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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

#241
I share the sentiment with others here that have become disillusioned with LLMs. Yes, their capabilities are impressive, and their progression is quite striking. But what I have realized, about programming specifically, is that I don't think LLMs can do a better job than humans.

To many futurists hopping on the hypetrain, this is probably somewhat of a hot take. But let me explain.

Ultimately, programming is about instructing a computer on what to do. We use programming languages because they're highly efficient representations of what a computer can do. In the case of LLMs, we need to use natural language to specify the program. For simple things, this can work great. But for complex programs, it's not easy to articulate exactly what a program should do. As you drill in to the details, you begin to experience an almost exponential growth in the amount of natural language specification you need. And so I think there is something very flawed in believing that you can replace human programmers with LLMs. In my personal opinion, a single programmer will be able to outproduce a single LLM prompt engineer, purely because programming languages are better at expressing ideas compared to natural language. At a certain point, it becomes faster to write code then to write sufficiently detailed prompts.

As a thought experiment for the reader: consider a complex system you've worked on. And now try to imagine writing down a specification for the system in natural language that an LLM could use to generate the code that powers the system. I honestly don't think I could do it for many of the system I've worked on.

So yes, I think LLMs are cool. And I think they're cool because they give creative power to people who can't program. But for sufficiently complex things, i.e. things people care about, a natural language interface isn't the answer.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#242

I share the sentiment with others here that have become disillusioned with LLMs. Yes, their capabilities are impressive, and their progression is quite striking. But what I have realized, about programming specifically, is that I don't think LLMs can do a better job than humans. To many futurists hopping on the hypetrain, this is probably somewhat of a hot take. But let me explain. Ultimately, programming is about in…

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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#243

Am I the only one becoming less impressed by LLMs as time passes? I will admit, when Copilot first became a thing in 2021, I had my own “I’m about to become obsolete” moment. However, it’s become clear to me, both through my own experience and through research that has been conducted, that modern LLMs are fundamentally flawed and are not on the path to general intelligence. We are stuck with ancient (in AI terms) tec…

It sounds like your initial impression was an overestimate and your current impression is a correction back down from that. You could say that it's "fundamentally flawed" coming from a very high initial expectation, but you could just as easily say "this is an amazing tool" coming from the point of view that it's "worthless" as many people seem to think

If I can be so bold as to chime in, perhaps "fundamentally flawed" because it's design means it will never be more than a very clever BS engine. By design it is a stochastic token generator and its output will only ever be fundamentally some shade of random unless a fundamental redesign occurs.

I was also fooled and gave it too much credit, if you engage in a philosophical discussion with it it seems purpose-built for passing the turing test.

If LLMs are good at one thing, it's tricking people. I can't think of a more dangerous or valueless creation.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#244
Personally I’m not worried about my employability. Until AGI arrives (which may coincide with an apocalypse for all we know) AI will simply allow me to move faster. If it lets me move 1000x faster then the art will be in what to build. 1000x still does nothing compared to an exponentially exploding field of possibilities. And technical knowledge, experience working as a product focused engineer, and general human intelligence should be enough to beat AI at that art form.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We’ll see - but given the gap between chatgpt 3 and 4, I think AIs will be competitive with mid level programmers by the end of the decade. I’d be surprised if they aren’t. The training systems we use for LLMs are still so crude. ChatGPT has never interacted with a compiler. Imagine learning to write code by only reading (quite small!) snippets on GitHub. That’s the state llms are in now. It’s only a matter of time b…

With today's mid level programmers, yes. But by that time, many of today's mid level programmers will be able to do stuff high level programmers do today.

Many people underestimate an LLM's most powerful feature when comparing it with something like Stackoverflow: the ability to ask followup questions and immediately get clarification on anything that is unclear.

I wish I had had access to LLM's when I was younger. So much time wasted on repetitive, mundane in-between code...

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#246

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 (o…

Would you say the same about math or reading?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#247

> 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…

Especially since that particular task has been done thousands upon thousands of times. I have done it to win arguments on Hacker News[0]. It wouldn't surprise me if the exact code to do it (except for changing file names and number of lines) existed on Stack Overflow. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28587016

More likely, the reason why ChatGPT can do it is because all necessary code is available on StackOverflow.

I don't understand unbound excitement about using a paid online tool (!) that does not have reproducible source code (!!) and can sometimes (!!!) generate correct implementations of extremely well-known algorithms if given perfect description.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#248
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…

I've been saying the same thing. Coding is the worst part of the process. I've been doing it for 20 years professionally and another 10 or more on top of that as a hobby. Don't care about code, just want to make things. Code sucks.

While I don't want to go as far as saying that it sucks, I do largely agree with the sentiment. Personally, I do like coding a little bit but mostly as a puzzle but for the most part it is a means to an end.

Lately, I have been using ChatGPT and the OpenAI API to do exactly that for a few projects. I used it to help me round out the design, brainstorm about approaches, tune database requirements, etc. I basically got to the point where I had a proof of concept for all the separate components in a very short amount of time. Then for the implementation it was a similar story. I already had a much more solid idea (technical and functional design, if you will) of how I wanted to implement things than I normally do. And, for most of the things where I would get slowed down normally, I could just turn to the chat. Then by just telling it what part I had trouble with, it would get me back on track in no time.

Having said all that, I couldn't have used it in such a way without any knowledge of programming. Because if you just tell it that you want to "create an application that does X" it will come up with overly broad solution. All the questions and problems I presented to it were based from a position where I already knew the language, platform and had a general sense of requirements.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#249
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 so much of the world that would be better off if GOOD software was cheaper and easier to make. But… we’d need far, far fewer programmers. And programming was the last thing humans were supposed to be able to do to ear a living.

You'll need a ton more programmers each 10x more productive at half the salary.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#250
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly: https://chat.openai.com/share/bc4a533e-c007-48ea-9232-0e548b... The "<" is actually an unnecessary additional character to type.

Except, I intentionally don’t use either form because they don’t extend nicely (and I dislike using flags when I could use another pipe segment or positional arguments when I could use standard input). I can iterate quickly by adding pipeline segments on top of the basic formula, because all of the segments have the same general shape and “calling convention”.

Finally, because I’ve built up familiarity with the shell over my career, I can come up with this formula as fast as I can type it. At this point, ChatGPT would slow me down: (1) because this sort of thing is basically muscle memory and (2) I have to actually think about the code ChatGPT produces to verify it is correct, which is almost as difficult as producing it in the first place.

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