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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

#341

Post by yonisto »

I'm currently re-writing a GPT4 code which is a very interesting experience.

The biotech startup I join 3 months ago have a pipeline written by one of the founders, who has experience in programing but not extensive so he used co-pilot and GTP a lot. The thing WORKS, it actually delivers! this is what got the startup going so it is amazing.

On the first month of the re-write I was able to cut costs in the 100x mark. And on the third month I was able to uncover some subtle bugs that affect the entire pipeline and fixing them is out of the realm of possibility in the current state of AI.

I have no answer whatever employers will continue to value what I bring to the table in 5/10/15 years time especially after AI will improve. I suspect many will not as they will have 'good enough' results from the AI.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#342

Post by bruce511 »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #315
csnover wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not talking about dreams or utopia. Just real modern life - one is way behind opportunity wise if they can't read and can't do math. At some point, that wasn't the case. Many signs point to being able to write instructions for a computer being a core skill for a good life. 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 f…

Possible but unlikely. I mean programming in the "code" sense.

We all "program" computers every day (when you turn on a microwave, when you talk to Alexa, when you do a budget in Excel, or write a Doc in Word.)

Coding is not an essential skill. It's clearly a useful skill, its a valuable skill, but pretty much no-one in my real life can code. And from what I've learned teaching others most people -can't- code, regardless of education.

I fly to place all the time, but I outsource the piloting. Programmers both argue that coding should be learnt by everyone, and at the same time most that it's getting easier (and hence less valuable) to do it.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#343

Post by jeffreygoesto »

chalcolithic wrote: post #328
clnq wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not necessarily. Every hockey stick is just the beginning of an s-curve. It will saturate, probably sooner than you think.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#344

Post by cornel_io »

fisherjeff wrote: post #41
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…

Also, I think we are quite a ways out from a tool being able to devise a solution to a complex high-level problem without online precedent, which is where I find the most satisfaction anyway. LLMs in particular can be a very fast, surprisingly decent (but, as you mention, very fallible) replacement for Stack Overflow, and, as such, a very good complement to a programmer's skills – seems to me like a net positive at l…

Two years ago we were quite a ways out from having LLMs that could competently respond to commands without getting into garbage loops and repeating random nonsense over and over. Now nobody even talks about the Turing test anymore because it's so clearly been blown past.

I wouldn't be so sure it will be very long before solving big, hard, and complex problems is within reach...

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#345

Post by 1letterunixname »

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…

GPT4 code output is currently at the level of a middling CS student. This shouldn't encourage self-assurance or complacency because this is absolutely certain to change as LLMs with some deep learning will be constructed to self-test code and adopt narrow "critical thinking skills" to discriminate between low- and high-quality code.

Ultimately, the most valuable coders who will remain will be a smaller number of senior devs that will dwindle over time.

Unfortunately, AI is likely to reduce and suppress tech industry wages in the long-term. If the workers had clue, rather than watching their incomes gradually evaporate and sitting on their hands, they should organize and collectively bargain even more so than Hollywood actors.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#346

Post by dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv »

manicennui wrote: post #228
GabeIsko wrote: post #22

Do people have problems with Leetcode stuff or something? Aside from generating code I already know how to write before hand quickly, I find AI super useless for coding. It's never been able to solve a single problem I have worked on - mostly involving infrastructure deployment and config.

"AI" helps the people who rely on Stack Overflow to do their jobs. Then they come to HN and worry that we will all be out of jobs soon. The problem it solves is "I don't actually know what I am doing at all". These people are not a threat to anyone competent and no amount of questionable code generated by "AI" will change that.

What domain do you work in that you never reference stack overflow?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#347

Post by vasco »

mrtksn wrote: post #329
EZ-E wrote: post #238

I 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, bu…

In most real world systems increased efficiency leads to more demand, not less - barring physical constraints. Usually because we can now apply the _thing_ to way more complex scenarios. I predict way more software will be created per year and more complex software will exist and evolve at a faster pace.

Once you make agriculture more efficient we can't really eat way more than today so we need less people working there. But if you make software easier to write, I think you'll just end up with way more software because the complexity of human needs and processes is unbounded unlike eating food.

Also called the efficiency paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#348

Post by DrSiemer »

josephg wrote: post #314
StableAlkyne wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah. You also don't have to wait for an answer or interrupt someone to get that answer. 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…

Good riddance. I can finally get started on the massive stockpile of potential projects that I never had time for until now.

It's a good time to be in the section of programmers that see writing code as a means to an end and not as the goal itself.

It does surprise me that so many programmers, whose mantra usually is "automate all the things", are so upset now that all the tedious stuff can finally be automated in one big leap.

Just imagine all the stuff we can do when we are not wasting our resources finding obscure solutions to deeply burried environment bugs or any of the other pointless wastes of time!

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#349

Post by chii »

jprete wrote: post #121
chii wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this moment, it is still not possible to do away with people in tech that have "senior" level knowledge and judgements. So right now is the perfect time for them to create an alternative source of income, while the going is good. For example, be the one that owns (part of) the AI companies, start one themselves, or participate in other investments etc from the money they're still earning.

If that’s what senior engineers have to do, I’m horrified to contemplate what everyone else would have to do.

> I’m horrified to contemplate what everyone else would have to do.

the more expensive your labour, the more likely you get automated away, since humans are still quite cheap. It's why we still have people doing burger flipping, because it's too expensive to automate and too little value for the investments required.

Not so with knowledge workers.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#350

Post by n_ary »

Here is the controversial take from my perspective:

All these AI replacing coders and creatives is just a broad marketing campaign to put downward pressure on dev and creative salary.

We could've said the same thing back when Code generation was popular. Or we couod say the same thing about stackoverflow, because a non-tech person can bungle together enough solutions from there to build something. Heck NoCode(TM) was putting coders out of job in last decade and here we are in 2023.

Compared to GPT's code-fu, most image generation models are light years ahead(imagine how those models can combine best of different artists into one painting), yet I still have plenty trouble describing in excruciatingly details about the painting I want with all the prompt-engineering-sauce and the end result is usually far away from desired state unless it is just normal sticker stuff.

Explaining requirements is hard, adapting to changes is hard, we still write tests and relatively every MR needs some fixes/updates and we have a whole army of management people trying to do the prompt engineering thing and we still have to interpret in between lines to get a piece of software(even basic CRUDs that makes millions), so yeah, it is all hype driven marketing catering to enterprise about saving all those money but in the end still spend more on the token count and prompt engineering and another army of people figuring out the right keywords to describe the product and whatnot.

All this things are mostly the same, it is like claiming that we'll habe quantum computers just like next year and any Joe rando can train their own GPT or crack open the SSL layer.

Don't feed the hype cycle of these marketers with ypur fear because more you engage on this, more their boat is lifted.

Show me a real product that was built/written by GPT and is making even few hundred in monthly revenue and I will be happy to change my mind.

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