311–320 of 1001 posts
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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?
I have been having the following debate with my friend who does AI and neural network stuff: Him: Coding will soon be obsolete, it will all be replaced by chatgpt-type code gen. Me: OK but the overwhelming majority of my job as a "senior engineer" is about communication, organizational leadership, and actually understanding all the product requirements and how they will interface with our systems. Yes, I write code,…
LLMs are best at doing the stuff senior engineers do that's NOT coding.
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With today's mid level programmers, yes. But by that time, many of today's mid level programmers will be able to do stuff high level programmers do today. Many people underestimate an LLM's most powerful feature when comparing it with something like Stackoverflow: the ability to ask followup questions and immediately get clarification on anything that is unclear. I wish I had had access to LLM's when I was younger. S…
> the ability to ask followup questions and immediately get clarification on anything that is unclear. Not only that, but it has the patience of a saint. It never makes you beg for a solution because it thinks there's an XY problem. It never says "RTFM" before posting an irrelevant part of the documentation because it only skimmed your post. It never says "Why would you use X in 2023? Everyone is using framework Y, I…
But - in the history of AIs written for chess and go, there was a period for both games where a human playing with an AI could beat either a human playing alone or an AI playing alone.
I suspect we're in that period for programming now, where a human writing code with an AI beats an AI writing code alone, and a human writing code alone.
For chess and go, after a few short years passed, AIs gained nothing by having a human suggesting moves. And I think we'll see the same before long with AI programmers.
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Would you say the same about math or reading?
I’m not the op—they explicitly stated programming is not a skill like reading or writing—but I’ll go down this rhetorical path for fun and say: sure, why not? The utopian aim of technology is all about offloading burdensome work so we can focus more on the things we enjoy. If reading is a burden to someone, why not let them use a TTS? If long division is a burden, why not let them use a pocket calculator? They’ll pro…
If your kid rolls their eyes and says "no math/reading for me thanks", you don't just accept it and figure they'll find what they love - you figure some way to make them learn and it's at least a few months of hard work for a kid(and parent) to sort of get escape velocity .
It's possible that programming will end up in the same spot.
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Spreadsheets actually did put many accountants and “computers” (the term for people that tallied and computed numbers, ironically a fairly menial job) out of business. And it’s usually the case that disruptive technology’s benefits are not evenly distributed. In any case, the unfortunate truth is that AI as it exists today is EXPLICITLY designed to replace people. That’s a far cry from technologies such as the teleph…
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.
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…
Programming is only superficially about code. The trick is really figuring out how to approach problems.
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Spreadsheets didn’t replace accountants, however, it made them more efficient. I don’t personally believe AI will replace software engineers anytime soon, but it’s already making us more efficient. Just as Excel experience is required to crunch numbers, I suspect AI experience will be required to write code. I use chat-gpt every day for programming and there are times where it’s spot on and more times where it’s blat…
AI might help programmers become more rigorous by lowering the cost of formal methods. Imagine an advanced language where simply writing a function contract, in some kind of Hoare logic or using a dependently-typed signature, yields provably correct code. These kinds of ideas are already worked on, and I believe are the future.
Proofreading what Copilot wrote seems like the saner option.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 t…
Today I asked it a question and it was wrong.... then it ran the code, got the same error as me, and then fixed it (and correctly explained why it was wrong), without me prompting further :)
Really though, how long until that training update goes from every so often, to constant. Now that half the internet is feeding it information, it doesn't even need to scour other sources -- its becoming its own source, for better or worse.
I think that's where I differ from a lot of the artful programmers, I've never found pleasure in a perfect, beautiful solution. I get annoyed when I have to dump hours and hours into something that 'should' be simple! I don't want to spend my time fiddling with layouts, CSS, Oauth handshakes, etc. I want to build stuff and get paid for it, that's how I view my job as well. Less logician and more mechanic.
I use ChatGPT as much as I can, to do all I can and then fix the output when it's needed. I view it as a higher level programming language, that spares me from the burden of thinking of low-level details. It's same the reason I code in Python/Javascript rather than C++ or other languages, the goal is to make something of use. That's my goal to stay employed, become one with the language du jour, in the same way I've jumped from PHP to Jquery to React to ...