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Programmers are modern-day computers

jtlicardo.com

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Re: Programmers are modern-day computers

#31

Post by dapperdrake »

svantana wrote: post #16
samantha-wiki wrote: post #8

I strongly disagree with this. “Computers” would have not been replaced with the machines that replaced them if those machines routinely produced incorrect results. One could argue that for applications where correctness is not critical my position does not apply, however this is not the analogy that the article is making.

Wait what? Human programmers produce incorrect results all the time, they are called bugs. If anything, we use automated systems when correctness is important - fuzzers, static analyzers, etc. And the "AI" systems are improving by leaps and bounds every month, look at SWE-Bench [1] for example. It's pretty obvious where this is all going. [1] https://www.swebench.com/

Human computers vs. electronic computers.

Think of electronic calculators. They have a significantly lower error rate than human calculators. Both statistically significant and practically significant.

Re: Programmers are modern-day computers

#32

Post by dapperdrake »

brink wrote: post #7

What a superficial and short-sighted take. > Even he, subconsciously, knows it doesn't pay off to waste cognitive energy on what a machine could do instead. > It's not laziness, but efficiency. It's only efficient in the short-term, not long-term. Now the programmer never understood the problem, and that is a problem in the long-run. As any experienced engineer knows - understanding problems is how anyone gets better…

Efficiency is mostly trash.

Effectiveness counts. Effective people rarely need to wag the efficiency dog.

Re: Programmers are modern-day computers

#33

Post by dapperdrake »

kibwen wrote: post #24

Except that going from human computers to mechanical computers made us more precise and more accurate at doing calculations, not less. Modern AI assistants have yet to demonstrate greater level of competence than even an inexperienced human programmer. Anyone telling you otherwise has fallen victim to extrapolation.

It’s not about calculations.

Now you can buy a command-line interface to marketing copy at less than $1000 per month that never applies for sick days.

Not saying that I like it, but that seems to be what it is.

Re: Programmers are modern-day computers

#34

Post by dapperdrake »

oscribinn wrote: post #18

Oh boy, I sure love to see some guy with a blog waxing poetic about the future of AI. The insistence that "most people haven't realized come to terms with it yet", and then proceeding to make a total fucking guess out of his ass. Reminds me of that one asshole who couldn't find a pen, and wrote a whole NYT article about "the demise of the pen".

LOL.

Makes people wish for the demise of stupidity.

Re: Programmers are modern-day computers

#35

Post by dapperdrake »

hwreG wrote: post #12

"Those are the very skills that are going to become a lot less relevant, for the precise reason that, now, the machine can do those things." A photocopier could steal books, a VHS recorder could steal movies, a computer could steal digital works. LLMs now steal pseudo-legally. Any person without morals could have done the exact same thing before LLM laundromats by just using Google search and GitHub. "Anyone who tell…

But "you wouldn’t steal a handbag".

Re: Programmers are modern-day computers

#36

Post by dapperdrake »

elzbardico wrote: post #11

I sure wish I had access to the crystal ball people like the author and linked-in top-voices have that enable them to utter with unawavering conviction those decrees, while warning that everyone that doesn't agree with them are "deluding themselves."

It’s less of a crystal ball and more of an ingestive material quality issue.

Re: Programmers are modern-day computers

#37

Post by dapperdrake »

cess11 wrote: post #10

'Did the computer create a generation of "illiterate mathematicians"? No, it only freed us to solve higher-level problems.' I'm not so sure LLM-based code-assistants/writers are directly comparable to the almost perfectly deterministic logic gate chips and monitors/printers and so on that we call "the computer". Wordpress is likely a better comparison, which allowed more web sites to come into existence with little e…

TeX and LaTeX are, apparently, the epitome of illiteracy. /s

Re: Programmers are modern-day computers

#38

Post by dapperdrake »

jablongo wrote: post #25

While I have been amazed by the progress of LLMs and believe that this ultimately leads to AGI, I still think that LLM aided development is limited to things that are often done and are well documented in the training corpus. Writing code with new libraries or less documented lower level apis still requires you to actually do it. LLMs slowly separate you from your understanding of what your code is doing, and if they…

snip Yes

Re: Programmers are modern-day computers

#40

Post by jtlicardo »

xg15 wrote: post #14

> Tomorrow's job [...] will look a lot more like: [...] 3. evaluating whether the end result works as intended. I have some news for the author about what 80% of a programmer's job consists of already today. There is also the issue #4, that "idea guy" types frequently gloss over: If things do not work as intended, find out why they don't do so and work out a way to fix the root cause. It's not impossible that an AI c…

You make a good point and those kind of senior engineer skills may be the least affected. My post does not argue against that. It argues that writing code manually may quickly become obsolete.

What I am trying to say is that people who see the output of their work as "code" will be replaced just like human computers did. I believe even debugging will be increasingly aided by AI. I do not believe that AI will eliminate the need for system understanding, just to be clear.

Then again, you might argue that writing lines of code and manually debugging issues is exactly what builds your understanding of the system. I agree with that too, I suppose the challenge will be maintaining deep system knowledge as more tasks become automated.

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