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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

#501

Post by flir »

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…

I'm always asking it to stitch together ad hoc bash command lines for me, eg "find all the files called *.foo in directories called bar and search them for baz".

(`find / -type d -name 'bar' -exec find {} -type f -name '*.foo' \; | xargs grep 'baz'` apparently.)

I would have done that differently, but it's close enough for government work.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#502

Post by Tade0 »

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…

My take on LLMs is as follows: even if its effectiveness scales exponentially with time(it doesn't), so does the complexity of programs with (statistically speaking) each line of code.

Assuming a LLM gets 99% of the lines correct, after 70 lines the chance of having at least one of them wrong is already around 50%. A LLM effective enough to replace a competent human might be so expensive to train and gather data for that it will never achieve a return on investment.

Last time I used ChatGPT effectively was to find a library that served a specific purpose. All of the four options it gave me were wrong, but I found what I wanted among the search results when I looked for them.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#503

Post by csomar »

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…

You must be interviewing good junior front-end devs. I have seen the opposite as gpt-4 can put a simple straightforward front-end while juniors will go straight to create-react-app or nextjs.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#504

Post by gtech1 »

Closi wrote: post #450
miiiiiike wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not that I don't believe you, but without sharing the specific prompt it's hard to say if it's actually GPT4 failing, or if it's actually being poorly-prompted, or if actually the task it is being given is more complex than GPT's capabilities or you are implying. GPT4 does fail (often!) but fails less with good prompts, simple requirements, it is better at some frameworks and languages than others, and there is…

This is why Asimov was a genius. I read what you said, and compared it to what he wrote 50-60 years ago:

"Early in the history of Multivac, it had becorne apparent that the bottleneck was the questioning procedure. Multivac could answer the problem of humanity, ALL the problems, if it were asked meaningful questions. But as knowledge accumulated at an ever-faster rate, it became ever more difficult to locate those meaningful questions."

http://blog.ac-versailles.fr/villaroylit/public/Jokester.pdf

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#506

Post by tlarkworthy »

lucideer wrote: post #469
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 recently asked ChatGPT to produce similar CSS and it did so flawlessly. I use ChatGPT every day for many tasks in my work and find it very helpful, but I simply do not believe this. > The article points this out: middling generalists can now compete with specialists. I'd say it might allow novices to compete with middling generalists, but even that is a stretch. On the contrary, ChatGPT is actually best suited to…

I wrote just the tool to optimize AI in the hand of a coding expert https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/robocoop

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#507

Post by ern »

kubb wrote: post #471
ern wrote: post #451

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…

[flagged]

Writing code is not my job anymore. It’s not ideal, but my time is better used elsewhere.

In any case, I could have written the code myself, but this literally took a couple of minutes and it read the documentation for me. And it wasn’t just calling an API, there were some other parts to it.

As for replacing me with one of my reports, that would be great, but they’d quickly end up in the same place as me. In fact, I’ve just spent a few weeks coaching one of my team leads in the art of effective delegation -being able to “let go” is one of the traits of an effective leader.

What’s with the toxic tone?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#508

Post by AJRF »

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…

Which ChatGPT?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#509

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

> middling generalists can now compete with specialists.

I want to say that this has been the state of a lot of software development for a while now, but then, the problems that need to be solved don't require specialism, they require people to add a field to a database or to write a new SQL query to hook up to a REST API. It's not specialist work anymore, but it requires attention and meticulousness.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#510

Post by torginus »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #477
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…

I agree it's amazing. But your comment doesn't touch on the key economic question that will decide for how many people it will be this amazing new dev experience. 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 develope…

Considering how much the craft has expanded - when in high school, I wrote an application for pocket for a small business in Borland Delphi 7. The domain knowledge I needed for that was knowing the programming environment, and a bit about Windows.

Nowadays, like the rest of the full-stack 'web' developers, I work on complex webapps that use Typescript, HTML, CSS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Postgres, bash, GitHub Actions, .NET, Node, Python, AWS, Git. And that isn't even the full list.

And it's not even a flex, all of the above is used by a relatively straightforward LoB app with some hairy dependencies, a CI/CD pipeline + a bit of real world messiness.

I need to have at least a passing familiarity with all those technologies to put together a working application and I'm sure I'm not alone with this uphill struggle. It's a staggering amount to remember for a single person, and LLMs have been a godsend.

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