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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

#41

Post by fisherjeff »

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 least in the near to medium term.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#42

Post by JKCalhoun »

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…

Yeah, I agree. I was thinking about it today — that most of my life I have coded projects that I have enjoyed. (Well, I often found ways to enjoy them even when they were unwelcome projects dropped on my desk.)

In a larger sense though I think I have looked for projects that allowed a certain artistic license rather than the more academic code that you measure its worth in cycles, latency or some other quantifiable metric.

I have thought though for some time that the kind of coding that I enjoyed early in my career has been waning long before ChatGPT. I confess I began my career in a (privileged it seems now) era when the engineers were the ones minding the store, not marketing.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#43

Post by gtirloni »

Today I already have trouble doing git archeology to understand why a piece of code was done in a certain way.

Now imagine debugging more and more code that was created by LLMs.

Debugging will become more of a voodoo witchcraft kind of thing. I pity anyone who decides to make a living out of that. Probably will earn a lot and die young.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#44

Post by skippyboxedhero »

FigurativeVoid wrote: post #23

I may be in the minority, but after the initial “wow” period, I have been underwhelmed with co-pilot. Don’t get me wrong, there are few times it has really really impressed me. And there are a few things it really shines at, but most of the time I find it getting in the way. I’m not so concerned about the craft of programming. But those that make a good living automating trivial tasks should be more worried.

Used it a couple of times. Never found it useful or thought of a situation in which it would be useful.

If you are doing something that is identical to something that has already been done, maybe it works...but then you just look at GH anyway.

For any other situation it is useless because it doesn't know how to program. Pretty much no company wants you typing in random shit into the internet either, it is accident waiting to happen.

Doesn't even work for automation. This is still an absolutely huge area of potential productivity gain. If we still don't have most people taking full advantage of computers, are they just going to magically automate everything? No.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#45

Post by zarzavat »

akira2501 wrote: post #17
atleastoptimal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you honestly believe that the skills of software devs will never be eclipsed by AI tools?

I honestly wouldn't expect it to be the first application, when the technology eventually does get developed, and we have the power budget necessary to actually operate one of these units. Until then, it's not a question of "eclipsed," it's a labor market, so it's a question of "efficiency" and the large language model people have a very long way to go to produce something that's generally as capable as a programmer.…

You don’t think the technology will improve at all in the next ~16 years? It will just be stuck at it being able to write simple scripts even in 2040?

I fully expect human programming to be completely obsolete by then.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#46

Post by bawana »

AI will surpass humanity at abstraction and the manipulation of abstraction in all its forms - laws, finance, literature, poetry, mathematics... Humans will finally be coralled into the activity their evolution optimized them for - innovation, adaptation, exploration, creation. All the billionaires of today will fade into obscurity as AI strips them of their wealth and leaves only the real humans - unfortunately this may only intensify the rat race if humans continue to compete in a capitalist market.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#47

Post by reincarnate0x14 »

StrangeSmells01 wrote: post #2

It's interesting and kind of a bummer that all this learning is made obsolete.

Learning itself is not obsolete. Burning scarce time on arcana associated with various platforms and libraries may become so.

The various LLMs are decently good at recreating known solutions to problems that may require arcane knowledge, which covers a lot of human memory. Is there something lost here? Probably. But who yet knows what may replace it.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#48

Post by UncleMeat »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #12
Uptrenda wrote: post #5

>At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed Wow, this guys working on rocket science, everyone. Watch out! We might get replaced!

Do you honestly believe that the skills of software devs will never be eclipsed by AI tools?

It'll be interesting to see what happens. But I won't take the opinion of somebody who struggles with a task that I'd expect first year undergraduates to accomplish as the key source of insight here.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#49

Post by paulddraper »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #12
Uptrenda wrote: post #5

>At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed Wow, this guys working on rocket science, everyone. Watch out! We might get replaced!

Do you honestly believe that the skills of software devs will never be eclipsed by AI tools?

A bit maybe

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#50

Post by commandlinefan »

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’s so much of the world that would be better off if GOOD software was cheaper and easier to make.

But… we’d need far, far fewer programmers. And programming was the last thing humans were supposed to be able to do to ear a living.

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