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A coder considers the waning days of the craft

newyorker.com

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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#451

Post by ern »

I manage a number of development teams, and I don’t get to write much code anymore, but I was asked to urgently build an integration.

The team lead I was going to assign the task to was offshore, and not yet online, so I put the URL for the documentation into ChatGPT premium, and it spat out a working solution.

My team lead was a bit perturbed and created a more enterprisy solution with factories and DI (more out of pride than necessity), but my original code was production ready.

I’m not going to be firing anyone just yet, and certainly not my senior people, but I can see a lot of grunt-level work going away.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#452

Post by sublinear »

ern wrote: post #444
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…

I was on a team developing a critical public safety system on a tight deadline a few years ago, and i had to translate some wireframes for the admin back-end into CSS. I did a passable job but it wasn’t a perfect match. I was asked to redo it by the team-lead. It had zero business value, but such was the state of our team…being pixel perfect was a source of pride. It was one of the incidents that made me to stop fron…

[flagged]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#454

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

Reasons why (supposition, not necessarily in agreement, just arguments I am familiar with) -

It's because foundations are now free but nobody understands how they work anymore - or soon won't hence the waning as opposed to disappeared. There are whole levels that a coder needed to understand in the past that recent entrants to the field do not understand, that can still subtly affect how things work, if no one understands the things the craft depends on, then the craft is waning.

For anyone who started programming more than 13 years ago in the most widespread programming discipline for the past few decades (Web technologies), which in this career makes you super-old, the craft is waning because every year it becomes more and more difficult to understand the whole stack that the web depends on. Not even considering the whole stack of technologies that my first paragraph alluded to.

For Frontend coders it is waning because there are ever increasing difficulties to find out how to do something someone else did by looking at their code - modern build technologies means looking at the code of a site is not worthwhile. And people were already complaining about that 13+ years ago.

If you have kids or outside work responsibilities then in combination with this and the need to produce things and the ever increasing eating of stuff by software (opening new problems and business areas one might need to be cognizant of) it becomes less possible, for those not in school, to hone their craft via purposeful working. For this reason it may be that the craft is waning.

Finally improving productivity is not necessarily something that correlates with improving the craft - industrialization may have improved productivity and made many products available to many people that did not have them before, but it is pretty well known that it was not beneficial to the crafts. Perhaps the feeling is the same here.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#455

Post by quickthrower2 »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #289
quickthrower2 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the same messy tedious thing with LLMs though. You still have the complex brittle artefact that is code. LLMs writing code is the beginning, but low or no code is more ideal for most people. With LLM assistance.

Until the LLMs get better. I just asked ChatGPT a thing, and then on a hunch I asked if there wasn't a built-in function that does the same, and it indeed remembered there is such a function. What if that second question had been automatically and transparently asked? What if there is a finite list of such "quiet reflecting" questions that dramatically increases the value and utility of the LLM output?

Yes. Thats like a langchain. The only issue then is latency as it talks to itself.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#456

Post by mike_hearn »

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.

He is. Later in the article he explains a task he did during the working day to his wife. It seemed like his employer uses some sort of custom tableview control, or he was working on a business report. Honestly it sounded like the bigger threat to that particular task was someone finding an open source library that did it already, but it illustrated the point and the story was nicely written.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#457

Post by Philpax »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #101
Philpax wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI cannot sustain itself trained on AI work. This isn’t true. You can train LLMs entirely on synthetic data and get strong results. [0] > If new languages, engines etc pop up it cannot synthesize new forms of coding without that code having existed in the first place. You can describe the semantics to a LLM, have it generate code, tell it what went wrong (i.e. with compiler feedback), and then train on that. For an…

> They’re only going to get better from here. Every AI apology seems to include this statement. It is more likely that LLMs have already hit a local maximum, and the next iterations will provide diminishing incremental returns - if anything at all.

What makes you say that? There are constant improvements in how they’re being trained and what they’re being trained with; there really isn’t any particular reason to believe we’re at a maxima. Especially with multimodality being introduced!

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#458

Post by welder »

kdmccormick wrote: post #286
RayVR wrote: post #59

I think more people in these comments should read the whole article before responding. The author intentionally takes several turns to arrive at a nuanced view, with a final statement that I think most here would agree with: "Hacking is forever"

I'll admit that I read up until this point: > 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, tried Googling. and concluded that this person is not a skilled enough programmer to be making any statements about the demise of the craft, nuanced or not.

That's the point.. "revenge of the so-so coder".

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#459

Post by RockRobotRock »

gavmor wrote: post #388
RockRobotRock wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay GPT, tell me the bash command to convert a PNG to a JPG and add a sarcastic comment at the end.

Sarcastic? I'm earnestly perplexed.

I'm just as perplexed that you're perplexed.
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