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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

#361

Post by gloosx »

skepticATX wrote: post #82

Am I the only one becoming less impressed by LLMs as time passes? I will admit, when Copilot first became a thing in 2021, I had my own “I’m about to become obsolete” moment. However, it’s become clear to me, both through my own experience and through research that has been conducted, that modern LLMs are fundamentally flawed and are not on the path to general intelligence. We are stuck with ancient (in AI terms) tec…

Me too.

I am seeing people seriously using the "Please write an expression for me which adds 2 and 2" prompt in order to get the "2+2" expression they need – advocating that they got it with magical efficiency. In all honesty, I don't like writing too much, and writing code for me is always shorter and faster than trying to describe it in general-purpose language, that is why we need code in the first place.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#362

Post by akavi »

closeparen wrote: post #278
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…

Code generating LLMs are simply a form of higher-level language. The commercial practice of software development (C++, Java, etc) is very far from the frontier of higher-level languages (Haskell, Lisp, etc). Perhaps "prompt engineering" will be the higher-level language that sticks, or perhaps it will fail to find purchase in industry for the same reasons.

There's a huge difference between LLMs and "higher level languages": Determinism

The same C++ or Java or Haskell code run with the same inputs twice, will cause the same result[0]. This repeatability is the magic that enables us to build the towering abstractions that are modern software.

And to a certain mind (eg, mine), that's one of the deepest joys of programming. The fact that you can construct an unimaginably complex system by building up layer by layer these deterministic blocks. Being able to truly understand a system up to abstraction boundaries far sharper than anything in the world of atoms.

LLMs based "programming" threatens to remove this determinism and, sadly for people like me, devalue the skill of being able to understand and construct such systems.

[0]Yes, there are exceptions (issues around concurrency, latency, memory usage), but as a profession we struggle mightily to tame these exceptions back to being deterministic because there's so much value in it.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#363

Post by asdff »

TheBigSalad wrote: post #123
decasia wrote: post #52

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,…

CEOs will be replaced before software engineers.

CEO is your scapegoat for a bad quarter. Throw all your eggs in the ai basket and you get a bad quarter, whats left to try? Companies don't like to admit they failed and walk things back to how they are. There's probably only a few off the shelf gpts you can throw in to replace your sacked one. Compared with 8 billion potential CEOs on earth you can go through to make the shareholders happy about a blood sacrifice.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#364

Post by epcoa »

corethree wrote: post #332
chalcolithic wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm used to HN being sensible, and seeing your comment being downvoted makes me wonder what's happening? What's the reason for that optimism?

Human nature. https://radiolab.org/podcast/91618-lying-to-ourselves I know this is a rando podcast and you most likely won't listen to it. But it's totally worth it, just 10 minutes. It's about the science of how and why we lie to ourselves.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Your trendline argument in DOA.

“Use some common sense here.”

As you are proving, it’s not very common.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#365

Post by [deleted] »

qup wrote: post #14
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…

It'll be amazing if anyone can request any basic program they want. Totally amazing if they can request any complex program. I cannot really envision a more empowering thing for the common person. It should really upset the balance of power. I think we'll see, soon, that we've only just started building with code. As a lifelong coder, I cannot wait to see the day when anyone can program anything.

[deleted]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#366

Post by lionkor »

LLMs can be very impressive, but "coding" can be a lot more than traversing a btree or sorting an array.

There is software engineering, which is probably what most well paid devs do a little bit too much of, which is requirements analysis, planning, talking to the customer, estimating, etc. Sure an AI could help with all of that, but leaving that entirely up to an AI probably wont work for a very long time. You'd need a real AGI to take over work that has that many social aspects and requires that much planning and consideration.

There is algorithms and datastructures, which is important for developers to learn, but usually not important to write yourself unless thats literally your job. There, LLMs could help with understanding, possibly visualizing these algorithms, and providing example use cases.

There are hobby projects, which generally wont be done with any AI by most people I know, since the point is to program for fun. AI can help with that, e.g. for inspiration or example implementations of little weird algorithms.

There is maintenance. Once a product, especially a B2B product, reaches maturity, a lot of the work is bugfixing, smaller features, updating dependencies, porting to new platforms, etc. I could see LLMs taking some of this work away, which everyone would probably appreciate.

In the end, I believe that AI and in particular LLMs just help programmers, and will maybe replace the 6€/hour outsourced copy paste programmers, but that is... not very scary.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#367

Post by CodeCompost »

n_ary wrote: post #350

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…

I don't know what's going on, but lately on /r/programming there has been a /lot/ of negative pessimistic and downright angsty articles on software development, like there is some kind of campaign to downgrade the career of software developer.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#368

Post by kaba0 »

nextos wrote: post #280
agotterer wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the beauty of our craft on a theoretical level is that it very quickly outgrows all of our mathematics and what can be stated based on that (e.g. see the busy beaver problem).

It is honestly, humbling and empowering at the same time. Even a hyper-intelligent AI will be unable to reason about any arbitrary code. Especially that current AI - while impressive at many things - is a far cry from being anywhere near good at logical thinking.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#369

Post by thfuran »

pama wrote: post #277
bdw5204 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The plan has always been to build the robots together with the better AI. Robots ended up being much harder than early technologists imagined for a myriad different reasons. It turned out that AI is easier or at least that is the hope.

No, AI is tremendously harder than early researchers expected. Here's a seminal project proposal from 1955:

"We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer. “

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#370

Post by thfuran »

nextos wrote: post #280
agotterer wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs are pretty much the antithesis of rigor and formal methods.
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