Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

cyberdemon.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 98 posts

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#51

Post by comment_ran »

> With ChatGPT, it’s too easy to implement ideas without understanding the underlying concepts or even what the individual lines in a program do. Doing so for unfamiliar tasks means failing to learn something new, while doing so for known tasks leads to skill atrophy.

Imagine this: A hypothetical "GPT 7" tech can effortlessly create a starship capable of shuttling you from Earth to Mars. It's so reliable that after 100 uses, it never fails. Perfect flights, precise landings, and zero issues. All it takes is a simple command prompt "design a starship to Mars". In this scenario, is there a need to learn the intricacies of aerodynamics, gravitational forces, or rocket science?

The notion here is to liberate ourselves from limitations and focus on what truly interests us. That's the end game.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#52

Post by rimliu »

hgsgm wrote: post #28
ilaksh wrote: post #10

I feel the same way I think. These days, I am happy when I am able to use GPT4 to complete a task faster or easier, but am also happy when I write some code "by myself". However, as far as the conclusion of the article. This "age" started only a few months ago. If you are going to call it an age, then the conclusion doesn't hold up. In the long term, programming "by hand" is likely to be similar to wood carving today…

You don't even need antique examples like "wood carving". Modern web app developers rarely write HTML by hand. They generate it from higher level language or templates.

And it shows :(

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#53

Post by EarthLaunch »

mrbombastic wrote: post #43
waboremo wrote: post #14

In a way, people who are concerned about skills atrophying are repeating the cycle of previous generations, shaking their fist at higher level programming languages or drawing digital images. How dare you not keep the skills of those who came before you! Time will not be so kind to this view. Some skills will atrophy, as article mentions we don't really care about road navigation anymore. But this is not a bad thing,…

Its not a bad thing until its a bad thing. There are certainly computer related tasks I am happy to relegate to AI, my concern is that we are already bad at maintaining software made by humans. If old school software engineering becomes an arcane art as everyone becomes prompt engineers and software starts to explode in complexity we better hope AI learns to maintain it too.

Maybe it'll be like hard goods; a blender you buy today is made of moulded plastic and lasts 5 years, instead of being metal and made to last 20 years. For 1% of the price.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#54

Post by moonchrome »

jason-phillips wrote: post #33
moonchrome wrote: post #13

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…

> meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucination GiGo, basically

Doubt it, I've tried prompts where a simple Google query would lead to an answer to see if it could save me time (eg. query about AWS service usage, some azure stuff). In every instance I got a plausible sounding solution to my problem that would directly contradict documentation, it invents capabilities/features and misleads.

I've tried using it for code review on a few functions and tasked it to improve provided code - every time it would write worse code eg. I had some logic that would filter to a new list and then append replacement - it's refactor did filter -> add or replace for already filtered items, the reasoning was bullshit : fake performance claims about avoiding allocation when the "allocation" in question was value type, and the suggested alternative was replacing a vector with a hash map which is both logically wrong because of losing order, and slower for the use case.

For generating small stuff like a regex the pain you have to go through to get a correct prompt is higher than writing the thing and you still need to double check it.

I see no use case where chatgpt would improve my workflow in current stage and I've seen so many idiotic bugs recently when pressing the devs that introduced them it's basically "ChatGPT".

The one time it was useful was when I had to convert a model definition to open API spec - was easy to fact check and give feedback to get a decent solution.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#55

Post by fauxpause_ »

gwoolhurme wrote: post #41
fauxpause_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know anything about assembly and I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.

You’ve never learned about it in university? It’s still a semi important concept to learn how a compiler is kind of rewriting your code and optimizing things. In rare occasions it can mess things up when you use optimization options. Even in rare iOS and Android development cases and LLVM. Not exactly assembly but similar logic. I think that goes to the original point, if you are just trying to make something? Sure J…

I’m a programmer. I’m not a computer scientist. I didn’t study computer science. I agree it’s probably important to computer science.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#56

Post by AverageDude »

moonchrome wrote: post #13

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…

Yup. I always wonder why is my experience not like others? Are those PR people for Microsoft?

Example:

I gave chatgpt a list. Which looked like

st street

av avenue

Convert this to yaml format as

  st:
    name:
      street
And so on.

It failed spectacularly. Not even once but about 10 times. Even if it succeeded, it kept changing the output by doing ops which I never mentioned in the prompt (like reordering and merging duplicated values to a single key)

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#57

Post by tjr »

barbazoo wrote: post #50
chupaolo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised with this response. I myself have found it extremely useful and ChatGPT has saved me tons of time with programming and non-programming tasks.

> all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations > ChatGPT is cheap at 20$/month but not even worth that price. This is so general obviously it's not true. It's providing lots of value to lots of people. To me this sounds like someone with the goal of confirming their own biases.

It might be worth considering, for those that GPT is helping a lot, what are you using it for? And for those that GPT is not helping, what are you trying to do with it?

"Programming" is a pretty broad activity description. I can readily imagine that AI tools, trained on publicly-available data, would be more helpful with, say, Wordpress plugins than with flight control systems.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#58

Post by cheald »

comment_ran wrote: post #51

> With ChatGPT, it’s too easy to implement ideas without understanding the underlying concepts or even what the individual lines in a program do. Doing so for unfamiliar tasks means failing to learn something new, while doing so for known tasks leads to skill atrophy. Imagine this: A hypothetical "GPT 7" tech can effortlessly create a starship capable of shuttling you from Earth to Mars. It's so reliable that after 1…

Someone has to. The "humanity designed tech that it became reliant on and forgot how to reimplement, so when it broke down nobody could fix it" is a recurring scifi trope.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#59

Post by m0llusk »

comment_ran wrote: post #51

> With ChatGPT, it’s too easy to implement ideas without understanding the underlying concepts or even what the individual lines in a program do. Doing so for unfamiliar tasks means failing to learn something new, while doing so for known tasks leads to skill atrophy. Imagine this: A hypothetical "GPT 7" tech can effortlessly create a starship capable of shuttling you from Earth to Mars. It's so reliable that after 1…

Frank Herbert's Destination: Void arguably takes one through such a scenario, a highly recommended read!

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#60

Post by texuf »

ducktective wrote: post #38

I asked GPT-4 for the Imagemagick command to make the white parts of an image, semi-transparent. It generated a command that made the fuzzy white parts [+1 on fuzzy] fully transparent [bad]. I told it that the result is not semi-transparent. It apologized and gave me another command that produced a blank image. In another case a grayish image. I told it this is not what I wanted, and it just looped here saying I'm so…

Imagine you’ve only been a programmer for 2 years. Imagine not knowing what imagemagick is. Now get an answer that gets you 99% of the way to where you want to be. Now look at the documentation to see why the parameters aren’t doing what you want them to do. You just saved hours of work.
Post reply on HN