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A coder considers the waning days of the craft
321–330 of 1001 posts
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#322A 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 hum…
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a zero-sum way of thinking about the world.
Life is zero sum. Space I exist in is space someone else literally can’t exist in. Anyone telling you something else is lying to you and doesn’t have your best interests at heart.
Yes. Finally. I'm tired of people spewing this zero sum buzz word. Literally everything has a limit. It's all zero sum. Actually it's negative sum. Entropy only increases.
It's not just space that's taken up. There's a fixed amount of energy in the known universe. The usability of that energy continuously becomes less and less and less.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#324A 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…
I agree. I think there will be lots of hard problems where an LLM is unlikely to be successful for quite a while. For high surety software like encryption or numerical software I think this is especially the case. Sure, you can have an LLM create a draft still, but you’ll need a lot of skill to refine it into something correct and trustworthy.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#325A 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…
I feel ChatGPT is primarily good at dealing with problems that are straight-forward to solve, but have a needless amount of complexity attached to them that is easy to delve through for an AI but takes a considerable amount of time to grasp for a human. It is essentially dealing with the parts of software development that we have failed to make human-friendly.
The compiler is already fulfilling a similar role in software development. We write in high-level languages so that we no longer need to deal with the intricacies of the hardware the program will be running on and can focus on high-level logic in a human-friendly programming language.
I suspect that AI tools will fulfill a similar role, relieving us of much of the need to read API documentation, like compilers have relieved us of the need to read instruction set manuals.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Many machinists, welders, etc would have asked the same question when we shipped most of American manufacturing overseas. There was a generation of experienced people with good jobs that lost their jobs and white collar workers celebrated it. Just Google “those jobs are never coming back”, you’ll find a lot of heartless comparisons to the horse and buggy.
Why should we treat these office jobs any differently?
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> It also is very often wrong in the code it outputs, doesn't know if things got deprecated after the training data threshold, etc 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…
> its becoming its own source, for better or worse
OpenAPi is actively actively taking steps to minimize the changes of that happening as that would be rather bad given how LLMs work.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#328Maybe 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’ve never found GPT-4 capable of producing a useful solution in my niche of engineering. When I’m stumped, it’s usually on a complex and very multi-faceted problem where the full scope doesn’t fit into the human brain very well. And for these problems, GPT will produce some borderline unworkable solutions. It’s like a jack of all trades and master of none in code. It’s knowledge seems a mile wide and an inch deep. G…
How long ago would you have considered this discussion ridiculous? How long till GPT-N will be churning out solutions faster than you can read them? It's useless for me now as well, but I'm pretty sure I'll be doomed professionally in the future.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#329I don't see it - and by that I don't mean I don't think AI can write good code and get better over time. I just don't see how it would work as a workflow to replace (most) devs by AI. If I take a junior programmer's task, say, creating CRUD endpoints. Describing the requirement in a way that matches exactly what I want will probably take more time that doing the coding assisted by something like copilot. Can we reall…
At this stage, it's like a junior. It's pretty useful for the boilerplate or mundane stuff and even with implementation of algorithms from human description to computer code.
It's also very good at converting a code from one language to another and getting stuff done when directed properly.
I can definitely see how large impact it will have on the employment prospects of many. It's not replacing the engineers yet, but those who specialise in a tech as an implementation specialist are screwed. Even the increased productivity alone will reduce the demand.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#330A 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…
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