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

Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

mitsloan.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 120 posts

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#51

Post by svnt »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #31
camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

It is not intelligent. Let's just accept it. Ask what happens if you go due east exactly from NYC in a boat. Eventually you'll hit land where does it hit? Totally collapses with false information. Of course you can ask what parallel NYC is at and ask the western most point of Europe at the same parallel and it'll maybe get it right. Give it basic directions. I'm in my car turning right on spring garden onto Broad str…

What do you think that intelligent means? Able to know things it hasn’t learned? I don’t think it has been trained on localization, geography or way-finding.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#53

Post by javajosh »

Your standard full-stack dev is going to have "less experience" with approximately 80% of her codebase, by dint of having a finite life-span. ChatGPT is a faster and more convenient SO in that (very common) case. I, for example, have used it with great effect writing bash scripts that I would not dare to write otherwise. It's also not bad at bashing out the first use of a new library. I mean, I have ended up throwing that code out 100% of the time, but it's still useful.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#54

Post by devbent »

dmarchand90 wrote: post #22
skepticATX wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing about the 10x claims (I've even seen folks say 100x) is that results like these would be readily apparent. Even a broad 1.5x productivity increase would be world changing. And yet, we clearly are not seeing this currently. I'm not saying it will never happen, just that it will be very obvious if it does. 5-10% sounds about right to me.

I dunno computers should be world changing. And they are. Yet the lives of ordinary people have hardly improved and are arguably worse since the 1980s

> Yet the lives of ordinary people have hardly improved and are arguably worse since the 1980s

Read up on improved crop yields for subsidence farmers who got access to weather reports through smart phones.

A lot of people are not starving now because of that one change alone.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#55

Post by ZiiS »

gibspaulding wrote: post #4
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #2

This makes sense to me. When using an LLM for programming it’s the most useful when teaching me the basics of a new language or framework. For example, it’s very helpful for giving me introductory information on x86-64. But much less useful at writing recursive higher-kinded types in TypeScript.

Yep, it's been great for me for knocking together scripts in Python where I know there will be a way to do something like open a csv file and read it into a list of dicts, but am not familiar enough with the ecosystem yet to know exactly what packages might be useful or how to invoke them. I could work the same thing out from stack overflow, but it would take a lot longer.

But did it do you any favours? The increadably well written official python csv doc manages to suggest using iterators rather then loading what may eventually be too much data into a list, Points out that the are dialects of CSV and some common ones you might use. https://docs.python.org/3/library/csv.html

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#56

Post by mensetmanusman »

camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

Use that extra 10% efficiency to take 5 more weeks off.

10% is disruptive:)

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#57

Post by kjkjadksj »

larve wrote: post #42
pm_me_your_quan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be really curious if you're willing to expand more on how it has helped with those workflows. Do you copy/paste chunks in and ask it to explain them? Have it try to refactor them and then clean up?

For legacy code: - generate comments (hit or miss, but at least it can rewrite my random notes into consistent notes) - generate type annotations - refactor "broadly" (say, "rename all variables to match the following style" or "turn this class into a dataclass like XXX" or "transform the SQL queries into builder queries using XYZ"). Often requires some manual work but it gets a lot of tedious stuff out of the way -…

Are you testing chatgpts output in any way? I’ve considered using it for tasks but after hearing all the talk of how it can write good looking code that ends up not working as you might expect, I started wondering if the time savings from generating that block are wasted from interpreting and testing.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#58

Post by saurik »

yieldcrv wrote: post #49
camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

I’m an experienced dev I’ve held off on some projects (but not others) completely because I needed help but I didn't trust the help to not put in backdoors or compete directly. I also needed to learn some concepts in advance. With ChatGPT it has definitely been a 10x boost because I can trust it not to put in backdoors, at least for its own benefit. Its a great pair programmer, I dont take its solutions out of the bo…

> With ChatGPT it has definitely been a 10x boost because I can trust it not to put in backdoors, at least for its own benefit.

Do you want a dystopia? Because that's how you get a dystopia :(.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#59

Post by dontupvoteme »

larve wrote: post #17
skepticATX wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing about the 10x claims (I've even seen folks say 100x) is that results like these would be readily apparent. Even a broad 1.5x productivity increase would be world changing. And yet, we clearly are not seeing this currently. I'm not saying it will never happen, just that it will be very obvious if it does. 5-10% sounds about right to me.

The problem with these claims is that you can't really quantify a "10x" change. I have found a lot of emergent benefits to using LLMs. For example, because my cognitive load of wrangling APIs and understanding and refactoring legacy code and all the other nonsense of my day to day can be so heavily delegated, I actually feel refreshed at the end of the day, and can bang out a decently chunked feature on my opensource…

Side projects are also where I found it invaluable. I'm spending most of my time thinking about actual problems in linguistics and language rather than how to setup an NLTK pipeline or docker image for your own wikimedia database or what not

I never heard of type hints before but ironically I use them on everything now, since it's easier to lint.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#60

Post by aleph_minus_one »

larve wrote: post #42
pm_me_your_quan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be really curious if you're willing to expand more on how it has helped with those workflows. Do you copy/paste chunks in and ask it to explain them? Have it try to refactor them and then clean up?

For legacy code: - generate comments (hit or miss, but at least it can rewrite my random notes into consistent notes) - generate type annotations - refactor "broadly" (say, "rename all variables to match the following style" or "turn this class into a dataclass like XXX" or "transform the SQL queries into builder queries using XYZ"). Often requires some manual work but it gets a lot of tedious stuff out of the way -…

> - generate SQL queries at the speed of mouth

Because of the points this is the nearest to the work that some colleagues do, I anakyze this point (but you could ask similar questions about many of the other points):

In my experience, writing correct SQL queries (which often tend to be quite non-trivial because of the internal complexity of the projects) typically involves a lot of knowledge about the whole system that my colleagues and I work on. Even if I could copy-paste this information, written down once, into the AI chat window:

- I seriously doubt that any of these AI chat bots would be able to generate a remotely decent SQL query based on this information, if only because these SQL queries look really different from what you would see in typical CRUD web applications (for a very instructive example think into the direction of ETL for unifying historically separated lines of business where you often have lots of discussions with the respective colleagues to clear up very subtle details what the code is actually supposed to do in some strange boundary cases that exist because of some historical reasons (which one wants to get rid of))

- even explaining what the SQL query is supposed to do would in my opinion take more time than simply writing it down. Even ignoring the previous point: it is very typical that explaining in sufficient detail what the code is supposed to do would take far more time than simply writing it. A lot of programming work is not writing some scaffolding of some CRUD app or implementing a textbook algorithm.

Post reply on HN