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Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

tylerglaiel.substack.com

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Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#501

Post by xwdv »

IKLOL wrote: post #229
quitit wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so common in many types of business, and usually a very difficult point to articulate so thank you for that. It's something to be shown to those ringing the death-knell for programmers, artists, and the like. Those death-knell types seemingly aren't aware of what day to day operations looks like and how AI makes a great tool, but doesn't necessarily deal with the very human factors of whims, uncertainty, reac…

I think the fear should be less about AI taking 100% of jobs but it should be AI making a single programmer do the job of 5, which would wipe a majority of the market out and make it a non-viable career option for most. Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors.

If you can have one programmer do the job of 5, then you will be defeated by companies using 5 programmers to do the job of 25.

Also, if your one programmer dies you now have no programmers and loss of all institutional knowledge, whereas the other company can lose several programmers and still be OK. There is value in having redundant programmers.

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#502

Post by bcrosby95 »

IKLOL wrote: post #229
quitit wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so common in many types of business, and usually a very difficult point to articulate so thank you for that. It's something to be shown to those ringing the death-knell for programmers, artists, and the like. Those death-knell types seemingly aren't aware of what day to day operations looks like and how AI makes a great tool, but doesn't necessarily deal with the very human factors of whims, uncertainty, reac…

I think the fear should be less about AI taking 100% of jobs but it should be AI making a single programmer do the job of 5, which would wipe a majority of the market out and make it a non-viable career option for most. Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors.

That would be awesome. We have a never-ending list of things to do and not enough time to do it all. What you're saying to me is that we can get through our list of priorities even faster, and stuff won't continually rot at the end of the list.

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#503

Post by adamauckland »

kneebonian wrote: post #496
nicholasjarnold wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors. Yep. This is where I'm at in terms of personal armchair predictions of the future. I expect the labor market will be tough for more junior software engineers in the coming years. This might indeed cause backpressure in the supply of new grads/new labor force entrants in this family of fields ("software…

I see it the other way around the senior engineer is expensive and costs a lot 2 juniors are cheap. Who cares if their code is crap they produce it really fast so they find a bug, just fix it quickly. If anything the time a Sr. spends thinking about things to do things "right" is seen as a waste of time. Whereas the jr. will produce an enormous amount of buggy code but they can fix the bugs quickly by just throwing a…

Because as soon as you tilt from producing features to fixing bugs, you are losing traction and your competitors will win and now you are bankrupt.

I've seen entire businesses collapse because of this mentality.

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#504

Post by ugh123 »

danwee wrote: post #183

I want to see GPT-4 dealing with this situation: - they: we need a new basic POST endpoint - us: cool, what does the api contract look like? URL? Query params? Payload? Response? Status code? - they: Not sure. Third-party company XXQ will let you know the details. They will be the ones calling this new endpoint. But in essence it should be very simple: just grab whatever they pass and save it in our db - us: ok, cool…

- Looks like they're using an auth protocol we don't support...

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#505

Post by Jensson »

jdminhbg wrote: post #394
lebuffon wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting case and use of the word efficient. Developer time reduced by 5X CPU time increased by 500x When CPU cycles are cheap it's a logical tradeoff but it still grates against my sensibilities.

5X is a gigantic underestimate of how much developer time has improved. How long would it take a good assembly programmer to implement a CRUD web server connected to a database? Way more than 5x longer what a mediocre Python programmer would need.

> How long would it take a good assembly programmer to implement a CRUD web server connected to a database?

You know you can call import functions and call libraries in other languages than python? If everyone was programming in assembly then there would be plenty of libraries to make database calls or make web servers in assembly, and there would be plenty of tutorials online that you could copy and paste to get things going, meaning it wouldn't take much work at all. It would be more work, but not orders of magnitude more work.

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#506

Post by kneebonian »

importantbrian wrote: post #407

> After going in circles a few more times, I decided that was it. It got close . It seemed to understand the problem, but it could not actually properly solve it. I had this same loop issue with Chat-GPT. I had something I wanted to do with asyncio in Python. That's not something I work with much so I thought I'd see if Chat-GPT could help me out. It was actually good at getting me up to speed on ansycio and which pa…

This here is my fear to. I have a buddy right now that is getting his degree in CS and he is using ChatGPT for a lot of his assignements.

I worry that the next generation of developers are going to grow up just figuring out how to "program GPT" and when they have an error rather than investigating it (because they can't because they aren't actually familiar with code in the first place) they'll simply tell GPT about the error they are having and tell it to spit out more code to fix that error, slapping more mud on the ball.

Eventually these systems are growing larger and larger at a faster and faster pace, and no one understands what they are actually doing, and they are so complex that no one human could ever actually understand what it is doing. Imagine if every codebase in the world was like the Oracle DB codebase.

In this future a programmer stops becoming a professional that works to create and understand things, instead they become a priest of the "Machine Spirit" and soon we are all running around in red robes chanting prayers to the Omnissiah in an effort to appease the machine spirit.

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#507

Post by jjkeddo199 »

nicholasjarnold wrote: post #434
IKLOL wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fear should be less about AI taking 100% of jobs but it should be AI making a single programmer do the job of 5, which would wipe a majority of the market out and make it a non-viable career option for most. Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors.

> Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors. Yep. This is where I'm at in terms of personal armchair predictions of the future. I expect the labor market will be tough for more junior software engineers in the coming years. This might indeed cause backpressure in the supply of new grads/new labor force entrants in this family of fields ("software…

Disagree -- I think chatGPT will make juniors more palatable to hire. ChatGPT will basically give juniors a free pair programmer to baby-sit their work/progress. Why pay extra for senior devs when juniors can become much more efficient thanks to ChatGPT becoming stack-overflow on steroids. I think the wage gap between junior and senior will actually drop massively. I predict teams will keep 1-3 architect level positions for designs and reviews and replace all seniors with cheaper juniors.

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#508

Post by jjkeddo199 »

mbesto wrote: post #378
IKLOL wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fear should be less about AI taking 100% of jobs but it should be AI making a single programmer do the job of 5, which would wipe a majority of the market out and make it a non-viable career option for most. Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors.

> imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors This already happens, the market is just not very efficient about it, e.g. a highly paid senior dev is not working at a company that only needs 2-3 developers, they're working at Google with 100's of devs.

Disagree -- I think chatGPT will make juniors more palatable to hire. ChatGPT will basically give juniors a free pair programmer to baby-sit their work/progress. Why pay extra for senior devs when juniors can become much more efficient thanks to ChatGPT becoming stack-overflow on steroids. I think the wage gap between junior and senior will actually drop massively. I predict teams will keep 1-3 architect level positions for designs and reviews and replace all seniors with cheaper juniors.

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#509

Post by kneebonian »

adamauckland wrote: post #503
kneebonian wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it the other way around the senior engineer is expensive and costs a lot 2 juniors are cheap. Who cares if their code is crap they produce it really fast so they find a bug, just fix it quickly. If anything the time a Sr. spends thinking about things to do things "right" is seen as a waste of time. Whereas the jr. will produce an enormous amount of buggy code but they can fix the bugs quickly by just throwing a…

Because as soon as you tilt from producing features to fixing bugs, you are losing traction and your competitors will win and now you are bankrupt. I've seen entire businesses collapse because of this mentality.

Tell that to SAP, Oracle, ServiceNow, or a dozen other enterprise software vendors.

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#510

Post by IsaacL »

wara23arish wrote: post #450
IsaacL wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out my comments higher up in the thread (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35197613 ), I really do believe that GPT4+ will be primarily useful as augmenters for capable and dedicated engineers, rather than replacements. It's like a very eager and brilliant junior dev that can solve many problems that you throw at it, but still needs hand-holding, error-checking, and someone who knows how to piece the actu…

What about the junior devs of today ?

If they're willing to learn, GPT is a very powerful tool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VznoKyh6AXs ["How to learn to code FAST using ChatGPT (it's a game changer seriously)"]

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