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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

#301

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #291
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this will happen because we’ll just increase the complexity of the systems we imagine. I think a variant of Wirth’s law applies here: the overall difficulty of programming tasks stays constant because, when a new tool simplifies a previously hard task, we increase our ambitions.

In general people are already working at their limits, tooling can help a bit but the real limitation to handling complexity is human intelligence and that appears to be mostly innate. The people this replaces can’t exactly skill up to escape the replacement, and the AI will keep improving so the proportion being replaced will only increase. As someone near the top end of the skill level my hope is that I’ll be one o…

But, for example, I probably couldn’t have written a spell checker myself forty years ago. Now, something like aspell or ispell is just an of the shelf library. Similarly, I couldn’t implement Timely Stream Processing in a robust way, but flink makes it pretty easy for me to use with a minimal conceptual understanding of the moving parts. New abstractions and tools raise the floor, enabling junior and mid-level engineers to do what would have taken a much more senior engineer before they existed.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#302

Post by anon-3988 »

breakwaterlabs wrote: post #243
habitue wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your initial impression was an overestimate and your current impression is a correction back down from that. You could say that it's "fundamentally flawed" coming from a very high initial expectation, but you could just as easily say "this is an amazing tool" coming from the point of view that it's "worthless" as many people seem to think

If I can be so bold as to chime in, perhaps "fundamentally flawed" because it's design means it will never be more than a very clever BS engine. By design it is a stochastic token generator and its output will only ever be fundamentally some shade of random unless a fundamental redesign occurs. I was also fooled and gave it too much credit, if you engage in a philosophical discussion with it it seems purpose-built fo…

> If I can be so bold as to chime in, perhaps "fundamentally flawed" because it's design means it will never be more than a very clever BS engine.

How is your fellow human better? People here seems to spend a lot of time talking about how much their average boss, coworkers, juniors are ass. The only reason I know that ChatGPT is based on a computer program is how fast it is. I wouldn't be able to tell its output (not mannerism) from a junior's or even some "seniors'" programmer. That itself is quite impressive.

With how much time we've spend on the internet, have we not realized how good PEOPLE are at generating bullshit? I am pretty I am writing bullshit right as this moment. This post is complete ass.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#303

Post by ilaksh »

armchairhacker wrote: post #89

I think people underestimate the level of general intelligence required to write even seemingly basic "glue-code" (which btw, 90+% of software consists of). If we ever get an AI which can write complex enough "glue code" with a low enough failure rate to replace even junior developers, it's going to cause much, much bigger impacts than people losing jobs. The "boilerplate" and "bureaucracy" which is currently handled…

GPT-4 is (incredibly obviously) well beyond that point.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#304

Post by [deleted] »

evilai wrote: post #119
29athrowaway wrote: post #21

If you train LLMs on code from GitHub it will output what the average GitHub repo has in it. That is, "competent level", not expert or virtuoso. And it will also carry over bugs found at the "competent" level.

Absolutely, but you really don't need virtuoso-level code most of the time ) :

[deleted]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#305

Post by yukinon »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #66
UncleMeat wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll be interesting to see what happens. But I won't take the opinion of somebody who struggles with a task that I'd expect first year undergraduates to accomplish as the key source of insight here.

What about opinion of the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, pivotal deep learning researchers, etc?

People with a vested interest in being proven correct?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#306

Post by cloverich »

aspyct wrote: post #296

Genuine question, as I didn't use LLMs much: Sure, they're good for quick prototypes or even launching production grade services. But what about maintenance? What about fixing issues in legacy software?

Yesterday I asked chatgpt to write me some boilerplate and it did. I went through the exercise of using it, find some bugs, pointing them out, and fixing them (with help, or on my own).

Today I asked a similar question and it gave me boilerplate. Then it ran the code. Then it noticed the error, then it fixed it on its own. All without me typing anything at all.

I pointed that out to someone, and they did not appreciate that it has quickly gained the capacity to test if what it says is true, at least in some limited sense. I'm in awe.

At any rate, I think yes, you plug in code and ask it questions and it can answer them, over time answering them better. Since i've been using it not only can it execute code, but can generate test cases and test _data_. I think wrt to legacy code, it could come up with tests and refactoring strategies.

More generally though, AI is coming. And with it, the ability to write better code than even the best of us. That maybe a year or 50 out, I"m not sure. But its coming. And with each passing day, I move the "when" more into my lifetime.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#307

Post by ilaksh »

FigurativeVoid wrote: post #235
cryptoz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s a good point. I do find gpt 4 to be excellent at generating code snippets. I think as the technology improves, it’ll get better. But I’m more hoping it’d be able to do something more interesting, say generate tests in the background.

There are multiple startups that do this specifically with the GPT-4 API today.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#308

Post by sharkjacobs »

aspyct wrote: post #296

Genuine question, as I didn't use LLMs much: Sure, they're good for quick prototypes or even launching production grade services. But what about maintenance? What about fixing issues in legacy software?

From the article:

> You can’t just say to the A.I., “Solve my problem.” That day may come, but for now it is more like an instrument you must learn to play. You have to specify what you want carefully, as though talking to a beginner.

It’s easier to explain “solve this common problem you’re already familiar with” or “create a prototype with pretty flexible specifications” but if you can break down and explain a problem to a rubber duck[1], you can explain it to GPT4, and it’s a better conversationalist than the duck

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#309

Post by water-your-self »

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…

I agree that a 20x chatGPT would be good for the world.

But I worry, because it is owned and controlled by a limited few who would likely be the sole benefactors of its value.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#310

Post by teaearlgraycold »

fumeux_fume wrote: post #299

A lot of this article and many of the comments here don't really comport with my experience programming and designing programs. Many or all of the examples in the article seem like toy programs meant to do something relatively straightforward/simple with loose constraints, but in a domain or using tools unfamiliar to the programmer. However, many programmers find themselves in the opposite situation: using tools they…

Also many of these programs described in the article have been built many times before. This is effectively like saying programming will die because you can download programs off of GitHub.

The "making flappy bird with GPT-4 in 30 minutes" YouTube videos are fun to watch, but I'll do more than raise an eyebrow when someone releases a novel video game on Steam written primarily by GPT-4 in a fraction of the time a human alone could have.

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