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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

#371

Post by ken47 »

It feels like this article was not written by a programmer, and it feels like a number of the commenters are not professional engineers. What part of a programmer jobs can AI realistically replace in the near term?

For the sake of argument, let’s say it could replace the coding part cost effectively. Can it still do all the other parts? Take ambiguous requirements and seek clarity from design, product, etc. (instructing an AI to a sufficient degree to build a complex feature could almost be a coding task itself). Code reviews. Deal with random build failures. Properly document the functionality so that other programmers and stakeholders can understand. Debug and fix production issues. And that’s just a subset.

Realistically, in the future there will be a long phase of programmers leveraging AI to be more efficient before there’s any chance that AI can effectively replace a decent programmer.

This will be an advantage to engineers who think on the more abstract side of the spectrum. The “lower level” programming tasks will be consumed first.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#372

Post by Zaofy »

clnq wrote: post #169
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…

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…

Same here. I'm not a developer. I do engineering and architecture in IAM. I've tested out GPT-4 and it's good for general advice or problem solving. But it can't know the intricascies of the company I work at with all our baggage, legacy systems and us humans sometimes just being straight up illogical and inefficient with what we want.

So my usage has mostly been for it to play a more advanced rubber duck to bounce ideas and concepts off of and to do some of the more tedious scripting work (that I still have to double check thoroughly).

At some point GPT and other LLMs might be able to replace what I do in large parts. But that's still a while off.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#373

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#374

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

CodeCompost wrote: post #367
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.

I don’t really go on Reddit so don’t know if something is going on but I know there has been very few jobs this year compared to normal times and rates have been going down so it could be genuinely disaffected people being angry rather than a coordinated campaign.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#375

Post by ramblerman »

water-your-self wrote: post #309
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…

I agree that a 20x chatGPT would be good for the world. But I worry, because it is owned and controlled by a limited few who would likely be the sole benefactors of its value.

We can already run local models on a laptop that are competitive with chatgpt 3.5

Open source may trail openai if they come out with a 20x improvement, but I'm not sure the dystopian future playing out is as likely as I would have thought it 1-2 years ago.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#376

Post by meheleventyone »

golergka wrote: post #108
ryandrake wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real point. If the profits from AI (or robots) replacing Job X were distributed among the people who used to do Job X, I don't think anyone would mind. In fact it would be great for society! But that's not what's going to happen. The AI (and robots) will be owned by the Shrinking Few, all the profits and benefits will go to the owners, and the people who used to do Job X will have to re-skill to gamble on…

> If the profits from AI (or robots) replacing Job X were distributed among the people who used to do Job X, I don't think anyone would mind. Why on Earth would you expect something so unjust and unfair? Do you expect to pay a tax to former travel agents when you buy a plane ticket online? Do you pay to descendants of calculators (as in profession — the humans who did manual calculations) every time you use a modern…

We expect the workers displaced to suffer something worse. It’s not just or fair that people lose their source of income and ability to support their families through no fault of their own. Slippery slope arguments to one side.

We have a choice about how society is organized our current setup isn’t ‘natural’ and it’s largely one of accelerating inequality.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#377

Post by enva2712 »

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…

https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#378

Post by konschubert »

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…

There are SO MANY problems left to solve even if software development is fully automated. Not just product management problems, but product strategy problems. Products that should be built that nobody has thought of yet.

If I could automate my own work, I would gladly switch to just being the PM for my LLM.

To be fair, there is an abstract worry that being smart will no longer be valuable in society if AI replaces all brain work. But I think we are far from that. And a world where that happens is so DIFFERENT from ours, I think I'd be willing to pay the price.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#379

Post by paganel »

CodeCompost wrote: post #367
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.

I've stopped visiting /programming a long time ago, but just wanted to say (and I've said it before in here) that the status of the computer programmer has been on a downward trend since just before the pandemic, I'd say 2017-2018 (maybe a little earlier than that, maybe just going into the pandemic, but that's the general timeframe).

There are many reasons for that, partly the "normies" realising that most of what we, programmers, do at our day-jobs is detrimental to the society as a whole (see Facebook, see all the jobs lost to automation, see the kafkaesque world brought about by digitising almost every interaction between a human being and the State/Government), it's partly because some of us, computer programmers ourselves, have realised the same thing, it's partly because of how many computer programmers are now financially way better off compared to the normally employed people, it's partly because of the smugness that some of us, the computer programmers, brandish in many social contexts, and there are countless other similar reasons.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#380

Post by FeepingCreature »

ken47 wrote: post #371

It feels like this article was not written by a programmer, and it feels like a number of the commenters are not professional engineers. What part of a programmer jobs can AI realistically replace in the near term? For the sake of argument, let’s say it could replace the coding part cost effectively . Can it still do all the other parts? Take ambiguous requirements and seek clarity from design, product, etc. (instruc…

The thing about GPT is that it has approximate knowledge of nearly everything. It makes errors, but the errors are seemingly uncorrelated with human errors. And it knows stuff that I could take hours to search for, especially as Google becomes more and more useless.

Personally, I use it for scripting and as an executive function aid.

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