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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

#281

Post by cjbgkagh »

fisherjeff wrote: post #206
cjbgkagh wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think another possibility is if you have skills that an LLM can’t replicate, your value may actually increase.

Only if the other people that the LLM did replace cannot cross train into your space. Price is set at the margins. People imagine it’ll be AI taking the jobs but mostly it’ll be people competing with other people for the space that’s left after AI has taken its slice.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#282

Post by ryukoposting »

GPT-4, copilot, etc are absolutely worthless for firmware. Copilot shows no meaningful capacity for understanding the context of a firmware codebase, and forget generating anything coherent based on your instructions. I don't need help writing function declarations, but that's the only thing it's useful for (and even that is heavily limited).

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#283

Post by fragmede »

saurik wrote: post #268
cjbgkagh wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

that's true, but it's harder to replace someone when you have a personal connection to them. VC fund managers are more likely to be personally known to he person who signs the checks. low-level workers may never have spoken any words to them or even ever have met them.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#284

Post by creesch »

Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #71
alexmuro wrote: post #10

I don't feel like we are in the waning days of the craft at all. Most of the craft is creating an understanding between people and software and most human programmers are still bad at it. AI might replace some programmers but none who program as a craft.

"Chess engines might get better than some chess players, but none who play Chess as a craft." Do you think people in the 90s thought this? Probably... In the article, the author mentions that Chess centaurs (a human player consulting an engine) can still beat an engine alone. But the author is wrong. There was a brief period a while ago when that was true, but chess engines are so strong now that any human interventi…

> It knows more languages, more tricks, more libraries, more error codes, is faster, cheaper, etc.

True up until the point that you want to do something that hasn't really be done before or is just not as findable on the internet. LLMs only know what is already out there, they will not create new frameworks or think up new paradigms in that regard.

It also is very often wrong in the code it outputs, doesn't know if things got deprecated after the training data threshold, etc. As a funny recent example, I asked ChatGPT for an example using the openAI nodejs library. The example was wrong as the library has had a major version bump since the last time the training data was updated.

> The only area that I still feel superior to ChatGPT is that I have a better understanding of the "big picture" of what the program is trying to accomplish and can help steer it to work on the right sub-problems.

Which probably is based on your general experience and understanding of programming in the last 30+ years. As I have said elsewhere, I really don't think that LLMs in their current iteration will be replacing developers. They are however going to be part of the toolchain of developers.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#285

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

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?

That most people in the world get by just fine without them? Yeah, actually. Isn't the median reading level like 8th grade or something in the States?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#286

Post by kdmccormick »

RayVR wrote: post #59

I think more people in these comments should read the whole article before responding. The author intentionally takes several turns to arrive at a nuanced view, with a final statement that I think most here would agree with: "Hacking is forever"

I'll admit that I read up until this point:

> 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.

and concluded that this person is not a skilled enough programmer to be making any statements about the demise of the craft, nuanced or not.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#287

Post by grogenaut »

pama wrote: post #277
bdw5204 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually I'd argue that we've had robots forever, just not what you'd consider robots because they're quite effective. Consider the humble washing machine or dishwasher. Very specialized, and hyper effective. What we don;'t have is Gneneralized Robotics, just like we don't have Generalized Intelligence.

Just as "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", "Any sufficiently omnipresent advanced technology is indistinguishable from the mundane". Chat GPT will feel like your smart phone which now feels like your cordless phone which now feels like your corded phone which now feels like wireless telegram on your coal fired steam liner.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#288

Post by corethree »

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…

>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.

You're not the minority. You're the majority. The majority can't look reality in the face and see the end. They lie to themselves.

>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.

Everyone and I mean everyone knows that if fails often. Use some common sense here. Why was the article written despite the fact that Everyone knows what you know? Because of the trendline. What AI was yesterday versus what it is today heralds what it will be tomorrow and every tomorrow AI will be failing less and less and less until it doesn't fail at all.

>But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of the world that would be better off if GOOD software was cheaper and easier to make.

Ever the optimist. The reality is we don't know if it's good or bad. It can be both or it can weigh heavily in one direction. Most likely it will be both given the fact that our entire careers can nearly be replaced.

>Idk where I’m going with this but if coding is something you genuinely enjoy, AI isn’t stopping anyone from doing their hobby. I don’t really see it going away any time soon, and even if it is going away it just never really seemed like the point of software engineering

Sure. AI isn't going to end hobbies. It's going to end careers and ways of life. Hobbies will most likely survive.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#289

Post by ryanjshaw »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #210
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…

It is the same messy tedious thing with LLMs though. You still have the complex brittle artefact that is code. LLMs writing code is the beginning, but low or no code is more ideal for most people. With LLM assistance.

Until the LLMs get better.

I just asked ChatGPT a thing, and then on a hunch I asked if there wasn't a built-in function that does the same, and it indeed remembered there is such a function.

What if that second question had been automatically and transparently asked? What if there is a finite list of such "quiet reflecting" questions that dramatically increases the value and utility of the LLM output?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#290

Post by mupuff1234 »

woodruffw wrote: post #38
atleastoptimal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a security person, I look forward to the nearly infinite amount of work I'll be asked to do as people reinvent the last ~30 years of computer security with AI-generated code.

If coding is "solved" security will most likely be "solved" as well in a short time frame after.
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