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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

#411

Post by arthur_sav »

josephg wrote: post #143
fisherjeff wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

We’ll see - but given the gap between chatgpt 3 and 4, I think AIs will be competitive with mid level programmers by the end of the decade. I’d be surprised if they aren’t. The training systems we use for LLMs are still so crude. ChatGPT has never interacted with a compiler. Imagine learning to write code by only reading (quite small!) snippets on GitHub. That’s the state llms are in now. It’s only a matter of time b…

Imagine being able train a model that mimics a good programmer. It would talk and program in the principles of that programmer's philosophy.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#412

Post by nonrandomstring »

specialist wrote: post #316
bdw5204 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is especially sad that VC money is currently being spent on developing AI to eliminate good jobs rather than on developing robots to eliminate bad jobs.

Capitalism always seeks to commodify skills. We of the professional managerial class happily assist, certain they'll never come for our jobs.

A serious, hopefully not flippant question; Who are "they" in this case? Particularly as the process you describe tends to the limit.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#413

Post by JonChesterfield »

There appears to be consensus that these models generate code very quickly, relative to a person typing, and that the code emitted varies from totally wrong to subtly wrong. Thus they're going to significantly increase the amount of code in production and that code is going to tend to be of the subtly wrong kind.

This is my non-web-dev impression of the javascript world. Loads of code out there, basically all of it wrong in a bunch of places. Reasoning by analogy with that, one should expect the reliability of computer systems to go downhill from here.

The interesting question for a professional software dev is where one can add value in a world in which essentially anyone can produce large amounts of code that sometimes works. My hunch is that it's going to be really important that the languages and libraries in use are totally solid as they're essentially being fuzz tested continually.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#414

Post by happytiger »

tangjurine wrote: post #402
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.

That’s interesting. I think there’s a real shift going on in terms of what coding actually means I’ve never produced so much code so quickly and it’s disconcerting to the part of me that wants to feel like I earned the outcome on a pretty deep level because I can just generate shit that works so fast and then just edit it until I get exactly what I’m looking for and it feels like cheating in a weird way.

I still don’t feel that way about front end frameworks for the web. Oh my God what what are people doing?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#415

Post by Banditoz »

miiiiiike wrote: post #409

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-d…

What sort of questions do you ask out of curiosity?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#416

Post by mrtksn »

vasco wrote: post #385
mrtksn wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the total demand increases but not the same kind of demand that it's replacing. We may end up seeing CSS specialists "rust belt" falling in poverty while theres substantial wealth build up among "prompt engineers" with good taste in aesthetics.

In any job if you overspecialize and don't learn the fundamentals you're at risk. A CSS specialist is like a CRT TV fixer as compared to a general programmer and an electrician, respectively. Those jobs always have numbered days.

Lot's of people make good many because of that over specialisation. They acquire deep understanding of these tools and that's how they become experts of something instead of jack of all trades and master of none. Of course, they end up outdated in the areas they don't practice and risk being wiped out if the toolset they specialise or the whole industry falls out of favor. That's also why we have people who once were middle class but now their wealth and influence decays and they feel left back. With de-industrialization, that happened to awful lot of people in classical industries for example. Also, with progressing age it becomes harder and harder to adapt.

As a twist in fate, maybe the AI people will eat the Software people who ate the classical industry people. Some will adapt and prosper, most won't because they will be busy doing their jobs and getting paid good salaries in comfortable jobs.

The software ate the world, the AI will eat the software.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#417

Post by padjo »

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 haven’t seen an AI tool that can take a Figma mock up and some fuzzy requirements and turn that into real code in an existing codebase unaided by humans. Given what I’ve seen of current AI tools that still seems a long way away.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#418

Post by WJW »

teschmitt wrote: post #394
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…

Although you are absolutely right, I think the point the author is trying to make is more melancholic. He's grieving about a loss of significance of the craft he has devoted so much of his life to. He's imagining software engineers becoming nothing more than a relic, like elevator operators or blacksmiths.

One of those is not like the others. Elevator operators disappeared entirely while the blacksmith profession morphed into the various type of metalworker that we still have today.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#419

Post by ken47 »

Closi wrote: post #406
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, bu…

Both code review and documentation require architectural knowledge to execute properly for a large app. This is not within the reach of current AI, and won’t be for a long time.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#420

Post by 59nadir »

vidarh wrote: post #390
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…

Frankly, I enjoy software development more because I can bounce obscure ideas off GPT4 and get sufficient quality questions and ideas back on subjects whenever it suits my schedule, as well as code snippets that lets me solve the interesting bits faster. Maybe it'll take the coding part of my job and hobbies away from me one day, but even then, I feel that is more of an opportunity than a threat - there are many hobb…

What do you mean by "low level" here? In the commonly accepted terminology I would take this to mean (nowadays) something that concerns itself more with the smaller details of things, which is exactly where I feel that current AI fails the most. I wouldn't trust it to generate even halfway decent lower-level code overall, whereas it can spit out reams of acceptable (in that world) high-level JavaScript.
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