This is a badass article.
A coder considers the waning days of the craft
271–280 of 1001 posts
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That is a problematic request for multiple obvious reasons, and for those same reasons, ChatGPT resisted providing an implementation that didn't require indexing the file. By telling it "no indexing is allowed, provide a best effort solution" it relented and provided a best effort solution.
Here is the provided solution and some discussion of the problems with the problem itself: https://chat.openai.com/share/54807663-17ca-4e7d-bc76-cd3cf3...
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#273Am 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…
I am not sure that GPT-4 is not better in a fundamental way than GPT-3.5. To me they seem like night and day. If GPT-5 is a similar jump, it will be impossible to compete without using it (or using a related / similar model). Yes they are both GPT models and trained as simple autoregressive LM, but there is a dramatic change you can experience at a personal level once GPT-4 can synthesize information correctly to address your specific requests in so many different contexts that GPT-3.5 was simply parroting like a toddler. All of LLM is just probabilistic inference on large bodies of text, however I do buy the idea that with enough compute and data a sufficiently large model will build the architecture it optimally needs to understand the data in the best possible way during training. And once the data becomes multimodal, the benefit to these probabilistic models can theoretically be multiplicative not just additive as each new modality will clarify and eliminate any previously wrong representations of the world. Yes, we will all laugh at how good GPT-10 trained with text, image, video, audio, and taste sensors will be, and yet GPT-4 was a major step forward, much bigger than any step taken by humanity so far.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#274I 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,…
> communication, organizational leadership, and actually understanding all the product requirements These problems sound like a result of working with people. Smaller but more capable teams because of AI will need less leaders and less meetings. Everything will become much more efficient. Say goodbye to all the time spent mentoring junior engineers, soon you won't have any
> Say goodbye to all the time spent mentoring junior engineers, soon you won't have any
Yeah... no. Not with LLMs as they currently are. They are great as an assisted tool, but still need people to validate their output and then put that output to work. Which means you need people who can understand that output, which are developers. Which also means that you need to keep training developers in order to be able to validate that output.
The more nuanced approach would be saying that the work of developers will change. Which I agree with, but is also has been true over the past few decades. Developers these days are already working with a hugely different tool chain compared to developers a decade ago. It is an always evolving landscape and I don't think we are at a point yet where developers will be outright replaced.
We might get there at some point, but not with current LLMs.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#275Maybe 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…
To me best part of AI is I can ask it a question and then a follow-up question, about how some code- or API construct works. THEN I can ask it a follow-up question. That was not possible before with Google.
I can ask exactly what I want in English, not by entering a search-term. A search-term is not a question, but a COMMAND: "Find me web-pages containing this search-term".
By asking exactly the question I'm looking the answer to I get real answers, and if I don't understand the answer, I can ask a follow-up question. Life is great and there's still an infinite amount of code to be written.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
It'll be amazing if anyone can request any basic program they want. Totally amazing if they can request any complex program. I cannot really envision a more empowering thing for the common person. It should really upset the balance of power. I think we'll see, soon, that we've only just started building with code. As a lifelong coder, I cannot wait to see the day when anyone can program anything.
How would this anyone be able to evaluate whether the program they requested is correct or not? Automatic program generation from human language really feels like the same problem with machine translation between human languages. I have an elementary understanding of French and so when I see a passage machine translated into French (regardless of software, Google Translate or DeepL) I cannot find any mistakes; I may…
I was imagining a step past what you're talking about, when the outputs are just always correct, and the bots code better than we do.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The plan has always been to build the robots together with the better AI. Robots ended up being much harder than early technologists imagined for a myriad different reasons. It turned out that AI is easier or at least that is the hope.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#278Maybe 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…
Code generating LLMs are simply a form of higher-level language. The commercial practice of software development (C++, Java, etc) is very far from the frontier of higher-level languages (Haskell, Lisp, etc).
Perhaps "prompt engineering" will be the higher-level language that sticks, or perhaps it will fail to find purchase in industry for the same reasons.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#279I 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,…
But now we introduce a junior engineer into the mix: _their_ job is none of those things, it's just to take the issues as filed, and implement them. They don't get the hard problems to solve, they get both the task and the acceptance criteria, and for them a future version of CodeGPT or whatever it'll be called will completely replace their programming skills. And then, 10 years later, they'll be the senior engineer.…
These junior engineers still will need to validate that whatever the LLM implemented works and fits the requirements. If it doesn't work they need to figure out why it doesn't work.
It might not be in the same way of current day developers, but I don't foresee a near future where developers don't learn to understand code to some degree.
For example, I know a lot of people who work in the low-code development sphere of things. A lot of the developers there barely see any code if any. Yet, when you talk with them they talk about a lot of the same issues and problem-solving but in slightly different terms and from a slightly different perspective. But, the similarities are very much there as the problems are fundamentally the same.
With generated code I feel like this will also be similarly true.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#280Earlier 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…
AI might help programmers become more rigorous by lowering the cost of formal methods. Imagine an advanced language where simply writing a function contract, in some kind of Hoare logic or using a dependently-typed signature, yields provably correct code. These kinds of ideas are already worked on, and I believe are the future.