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In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

cyberdemon.org

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Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations Are you using GPT3 or 4?

4 and full agree and still confusedly wondering.. I know I will be shouted down, but what are all you "tech guys" doing in your daily biz, just glueing hyperdocumented boilerplate together and spitting out the same textbook examples, I don't get it.

That's my impression too, for every engineer with master or more you have 10 developers who just got out of a 3 weeks Javascript boot camp

Of course they think Chatgpt is a revolution and will replace developers, that's because they don't see the bigger picture.

If you work on anything remotely hard you already know coding is like 10% of the job and out of this only 10% is trivial and this is the only part got will get right

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#32

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…

I think there's two camps of think-piece authors emerging - the ones who've tried a bunch of different examples of things and got passable-to-great-looking results; and the ones going deeper into specific areas and hitting the wall in terms of expertise and specificity. Using the GPT 4 API, I'm definitely often hitting limitations, especially around depth of information, and having to "prompt engineer" my way around…

I am in the camp of people who see the current limitations but also see the rate of progress and think those limits may not stand for long. It is yet unclear if it will progress like autonomous driving or like playing go …

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#33

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…

> meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucination

GiGo, basically

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#34
chatgpt is hit or miss but ive had success using it either way. The hard part will be not relying too much on it. We already know that some devs wont read error messages and instead will just jump into debugging, i trust thisll only get moreso with the advent of chatgpt. However, this might actually save those devs, assuming chatgpt answers correctly.

once you can upload images and ask it to answer based on that, itll be even more wild.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#35

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…

I think there's two camps of think-piece authors emerging - the ones who've tried a bunch of different examples of things and got passable-to-great-looking results; and the ones going deeper into specific areas and hitting the wall in terms of expertise and specificity. Using the GPT 4 API, I'm definitely often hitting limitations, especially around depth of information, and having to "prompt engineer" my way around…

Prompt engineer won't go away, it'll get more "engineer"-like. Knowing how to describe a point in a model's latent space for the generation you want is here to stay, but the black magic and art aspect of it will go away.

For example, in stable diffusion land, lots of people have intuition about the relationship between certain prompts and the output they produce. That intuition is embedding and training data specific, so it's not really transferrable (even to different fine tuned models for stable diffusion 1.5). However, I use clip interrogation to map the portions of the latent that my prompt is pointing to, evaluate the embedding text to find desirable/undesirable elements, then adjust the prompt or add negative prompts to navigate my generations towards what I want.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#36

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…

I'm surprised with this response. I myself have found it extremely useful and ChatGPT has saved me tons of time with programming and non-programming tasks.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#37

In a way, people who are concerned about skills atrophying are repeating the cycle of previous generations, shaking their fist at higher level programming languages or drawing digital images. How dare you not keep the skills of those who came before you! Time will not be so kind to this view. Some skills will atrophy, as article mentions we don't really care about road navigation anymore. But this is not a bad thing,…

Exactly

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#38
I asked GPT-4 for the Imagemagick command to make the white parts of an image, semi-transparent.

It generated a command that made the fuzzy white parts [+1 on fuzzy] fully transparent [bad].

I told it that the result is not semi-transparent.

It apologized and gave me another command that produced a blank image. In another case a grayish image.

I told it this is not what I wanted, and it just looped here saying I'm sorry and giving me one of these above solutions.

As a matter of fact, this looping back and forth between half-working and non-working solutions is something that I've experienced every time when the first result was not what I asked...

Aside from the possibility of "emerging intelligence", I don't think this is the way to the AGI.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's two camps of think-piece authors emerging - the ones who've tried a bunch of different examples of things and got passable-to-great-looking results; and the ones going deeper into specific areas and hitting the wall in terms of expertise and specificity. Using the GPT 4 API, I'm definitely often hitting limitations, especially around depth of information, and having to "prompt engineer" my way around…

Prompt engineer won't go away, it'll get more "engineer"-like. Knowing how to describe a point in a model's latent space for the generation you want is here to stay, but the black magic and art aspect of it will go away. For example, in stable diffusion land, lots of people have intuition about the relationship between certain prompts and the output they produce. That intuition is embedding and training data specific…

Prompt engineering is merely the entry-drug to AI-wrangling.

SD has gotten to the point that someone can fine tune a model (LORAs) with 2 days of time and $2 of GPU time.

There'll be roles for AI wranglers in every large company, where you'll be gathering the dataset and building LORA plugins for the AI to adapt specifically for your codebase/customerbase/documentation etc.

There's also processes involved in building APIs for the AI (AIPI?) to use and interface with your documentation and systems, setting up vector databases, monitoring AI output etc.

People who think there won't be job for expert AI users are just coping. Thinking "haha AI will kill your job too". The steam engine was more powerful than 100 men. In the end it required like 30 people up and down the value chain to support the engines, from coal mining, to coal shoving, to maintenance, to manufacturing.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#40
post #10

I feel the same way I think. These days, I am happy when I am able to use GPT4 to complete a task faster or easier, but am also happy when I write some code "by myself". However, as far as the conclusion of the article. This "age" started only a few months ago. If you are going to call it an age, then the conclusion doesn't hold up. In the long term, programming "by hand" is likely to be similar to wood carving today…

Funny to hear that. I'm closer to 60 than 50, and it never occurs to me to use GPT to write my code. So I wonder if it's partly based on how long someone has been doing something. In retrospect, I never copied code from StackOverflow either (have used it occasionally to get ideas, but mostly felt the code I'd find there just wasn't very good, or at least was too different from my personal coding style to be something…

Old people do not like radical new technology. That's not a new observation.

It doesn't benefit you to adapt to the new workflow, with all its initial inefficiencies and errors, since you don't get the long term benefit.

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