Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A coder considers the waning days of the craft

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 1001 posts

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#401

Post by AlexAffe »

betaby wrote: post #3

Article itself feels like it was written by LLM - unnecessarily long, pretentious and boring without much of a substance. But hey, folks from this forum aren't the target audience for 'Newyorker'!

It's what I thought too. Would I be able to tell the difference? That thought really scares me. What if in not so distant future whole threads, comments included, are LLM generated? We are losing touch (ppl like you and me), and I feel it coming. That is not the first article on the web, that I quit reading in disgust, thinking 'FUCK, what if I'm reading GPT4 babble right now?' We will need a way to tell 100%.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#402

Post by tangjurine »

happytiger wrote: post #395

Do people seriously consider this the waning days of the craft? I don’t understand that. My view is that I am about to enter the quantum productivity period of coding. I am incredibly excited about AI assistance on my coding tasks, because it improves not only what I’m writing, but also helps me to learn as I go. I have never had a better time writing software than I have in the last year. I’ve been writing software…

The author isn't a professional programmer. He has a couple side projects and doesn't seem very good at coding.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#403

Post by ugh123 »

happytiger wrote: post #395

Do people seriously consider this the waning days of the craft? I don’t understand that. My view is that I am about to enter the quantum productivity period of coding. I am incredibly excited about AI assistance on my coding tasks, because it improves not only what I’m writing, but also helps me to learn as I go. I have never had a better time writing software than I have in the last year. I’ve been writing software…

My sense is that the doomers in software these days are either inexperienced and lack perspective from industry shifts over the years or weren't very good to begin with and could not build beyond basic crud and data shipping applications of varying complexity.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#404

Post by reactordev »

(as they know it). As someone who also learned to code in the same time era as the author. The craft that we were taught is dying and a new way emerging. Programming has already changed drastically since the 90s. Exceptions around low level languages, everything else is orders of magnitude faster, more efficient, more succinct, and more abundant. Combine this was AI assistance and it’s like you have super powers of productivity.

Cry about how you no longer have to code the small and mundane, but solving problems and writing software is more than just coding small mundane things. It’s how those mundane things are architected and called to do a really big thing.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#405

Post by Xelynega »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #136
commandlinefan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I disagree. For every 100 problems that would be convenient to solve in software, maybe 1 is important enough to the whims of the market that there are actually programmers working on it. If software becomes 100x easier to make, then you don't end up with fewer programmers, you end up with more problems being solved. And once 100% of the problems that can be solved with software are already solved with software... th…

Who's paying those programmers to solve those problems you've identified the market doesn't care about?

It sounds like that would require an economic shift more than "just add chatgpt"

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#406

Post by Closi »

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…

I suspect automated code reviews and doing high-quality automatic documentation (i.e. better than current standards in most projects) will be fully within the capabilities of LLMs soon. Fixing random build failures will probably follow...

So then the question is what % of a programmers job might be taken by this, and does the remaining % require a different skillset.

There are programmers that are great at coding, but complain loudly when the business gives slightly ambiguous requirements because they see their job as coding, not clarifying business rules. This group are more likely to be impacted than the programmers who will happily work in ambiguous situations to understand the business requirements.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#407

Post by reactordev »

ugh123 wrote: post #403
happytiger wrote: post #395

Do people seriously consider this the waning days of the craft? I don’t understand that. My view is that I am about to enter the quantum productivity period of coding. I am incredibly excited about AI assistance on my coding tasks, because it improves not only what I’m writing, but also helps me to learn as I go. I have never had a better time writing software than I have in the last year. I’ve been writing software…

My sense is that the doomers in software these days are either inexperienced and lack perspective from industry shifts over the years or weren't very good to begin with and could not build beyond basic crud and data shipping applications of varying complexity.

3rd option. They got complacent and old and have trouble learning (don’t realize it) and can’t grok the new medium.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#408

Post by ozim »

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…

To add an example, people ask it to generate new piece of code and then add more questions to refine it. Writing new CRUD is not impressive.

I can do that with scaffolding or copy past template and change.

I did not try and I did not see someone actually giving existing code asking GPT to fix or change it. So that is something I’d try.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#409

Post by miiiiiike »

I have a simple front-end test that I give to junior devs. Every few months I see if ChatGPT can pass it. It hasn’t. It can’t. It isn’t even close.

It answers questions confidently but with subtle inaccuracies. The code that it produces is the same kind of non-sense that you get from recent bootcamp devs who’ve “mastered” the 50 technologies on their eight page résumé.

If it’s gotten better, I haven’t noticed.

Self-driving trucks were going to upend the trucking industry in ten years, ten years ago. The press around LLMs is identical. It’s neat but how long are these things going to do the equivalent of revving to 100 mph before slamming into a wall every time you ask them to turn left?

I’d rather use AI to connect constellations of dots that no human possibly could, have an expect verify the results, and go from there. I have no idea when we’re going to be able to “gpt install ” to get a new CLI tool or app, but, it’s not going to be soon.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#410

Post by happytiger »

reactordev wrote: post #407
ugh123 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sense is that the doomers in software these days are either inexperienced and lack perspective from industry shifts over the years or weren't very good to begin with and could not build beyond basic crud and data shipping applications of varying complexity.

3rd option. They got complacent and old and have trouble learning (don’t realize it) and can’t grok the new medium.

That seems possible. There is a frequent bias against the new even in progressive technology circles.
Post reply on HN