471–480 of 1001 posts
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…
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'm probably bad at writing prompts, but in my limited experience, I spend more time reviewing and correcting the generated code than it would have taken to write it myself. And that is just for simple tasks. I can't imagine thinking a llm could generate millions of lines of bug free code.
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Spreadsheets didn’t replace accountants, however, it made them more efficient. I don’t personally believe AI will replace software engineers anytime soon, but it’s already making us more efficient. Just as Excel experience is required to crunch numbers, I suspect AI experience will be required to write code. I use chat-gpt every day for programming and there are times where it’s spot on and more times where it’s blat…
AI might help programmers become more rigorous by lowering the cost of formal methods. Imagine an advanced language where simply writing a function contract, in some kind of Hoare logic or using a dependently-typed signature, yields provably correct code. These kinds of ideas are already worked on, and I believe are the future.
In practice, our industry seems to have reached a sort of limit in how much type system complexity we can actually absorb. If you look at the big new languages that came along in the last 10-15 years (Kotlin, Swift, Go, Rust, TypeScript) then they all have type systems of pretty similar levels of power, with the possible exception of the latter two which have ordinary type systems with some "gimmicks". I don't mean that in a bad way, I mean they have type system features to solve very specific problems beyond generalizable correctness. In the case of Rust it's ownership handling for manual memory management, and for TypeScript it's how to statically express all the things you can do with a pre-existing dynamic type system. None have attempted to integrate generalized academic type theory research like contracts/formal methods/dependent types.
I think this is for a mix of performance and usability reasons that aren't really tractable to solve right now, not even with AI.
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…
It comes down to whether society's demand for programmers is fixed, or if it scales with how productive programmers are, or more likely some mix of these scenarios. If the demand is fixed, then you are just taking someone's job by being more productive.
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I’d need to see it. I can’t get ChatGPT to outperform a novice. And now I’m having candidates argue that they don’t need to learn the fundamentals because LLMs can do it for them.. Good luck HTML/CSS expert who couldn’t produce a valid HTML5 skeleton. Reminds me of the pre-LLM guy who said he was having trouble because usually uses React.. So I told him he could use React. I don’t mean to rag on novices but these guy…
Just out of curiosity: is the code generated by ChatGPT not what you expected or is it failing to produce the result that you wanted. I suspect you mean the latter, but just wanted to confirm.
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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.
Many machinists, welders, etc would have asked the same question when we shipped most of American manufacturing overseas. There was a generation of experienced people with good jobs that lost their jobs and white collar workers celebrated it. Just Google “those jobs are never coming back”, you’ll find a lot of heartless comparisons to the horse and buggy. Why should we treat these office jobs any differently?
US manufacturing jobs went overseas.
What went overseas were those areas of manufacturing that was more expensive to automate than it was to hire low paid workers elsewhere.
With respect to your final question, I don't think we should treat them differently, but I do think few societies have handled this well.
Most societies are set up in a way that creates a strong disincentive for workers to want production to become more efficient other than at the margins (it helps you if your employer is marginally more efficient than average to keep your job safer).
Couple that with a tacit assumption that there will always be more jobs, and you have the makings of a problem if AI starts to eat away at broader segments.
If/when AI accelerates this process you either need to find a solution to that (in other words, ensure people do not lose out) or it creates a strong risk of social unrest down the line.
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…
If AI makes developers twice as productive (maybe a few years down the road with GPT-6), will this additional supply of developer capacity get absorbed by existing and new demand? Or will there be half as many developers? Or will the same number of developers get paid far less than today?
These questions arise even if not a single existing dev job can be completely taken over by an AI.
A secondary question is about the type of work that lends itself to AI automation. Some things considered "coding" require knowing a disproportionate number of tiny technical details within a narrowly defined context in order to effect relatively small changes in output. Things like CSS come to mind.
If this is the sort of coding you're doing then I think it's time to expand your skillset to include a wider set of responsibilities.
Our brain does not think in text, it just spurts out text as a side effect.
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…
Haha, does it involve timers?
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…
However, it seems only a matter of time before even this challenge is overcome, and when that happens the question will remain whether it's a real capability or just a data leak.