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Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

mitsloan.mit.edu

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Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#41

Post by ren_engineer »

camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

as always the question is are you using GPT4? Almost all people downplaying it are using free ChatGPT accounts and Bard is still a joke at this point

GitHub Copilot is also very good because it has the context of your open files or selected text and will pretty regularly give you exactly what you want for the next line of code.

I will say it's much weaker for less popular libraries and programming languages, but for most full stack engineering tasks it gives a huge productivity boost

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#42

Post by larve »

pm_me_your_quan wrote: post #26
larve wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with these claims is that you can't really quantify a "10x" change. I have found a lot of emergent benefits to using LLMs. For example, because my cognitive load of wrangling APIs and understanding and refactoring legacy code and all the other nonsense of my day to day can be so heavily delegated, I actually feel refreshed at the end of the day, and can bang out a decently chunked feature on my opensource…

I'd be really curious if you're willing to expand more on how it has helped with those workflows. Do you copy/paste chunks in and ask it to explain them? Have it try to refactor them and then clean up?

For legacy code:

  - generate comments (hit or miss, but at least it can rewrite my random notes into consistent notes)
  - generate type annotations
  - refactor "broadly" (say, "rename all variables to match the following style" or "turn this class into a dataclass like XXX" or "transform the SQL queries into builder queries using XYZ"). Often requires some manual work but it gets a lot of tedious stuff out of the way
  - reverse-engineer clean API specs by just pasting in recorded HTTP logs
  - clean up logs into proper enums by generating the regexps
  - write CLI tools to probe the system (say, CLI tool to exercise the APIs mentioned above)
  - generate synthetic test data
  - transform HTML garbage into using a modern component system / react
  - transform legacy react/js into consistent redux actions
  - generate SQL queries at the speed of mouth
I could go on forever...

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#43

Post by raincole »

ren_engineer wrote: post #41
camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

as always the question is are you using GPT4? Almost all people downplaying it are using free ChatGPT accounts and Bard is still a joke at this point GitHub Copilot is also very good because it has the context of your open files or selected text and will pretty regularly give you exactly what you want for the next line of code. I will say it's much weaker for less popular libraries and programming languages, but for…

I've been using GPT4 (web version) since it came out.

I don't think the grand OP is downplaying anything at all.

And generally speaking, 10% increase in productivity is extremely (repeat 3 times) significant. Remember most developed countries' GDP only grow <3% annually.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#44

Post by devbent »

camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

On some tasks I've seen huge gains.

I needed to setup a websocket server, chatGPT saved me tons of hours because Google results are now all useless blogspam so even finding simple resources has become hard.

I needed a custom ui component built, chatGPT gave me a good base and I was then able to also it to go add accessibility keyboard handlers, something I do not know e how to do myself.

I was having some CSS issues and chatGPT was able to tell me what was going on.

IMHO it is a huge productivity booster, but only because I already know how to architect good software.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#45

Post by rubicon33 »

camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

This exactly. I have had to correct ChatGPT so many times when asking it coding questions. It often gives answers that are flat out deprecated, partially working, or flat out incorrect.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#46

Post by pcthrowaway »

camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

> Instead of Googling

I feel like Google result quality has declined though, so chatGPT is just bridging the gap; not sure if I'm more productive than I was when Google worked better. ChatGPT often gives me concrete things to google which give me the results I want in the end, and save me a bit of time, but that's only because Googling the thing in the abstract doesn't give me those results any more.

...and I'm not enough of a maniac to trust what ChatGPT tells me without reference checking.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#47

Post by dmarchand90 »

JimtheCoder wrote: post #32
dmarchand90 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno computers should be world changing. And they are. Yet the lives of ordinary people have hardly improved and are arguably worse since the 1980s

Worse in what sense? Computers have done amazing things for humanity. I would not want to go back to a computerless world...

If you work in the US for fang or similar your life is probably much better. I love computers. I love what they do for recreation and keeping in touch long distance. But work hours are longer. Education and housing is no longer affordable for most people. In the US life expectancy is beginning to drop. You would think people would have easier less stressful lives with greater financial security. But it's not the case for 99% of us.

Quick example. A doctor in the 90s would expect to look forward to less time wasted on paperwork thanks to computers but administration work is increasing. Likewise most professors at most universities will tell you they spend more and more time on administration. Shouldn't this be one of the primary things a computer could address.

My point is great gains brought by a technology such as computers may not translate to great end user benefit. Largely due to compensating inefficiencies elsewhere in the system.

So for example. It may be that chatgpt makes people 10x more productive. But if management gives bad direction it doesn't matter. If most software being developed is redundant then it doesn't matter. If most software is just making ads run faster then it doesn't matter. The technology needs to be appropriately directed to be of noticeable social benefit.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#49

Post by yieldcrv »

camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

I’m an experienced dev

I’ve held off on some projects (but not others) completely because I needed help but I didn't trust the help to not put in backdoors or compete directly. I also needed to learn some concepts in advance.

With ChatGPT it has definitely been a 10x boost because I can trust it not to put in backdoors, at least for its own benefit. Its a great pair programmer, I dont take its solutions out of the box, I walk through them with it and iterate on improvements together. Instead of waiting for a response on StackOverflow and getting into a moderation war in the process, I just ask it and get instant responses that are far better than someone chasing digital karma points.

I’m coding in ways I wouldn't have, lots of bitshifting, assembly. I can just ask “how would this same procedure be done in assembly”, “why is the syntax like that”.

things that are both hard to ask and hard to google.

it predicts what it needs to explain, unprompted, instead of someone online that wants you to prove that you’ll take initiative in scouring documentation and trial and error yourself.

these are just some of the ways that its a productivity boost for me, let alone acknowledging the subcontractors and developers I simply didn’t seek out to hire.

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