I'm building a pretty neat database with it at the moment, its not perfect, but it is saving me potentially months of fine tuning, down to just hours. It is amazing IMHO.
Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems
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Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems
#372As a human programmer I didn't quite understand the problem statement until I read the whole article and the tests. I believe the goal is to find a path with the fewest possible "fire" cells and the minimum cost as a tie breaker. The cost of a path is the sum of its cells' cost and it can't be greater than 5. If I understood the assignment correctly, I don't think the problem statement is equivalent to what's include…
By the time you've formulated the problem as: "Give me the shortest route with a cost of 5 or lower that doesn't go through fire, and if that doesn't exist, the shortest route with a cost or 5 or lower that goes through fire." Then you've basically formulated the algorithm as well. That's also precisely where one of the programmer's greatest challenges lies, to carefully translate and delineate the problem. I agree i…
The difficult parts and time-consuming parts are not the same.
Since I have experience in both programming and the domain of my tasks, formulating the steps that need to be done for some task is very quick, and they are "good" steps that avoid various potential pitfalls - but then I need half a week to actually make and debug them; so if some tool (or a junior developer) can do the latter part, that's a big benefit.
Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems
#373It seems so many of you guys are extremely lucky to be working on novel problems require elegant new solutions each day. That must be the case, otherwise I don’t understand these comments shrugging off GPT-n capabilities around coding. “Psh, it’s just doing stuff it saw from its training data. It’s not thinking. It can’t make anything new.” In my 11 years as a professional software engineer (that is, being paid by co…
No need to be sarcastic when ChatGPT-4 has issues using APIs, I mean software library interfaces
Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems
#374I find it interesting that many people took a defensive position towards AI. For many the discurs seems to be "will this AI thing eventually replace me and kick out of me job". For me it's more like will that AI thing make me a 10x developer? And the answer I'm leaning for is yes. I use copilot which saves me time googling and reading stackoverflow. I use chatgpt for writing tests to my code (which I hate to do mysel…
Yep. I wanna dial back to being a 0.2 programmer thanks. GPT can fill in the rest. I'll be hanging outside with my kids.
Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems
#375I want to see GPT-4 dealing with this situation: - they: we need a new basic POST endpoint - us: cool, what does the api contract look like? URL? Query params? Payload? Response? Status code? - they: Not sure. Third-party company XXQ will let you know the details. They will be the ones calling this new endpoint. But in essence it should be very simple: just grab whatever they pass and save it in our db - us: ok, cool…
Why aren’t you thinking rather that instead of talking to you, “they” would already be talking to the LLM (likely trained on your code, among other data)—while you get 0 total billable workload in the first place?
My intuition here is that it's because people don't always say what they mean, or know how to describe what they want.
I've been working on a database migration recently, and I look forward to the rare moments when I get to write queries and analyze actual data. The vast majority of my billable hours are spent trying to tease out the client's needs by going over the same ground multiple times, because their answers keep changing and are often unclear.
It takes a lot of processing to figure out an implementation for someone who will straight up describe their requirements incorrectly. Especially when a higher-ranking person comes back from vacation and says "no, everything you nailed down in the last two weeks is completely wrong".
I don't think any of the current LLMs are going to handle these types of very common situations better than an experienced human any time soon. It's like that last 1% of self driving which may actually require AGI. No one can say for sure because it's not cracked yet. I think most of us will continue to have job security for quite a while.
Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems
#376In before all the comments about how “most code is trivial” or “most programming is stuff that already exists” or “you’re missing the point look how it’s getting better”. I really am in awe of how much work people seem willing to do to justify this as revolutionary and programmers as infantile, and also why they do that. It’s fascinating. Thinking back to my first job out of college as a solid entry level programmer.…
These statements can definitely be simultaneously true: * ChatGPT is revolutionary - honestly, it's genuinely impressive how much of a leap ChatGPT is compared to the attempts that came before it. * Programmers write a lot of simple code that has been written before - there are genuinely tons of cases of "write a web endpoint that takes an ID, looks it up in a database table, pulls an object through an ORM, and retur…
I feel safe too, and I'm amused at the dynamic. GPT could do a lot of the things I do, but it would take someone who knows what I know in order to explain the task in sufficient detail for it to do that.
Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems
#377[deleted]
Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is so common in many types of business, and usually a very difficult point to articulate so thank you for that. It's something to be shown to those ringing the death-knell for programmers, artists, and the like. Those death-knell types seemingly aren't aware of what day to day operations looks like and how AI makes a great tool, but doesn't necessarily deal with the very human factors of whims, uncertainty, reac…
I think the fear should be less about AI taking 100% of jobs but it should be AI making a single programmer do the job of 5, which would wipe a majority of the market out and make it a non-viable career option for most. Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors.
> imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors
This already happens, the market is just not very efficient about it, e.g. a highly paid senior dev is not working at a company that only needs 2-3 developers, they're working at Google with 100's of devs.
Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems
#379> I think ChatGPT is just kind of bullshitting at this point. It doesn’t have an answer, and cannot think of one, so it’s just making shit up at this point [...] But instead it’s [overconfident] in its own capabilities, and just makes shit up. It’s the same problem it has with plenty of other fields If anything, the article demonstrates it can write code, but it can't thoroughly reason about problems it hasn't been t…
I've been able to give it arbitrary blocks of code and have it explain how they work.
(Asking this makes GPT more effective when I ask it make further changes. One reason I do this is when I start a new session with ChatGPT discussing code it helped me write previously, especially if I've gone away and done a big refactoring myself.)
A very simple example is that I asked it to write some Ruby functions that would generate random creature descriptions (e.g., "a ferocious ice dragon", "a mysterious jungle griffin"). It did this by generating three arrays (adjectives, locations, creature types) and randomly selecting from them to build the output string. I then asked it to explain how many different descriptions it could generate, and it explained that multiplying the length of the three arrays would give the number of outputs. (125 for the first iteration, 5x5x5).
I then asked it how it would increase the number of possible outputs to 1000, and it did so by increasing each of the three arrays to length 10. I then asked it how it would generate millions of possible outputs, and it added extra arrays to make the creature descriptions more complicated, increasing the number of permutations of strings.
This is not the most sophisticated example, but it shows what GPT can do when it can combine "knowledge" of different areas.
If it's able to combine the solutions to known problems in a straightforward way, it can accomplish a lot. Beyond a certain point it needs guidance from the user, but if used as a tool to fill in the gaps in your own knowledge, its enormously powerful. I it more as an "intelligence-augmenter" than a "human-replacer".
See my comment here where I went into more detail on how I work with GPT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35197613
Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems
#380In before all the comments about how “most code is trivial” or “most programming is stuff that already exists” or “you’re missing the point look how it’s getting better”. I really am in awe of how much work people seem willing to do to justify this as revolutionary and programmers as infantile, and also why they do that. It’s fascinating. Thinking back to my first job out of college as a solid entry level programmer.…
The problem is that many people here have an extreme point of view. It's either "this is going to make all develops jobless" or "it's useless, my job isn't that". I think It'll help with some tasks, which is always good to take. After all, people tweak their vim settings because they feel it makes them more productive.
Software development seems safe for the time being, but as someone who has both paid professional translators and used ChatGPT for translation, I'm certain GPT is obliterating some jobs.