Nostradamus wannabes are everywhere, in every field.
A coder considers the waning days of the craft
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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#32I may be in the minority, but after the initial “wow” period, I have been underwhelmed with co-pilot. Don’t get me wrong, there are few times it has really really impressed me. And there are a few things it really shines at, but most of the time I find it getting in the way. I’m not so concerned about the craft of programming. But those that make a good living automating trivial tasks should be more worried.
Something to note here is that copilot is pretty old tech at this point already - GPT4 API is just absolutely worlds better, and it is also about to be old news soon too! With GPT5 coming probably next year, we don’t know what advances it will make but surely basing your understanding of it on copilot will leave you shocked soon enough.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#33I feel like the headline does not match the article here. The headline implies that programming as a craft is to be replaced but the article ultimately argues that it will change significantly which matches my intuition as well.
At the end of the day, the bar is being lowered. Is that a bad thing? From a selfish perspective, yes. From a societal perspective, no. At the risk of digressing, I think one of the issues that my part of the world (Canada and to a lesser extent, America) has been faced with is inequality. I know people who work more "average" service jobs and they make substantially less than engineers do and that's something that's made me pretty uneasy over the past few years. The societal value of generative AI is in making knowledge work such as law, medicine, and software engineering much more accessible to "average" people.
Are there downsides to that? Probably but I think granting power evenly is probably a better path to utopia than misguided elitism. The latter sounds like the path to despotism.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#34>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 Wow, this guys working on rocket science, everyone. Watch out! We might get replaced!
The author makes this conceit in the next sentence
> everybody looks them up anyway. It’s not real programming
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#35Melodramatic, pretentious, they just love these puff pieces outside of tech
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#36Article itself feels like it was written by LLM - unnecessarily long, pretentious and boring without much of a substance. But hey, folks from this forum aren't the target audience for 'Newyorker'!
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'
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#37Maybe 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.
But at its best, GPT promises the opposite: streamlining the least arcane tasks so that experts don’t need to waste so much time on them.
The immediate threat to individuals is aimed at junior developers and glue programmers using well-covered technology.
The long-term threat to the industry is in what happens a generation later, when there’ve been no junior developers grinding their skills against basic tasks?
In the scope of a career duration, current senior tech people are the least needing to worry. Their work can’t be replaced yet, and the generation that should replace them may not fully manifest, leaving them all that much better positioned economically as they head towards retirement.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#38Maybe 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.
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.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#39Maybe 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…
If a successor to GPT4 produced 5% of the errors it currently does, it would change programming, but there would still be programmers, the focus of what they worked on would be different.
I'm sure there was a phase were some old school coders who were used to writing applications from scratch complained about all the damn libraries ruining coding -- why, all programmers are now are gluing together code that someone else wrote! True or not, there are still programmers.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#40Maybe 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…
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.
Requesting a basic or complex program still requires breaking down the problem into components a computer can understand. At least for now, I haven’t seen evidence most people are capable of this. I’ve been coding for ~15 years and still fail to describe problems correctly to LLMs.