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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

#421

Post by ikari_pl »

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.

4th option. They're trying to enter the market and get a good job, but some companies consider them less experienced but more expensive than Copilot.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#422

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

#423

Post by brailsafe »

The job market this year, even as someone with a fair bit of experience, is already dogshit for other reasons. I do see the writing on the wall, and am considering re-starting from scratch in something completely different, but I don't know what yet. Though I don't see dramatic leaps in capability happening, opportunity, or productivity happening as much as labor price reducing even further and competition increasing to the point where I don't know if it'll be worth trying.

Carpentry seems like growing field though.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#424

Post by markhaslam »

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…

If you feel comfortable doing so, would you mind the sharing the front-end test you give to junior devs and ChatGPT?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#425

Post by ChatGTP »

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…

Code being difficult to make is probably a good thing. It forces us to actually build useful things. To consider it.

Now, we can just nonstop build and try everything. Yay.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#427

Post by yosef123 »

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…

Just like the author suggests, sometimes you have to tailor your question to ChatGPT, for it to succeed.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#428

Post by benreesman »

I was trying to get whisper.cpp built under buck2 this weekend. Unsurprisingly nothing from GPT-4 to valiant to vanilla llama knew how to do that. I got it done but no model (search or LLM) was any help.

I only need help when it’s hard. I’ve already got a BERT-style model completing my queries on Google.

If your entire job could be done by riffing on stackoverflow answers? Yeah, I’d try to climb the value chain.

But most people’s job isn’t to copy paste shit.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#429

Post by dieselgate »

padjo wrote: post #417
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.

Indeed. It's one thing to implement a UI as defined in a mock, for example, but the UX can be totally undefined and open to interpretation.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#430

Post by firecall »

w4ffl35 wrote: post #144
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 been saying the same thing. Coding is the worst part of the process. I've been doing it for 20 years professionally and another 10 or more on top of that as a hobby. Don't care about code, just want to make things. Code sucks.

I rather enjoy making things, or solving problems.

But my favourite bit is refining and optimising the code!

Finding the patterns and abstractions I can make to DRY it out.

That's the bit I like :-)

Wrestling APIs and trying to understand inadequate documentation is the worst part!

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