versus modifying existing code ("brown-field"), where whatever generated snippet of code you get can be subtly incompatible or require shaping to fit in the existing framework.

The massive shared model could do better if it was fed on your company's private source-code... but that's something that probably isn't/shouldn't-be happening.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#235

Post by FigurativeVoid »

cryptoz wrote: post #32
FigurativeVoid wrote: post #23

I 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.

Something to note here is that copilot is pretty old tech at this point already - GPT4 API is just absolutely worlds better, and it is also about to be old news soon too! With GPT5 coming probably next year, we don’t know what advances it will make but surely basing your understanding of it on copilot will leave you shocked soon enough.

That’s a good point. I do find gpt 4 to be excellent at generating code snippets.

I think as the technology improves, it’ll get better. But I’m more hoping it’d be able to do something more interesting, say generate tests in the background.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#236

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#237

Post by TerrifiedMouse »

fisherjeff wrote: post #41
cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe 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…

Also, I think we are quite a ways out from a tool being able to devise a solution to a complex high-level problem without online precedent, which is where I find the most satisfaction anyway. LLMs in particular can be a very fast, surprisingly decent (but, as you mention, very fallible) replacement for Stack Overflow, and, as such, a very good complement to a programmer's skills – seems to me like a net positive at l…

> LLMs in particular can be a very fast, surprisingly decent (but, as you mention, very fallible) replacement for Stack Overflow

Nice thing about Stack Overflow is it’s self-correcting most of the time thanks to,

https://xkcd.com/386/

GPT not so much.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#238

Post by EZ-E »

I don't see it - and by that I don't mean I don't think AI can write good code and get better over time. I just don't see how it would work as a workflow to replace (most) devs by AI.

If I take a junior programmer's task, say, creating CRUD endpoints. Describing the requirement in a way that matches exactly what I want will probably take more time that doing the coding assisted by something like copilot. Can we really imagine a non technical user using an AI having it do development from A to Z? What if the generated code has a bug, can we really imagine that at no point someone will need to be in the loop? Even if a tech person intervenes in the case of a bug how much time would be lost to investigate what the AI wrote and trying to understand what happened in retrospect - the time or cost saved to write the code would be lost quickly. Writing code is a small part of the job after all. LLMs are good at generating code, but they are fundamentally not problem solvers.

The technology is amazing but I think LLMs will just be another tool in the arsenal for devs. It's also an amazing tutor. It can avoid having to call a developper for some self contained problems (writing a script to scrape content from a web page for example).

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#239

Post by k0k0 »

javajosh wrote: post #209
simonw wrote: post #176

> What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession. Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles. This captures the reason I'm optimistic about AI-assisted programming. The learning curve for getting started programming is horribly steep - and it's not because it's hard, it's because it's frustrating. You have to s…

>You have to sweat through six months of weird error messages and missing semicolons before you get to the point where it feels like you're actually building things and making progress. Computers are rude and honest and humans prefer a pretty lie to an ugly truth. Programmers must appreciate the ugly truth in their day-to-day lives more than any other profession. (Physical engineering and construction workers and rep…

More than doctors? Feedback cycles in the OR and ICU get pretty fucking short.

I do think the overall premise is silly, programming isn’t that special in this regard in my opinion. Most professions are like this, they just might not be the most visible ones like politics, journalism, show biz.

Software developer have more to learn from other professions than they often think (the old engineering professions understand this a bit better)

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#240

Post by tarqtome »

wlesieutre wrote: post #207
djbusby wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing that some folk haven't learned that yet - and that others have forgotten it. In 2013 I was using complex ffmpeg commands and using filters in there. Could remember the stuff easy. Now, I've gotta reference my ffmpeg notes more frequently. Where's that XKCD about using the tar command?

> Where’s that XKCD about using the tar command? As of my last knowledge update in January 2022, I can't provide specific details about the latest XKCD comics or their numbers because my training data only includes information available up to that time. However, you can easily find XKCD comics on the official XKCD website (xkcd.com) by using the search function or by browsing through the archives. If there's a specif…

With gpt4 and browsing enabled it searches the web and returns

> The XKCD comic about using the `tar` command can be found at [XKCD Comic #1168](https://xkcd.com/1168/). The comic humorously addresses the complexities and challenges of remembering the correct syntax for the `tar` command, a common scenario for many who use Unix-based systems.

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