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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

#251

Post by danielmarkbruce »

manicennui wrote: post #228
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.

Sure, but the number of truly competent software engineers is maybe 10% of employed software engineers. So, 90% of people might need to worry.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#252

Post by klipt »

coder543 wrote: post #187
klipt wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not bad, but suppose the dictionary is too big to load into memory - could AI suggest an online (reservoir sampling) algorithm as an alternative?

Sure: https://chat.openai.com/share/0a3e52c6-1db8-422a-a98c-cb3500... I laid out the constraints, but I did not mention reservoir sampling at all. The script seems to work as expected when I run it against a dictionary file.

Not bad, but suppose the dictionary has n lines and you only want to randomly sample k=100 of them, where n is so huge that you don't want to scan over the whole file at all.

Can you use random access into the file to sample k lines in O(k) time instead of O(n) time?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#253

Post by agotterer »

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…

Spreadsheets didn’t replace accountants, however, it made them more efficient. I don’t personally believe AI will replace software engineers anytime soon, but it’s already making us more efficient. Just as Excel experience is required to crunch numbers, I suspect AI experience will be required to write code.

I use chat-gpt every day for programming and there are times where it’s spot on and more times where it’s blatantly wrong. I like to use it as a rubber duck to help me think and work through problems. But I’ve learned that whatever the output is requires as much scrutiny as a good code review. I fear there’s a lot of copy and pasting of wrong answers out there. The good news is that for now they will need real engineers to come in and clean up the mess.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#254

Post by jrumbut »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #136
commandlinefan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I disagree. For every 100 problems that would be convenient to solve in software, maybe 1 is important enough to the whims of the market that there are actually programmers working on it. If software becomes 100x easier to make, then you don't end up with fewer programmers, you end up with more problems being solved. And once 100% of the problems that can be solved with software are already solved with software... th…

I'm all for this, as long as we programmers continue to capture a reasonable amount of the value we create.

The danger doesn't come from some immutable law of nature, it comes from humans organizing. Some people want to be able to hire programmers cheaply, programmers want to continue to be expensive (maybe get more expensive because now we can deliver more value?).

It will be up to us, the people living in this moment, to determine what balance is struck.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#255

Post by intended »

skepticATX wrote: post #82

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…

You are not alone. People are reading papers, not building things.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#256

Post by ungamedplayer »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #79
andrei_says_ wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’m doing something thousands of people have coded before me then yes please hold my hand while I write this CSV import. When I’m writing business logic unique to this specific domain then please stop mumbling bs at me.

Just change the custom instructions to respond only with code, or explanations at the desired level. This works for me thus far.

Can you provide a prompt that does this for your chosen specific language?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#257

Post by glonq »

As a grayhead who does not code daily anymore, I was impressed with ChatGPT as a programming sidekick. It's like having an on-call junior developer who only costs $20/mo.

I needed a quick and dirty utility developed last month and by breaking the problem down into 4-5 steps myself I got ChatGPT to write functions for those steps and then I bolted them together. Most of it went smooth but one part took far too much coaxing and refinement before it generated the right thing.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#258

Post by aabhay »

agotterer wrote: post #253
fisherjeff wrote: post #41

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…

Spreadsheets didn’t replace accountants, however, it made them more efficient. I don’t personally believe AI will replace software engineers anytime soon, but it’s already making us more efficient. Just as Excel experience is required to crunch numbers, I suspect AI experience will be required to write code. I use chat-gpt every day for programming and there are times where it’s spot on and more times where it’s blat…

Spreadsheets actually did put many accountants and “computers” (the term for people that tallied and computed numbers, ironically a fairly menial job) out of business. And it’s usually the case that disruptive technology’s benefits are not evenly distributed.

In any case, the unfortunate truth is that AI as it exists today is EXPLICITLY designed to replace people. That’s a far cry from technologies such as the telephone (which by the way put thousands of Morse code telegraph operators out of business)

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#259

Post by foobazgt »

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'

I have a new phrase in my lexicon. Thank you!

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#260

Post by thayne »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #11
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…

Some people I feel fear losing their siloed prestige built on arcane software knowledge. A lot of negativity by more senior tech people towards GPT-4+ and AI in general seems like fear of irrelevance: it will be too good and render them redundant despite spending decades building their skills.

If your prestige is based solely on "arcane software knowledge", then sure, LLMs might be a threat. Especially as they get better.

But that is just one part of being a good software engineer. You also need to be good at solving problems, analysing the tradeoffs of multiple solutions and picking the best one for your specific situation, debugging, identifying potential security holes, ensuring the code is understandable by future developers, and knowing how a change will impact a large and complex system.

Maybe some future AI will be able to do all of that well. I can't see the future. But I'm very doubtful it will just be a better LLM.

I think the threat from LLMs isn't that it can replace developers. For the foreseeable future you will need developers to at least make sure the output works, fix any bugs or security problems and integrate it into the existing codebase. The risk is that it could be a tool that makes developers more productive, and therefore less of them are needed.

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