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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

#261

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #157
al_borland wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also where I find most of the work. There are plenty of off the shelf tools to solve all the needs of the company I work at. However, we still end up making a lot of our own stuff, because we want something that the off the shelf option doesn't do, or it can't scale to the level we need. Other times we buy two tools that can't talk to each other and need to write something to make them talk. I often hear people…

It’s not just about if a LLM could replace you, if a LLM replaces other enough other programmers it’ll tank the market price for your skills.

I don’t think this will happen because we’ll just increase the complexity of the systems we imagine. I think a variant of Wirth’s law applies here: the overall difficulty of programming tasks stays constant because, when a new tool simplifies a previously hard task, we increase our ambitions.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#262

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> Am I the only one becoming less impressed by LLMs as time passes?

Not at all.

I was very impressed at first but it's gotten to the point where I can no longer trust anything it says other than very high level overviews. For example, I asked it to help me implement my own sound synthesizer from scratch. I wanted to generate audio samples and save them to wave files. The high level overview was helpful and enabled me to understand the concepts involved.

The code on the other hand was subtly wrong in ways I simply couldn't be sure of. Details like calculating the lengths of structures and whether something did or did not count towards the length were notoriously difficult for it to get right. Worse, as a beginner just encountering the subject matter I could not be sure if it was correct or not, I just thought it didn't look right. I'd ask for confirmation and it would just apologize and change the response to what I expected to hear. I couldn't trust it.

It's pretty great at reducing the loneliness of solo programming though. Just bouncing ideas and seeing what it says helps a lot. It's not like other people would want to listen.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#263

Post by m463 »

I've noticed that over the years, coding has gotten easier.

I've been able to express myself better with each year.

I see AI as another higher-level way of expressing myself.

Also, people don't write as much new code as they think they do.

Still, I have many many... MANY projects that I have on my wishlist. Maybe AI will help, but my list won't go away.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#264

Post by crabmusket »

4death4 wrote: post #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 in…

> 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.

But you didn't write it down, so how did the system get made?

The answer is that the program exists in your head as much as it exists in bytes in your source files. There might be a mismatch between your head-program and the source-program, or between your head-program and what the customer actually wants.

But the existence of the head-program is what Naur was articulating in 1985's "Programming as Theory-Building", and is what LLM proponents are rediscovering.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#265

Post by creesch »

EZ-E wrote: post #238

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 reall…

I agree in the sense that, in its current state, will not replace devs entirely. But it can make the workflow much easier for many devs, to the point where you'd possibly need less of them or can get more done with the same amount.

I commented about somewhere else in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38259425

But basically I have found that it is a really powerful general purpose assistant/brainstorming pall for a lot of the things that would normally eat up a lot of time.

To expand on that, it isn't even limited to code, but also surrounding tasks. I have used it to round out documentation in various ways. Either by giving it a lot of the rough information and asking to write coherent documentation for me, or by giving me feedback.

The other way around it has helped me onboard on new projects by giving it bits and pieces of written text where I had trouble understanding what the document said.

In the same sense when dealing with management bullshit I have used it to just presenting it with what was asked, telling it my view on it and then asking it to come up with responses based around certain perspectives. Which meant I had to spend less mental bandwidth on inane stuff there as well.

And yes, a lot of it can also be achieved in a team with other people. But, those people aren't always around and also have their own things to do. The advantage of tools like ChatGPT is that they don't get tired, so I can really channel my inner toddler and just keeping asking "why" until I am satisfied with the answer. Even if there are other people available to turn to for help, ChatGPT can also help in refining the questions you want to ask.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#266

Post by bdw5204 »

aabhay wrote: post #258
agotterer wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 teleph…

It is especially sad that VC money is currently being spent on developing AI to eliminate good jobs rather than on developing robots to eliminate bad jobs.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#267

Post by DrSiemer »

w4ffl35 wrote: post #144
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…

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.

Many designers despise AI generated images, because they love the process itself. I knew one who missed the slow loading of massive design documents, because he would use that time to get inspired by stuff.

There were probably a lot of loom weavers that felt the same about their tools. But the times, they are a-changing.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#268

Post by saurik »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #157
al_borland wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also where I find most of the work. There are plenty of off the shelf tools to solve all the needs of the company I work at. However, we still end up making a lot of our own stuff, because we want something that the off the shelf option doesn't do, or it can't scale to the level we need. Other times we buy two tools that can't talk to each other and need to write something to make them talk. I often hear people…

It’s not just about if a LLM could replace you, if a LLM replaces other enough other programmers it’ll tank the market price for your skills.

If an LLM gets good enough to come for our jobs it is likely to replace all the people who hire us, all the way up to the people who work at the VC funds that think any of our work had value in the first place (remember: the VC fund managers are yet more employees that work for capital, and are just as subject to being replaced as any low-level worker).

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#269

Post by 4death4 »

crabmusket wrote: post #264
4death4 wrote: post #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 in…

> 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. But you didn't write it down, so how did the system get made? The answer is that the program exists in your head as much as it exists in bytes in your source files. There might be…

> But you didn't write it down, so how did the system get made?

We didn't write it down, but we did use natural language to specify it, albeit somewhat indirectly. Some of the specification came from meetings with leadership, PMs, other people in the org, customers, etc. Some of it came from getting drinks with the team and talking about what we wanted to build. Some of it came from conversations with ex-colleagues. Some was inspired by past experience. It was be extremely onerous to put all of that down as input to an LLM.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#270

Post by csnover »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #246
bruce511 wrote: post #222

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?

I’m not the op—they explicitly stated programming is not a skill like reading or writing—but I’ll go down this rhetorical path for fun and say: sure, why not?

The utopian aim of technology is all about offloading burdensome work so we can focus more on the things we enjoy. If reading is a burden to someone, why not let them use a TTS? If long division is a burden, why not let them use a pocket calculator? They’ll probably learn enough to get by even if they never get to the point of reading Dostoevsky by sight.

Lest you say, “well but those skills are essential!”, humans needed food to survive before we needed mathematics or written language, yet we’ve been been OK outsourcing farming for at least a century because we’ve experienced how it frees us up to pursue other things. And, to that end, we’ll probably be facing some pretty extreme civilizational crisis if we get to the point that someone without basic maths skills can’t find a calculator.

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