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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

#491

Post by dragonwriter »

liampulles wrote: post #478

The really big problem with LLMs for general AI usage is the requirement of text input - this is a very limited way to represent ideas and intelligence. Our brain does not think in text, it just spurts out text as a side effect.

Really, they don't require text they require tokens, and they can be built with toolchains that turn aby kind of input into tokens. They are called LLMs because they are initially trained on a large bosy of text with all or some of the available tokens mapped to text, but they can also be trained with mappings of other inputs into tokens (either distinct or overlapping the tokens mapped to text), and then you end up with a multimodal toolchain.

But even if they did require text, that's how a large portion of communication from work-issuer to human workers, and vice versa, goes, too, so even if it was true it wouldn't be all that limiting; we don’t communicate directly mentally withbother humans bypassing text.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#492

Post by girvo »

yosef123 wrote: post #427
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.

> sometimes you have to tailor your question to ChatGPT, for it to succeed

Right, which means its a force multiplier for specialists, rather than something that makes generalists suddenly specialists.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#493

Post by Tainnor »

clnq wrote: post #169
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 never found GPT-4 capable of producing a useful solution in my niche of engineering. When I’m stumped, it’s usually on a complex and very multi-faceted problem where the full scope doesn’t fit into the human brain very well. And for these problems, GPT will produce some borderline unworkable solutions. It’s like a jack of all trades and master of none in code. It’s knowledge seems a mile wide and an inch deep. G…

Same. Even for technologies that it supposedly should know a lot about (e.g. Kafka), if I prompt it for something slightly non-standard, it just makes up things that aren't supported or is otherwise unhelpful.

The one time I've found ChatGPT to be genuinely useful is when I asked it to explain a bash script to me, seeing as bash is notoriously inscrutable. Still, it did get a detail wrong somehow.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#494

Post by vidarh »

miiiiiike wrote: post #447
ern wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Requirements vary. It certainly can't produce really complex visual designs, or code a designer would be very happy with, but I have a hobby project work in progress where gpt4 has produced all of the CSS and templates. I have no doubt that the only reason that worked well is that it's a simple design of a type there is about a billion of in its training set and that it'd fall apart quickly if I started deviating much from that. But if t produced both clean CSS and something nicer looking than I suspect I would have myself.

A designer would probably still beat it - this doesn't compete with someone well paid to work on heavily custom designs. But at this point it does compete with places like Fiverr for me for things I can't or don't want to do myself. It'll take several iterations for it to eat it's way up the value chain, but it probably will.

But also, I suspect a lot of the lower end of the value chain, or at least part of them, will pull themselves up and start to compete with the lower end of the middle by figuring out how to use LLMs to take on bigger, more complex projects.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#495

Post by piva00 »

miiiiiike wrote: post #432
markhaslam wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not gonna happen. I don’t want scrapeable answers out there, I want to see ChatGPT cross this little Rubicon on its own.

Have you tried using the ChatGPT-AutoExpert custom instructions yet? [1]

[1] https://github.com/spdustin/ChatGPT-AutoExpert/blob/main/dev...

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#496

Post by mike_hearn »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #454
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 unders…

Isn't this a slight over-generalization from web dev? If you learned programming in the pre-web era then you weren't able to learn how programs work by studying the shipped artifacts, but the craft wasn't waning, far from it.

I learned HTML in the mid nineties and even then I don't honestly recall learning very much from View Source. HTML has never been particularly easy to read even when written by the rare breed who are fanatical about "semantic" markup (in quotes because even so-called semantic markup doesn't communicate much in the way of useful semantics). HTML lacks extremely basic abstraction features needed to make code readable, like (up until very recently) any kind of templating or components system, so even if you were trying to learn from Yahoo! in 1996 you'd be faced with endless pages of Perl-generated HTML boilerplate. So I think most of us learned the old fashioned way, from books, tutorials and copious amounts of fiddling.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#497

Post by girvo »

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.

I mean most people in most jobs are average, or below. Programmers aren't immune: most of them are bad at their jobs on aggregate. Of course they can be replaced by LLM output: their output is already half broken too. I'm only slightly exaggerating for effect, but it's been 17 years for me in this industry and I've seen that over and over again.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#498

Post by rixed »

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…

Out of curiosity, how did you pass the wireframe to chatGPT ?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#499

Post by kumarvvr »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #246
bruce511 wrote: post #222

Obviously we can discuss the merits of GPT4, but actually my first issue is with his root question; >> I would make sure that my kids could program computers. It is among the newer arts but also among the most essential I've got kids. 1 can program. 1 tried it, and didn't like it. 1 just rolled her eyes at me. Turns out, for most people, programming is not like reading or writing at all. Got a question? Ask Google (o…

Would you say the same about math or reading?

Reading is one of the major means of information gathering for humans, apart from introspection, inspection and vocal communication.

It is not comparable.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#500

Post by miiiiiike »

vidarh wrote: post #494
miiiiiike wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Requirements vary. It certainly can't produce really complex visual designs, or code a designer would be very happy with, but I have a hobby project work in progress where gpt4 has produced all of the CSS and templates. I have no doubt that the only reason that worked well is that it's a simple design of a type there is about a billion of in its training set and that it'd fall apart quickly if I started deviating muc…

This meshes pretty well with my experience.
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