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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

#521

Post by mike_hearn »

simonw wrote: post #176

> What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession. Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles. This captures the reason I'm optimistic about AI-assisted programming. The learning curve for getting started programming is horribly steep - and it's not because it's hard, it's because it's frustrating. You have to s…

Definitely. And think about all the other ways LLMs can improve quality of life!

In any complex software project with lots of users there is guaranteed to be an effectively endless backlog of bug tickets that are, in effect, abandoned. I think a few months ago some bug got fixed in Firefox that was ~25 years old. In most compilers and frameworks there's going to be a pile of tickets of the form, "improve error message when X happens" that just never floats to the top because programmer time is too expensive to justify working on it. Over time the difference between a senior engineer and a junior becomes not so much intelligence or even actual experience but just the accumulated scar tissue of all the crap we have to wade through to make anything work, thanks to the giant backlogs of bugs and stupid usability problems that never get solved before the product reaches EoL anyway.

For AI to fully replace programmers is going to require quite a few more major breakthroughs, but setting one loose on a bug tracker and asking it to churn out trivial fixes all day is well within reach. That will both make human programming more fun, and easier to learn.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#522

Post by frabcus »

Tade0 wrote: post #502
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…

The more automated ones will separately write tests and code, and if the code doesn't compile or pass the test, give itself the error messages and update its code.

Code Interpreter does this a bit in Chat-GPT Plus with some success.

I don't think it needs much more than a GPT-4 level LLM, and a change in IDEs and code structure, to get this working well enough. Place it gets stuck it'll flag to a human to help.

We'll see though! Lots of startups and big tech companies are working on this.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#523

Post by atoav »

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 tried for 2 hours to get ChatGPT to write a working smooth interpolation function in python. Most of the functions it returned didn't even go through the points between which it should be interpolating. When I pointed that out it returned a function that went through the points but it was no longer smooth. I really tried and restarted over multiple times. I believe we have to choose between a world with machine learning and robot delivery drones. Because if that thing writes code that controls machines it will be total pandemonium.

It did a decent job at trivial things like creating function parameters out of a variable tho.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#524

Post by cousin_it »

lordnacho wrote: post #488
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 think what will happen is what happened to hardware. You used to come across people who could do things like solder components to a board and hook up various ICs as well. Heck, I did this at uni. Now that layer of craftsmen is gone. You are either an uber-expert in how computer hardware works, or you just buy the hardware and treat it like a kind of magic. Traditionally to become an expert you went through an inter…

Yes, the same thing happened before. There was a generation that tinkered with cars, there was a generation that tinkered with radios. There was a generation that tinkered with computer hardware. And then there was a generation that tinkered with software, and now it's going away.

The real question for me is whether AI will put humans out of most intellectual work, not just programming. Then, even if AI is shared equitably and satisfies our every need, most of us become some kind of sponges that don't need to think for a living. Or human intelligence will remain but only as a peacock's tail, like physical strength is now.

Maybe a true "friendly AI" would recognize the human need to be needed, for human capabilities to stay relevant, and choose to put limits on itself and other AIs for that reason.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#525

Post by girvo »

kragen wrote: post #30
qup wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll be amazing if anyone can request any basic program they want. Totally amazing if they can request any complex program. I cannot really envision a more empowering thing for the common person. It should really upset the balance of power. I think we'll see, soon, that we've only just started building with code. As a lifelong coder, I cannot wait to see the day when anyone can program anything.

they already could, they just had to debug it, which is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place

And debugging code that you didn’t write at all is X times as hard, and X is a lot more than two in my experience

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#526

Post by crnkofe »

skepticATX wrote: post #82

Am I the only one becoming less impressed by LLMs as time passes? I will admit, when Copilot first became a thing in 2021, I had my own “I’m about to become obsolete” moment. However, it’s become clear to me, both through my own experience and through research that has been conducted, that modern LLMs are fundamentally flawed and are not on the path to general intelligence. We are stuck with ancient (in AI terms) tec…

AI is the next bubble. VCs are really pushing it but I don't see this solving day to day software development problems anytime soon. Solving difficult CS problems is one thing and I do find it impressive, unfortunately the greater majority of everyday work is not about generating Snake games or 0/1 knapsack solutions.

Also the idea that we'll need less engineers is bogus. Technology doesn't reduce the amount of work we do, it just increases productivity and puts more strain on individuals to perform. With AI spitting out unmaintainable code nobody understands I can only see more work for more engineers as the amount of code grows.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#527

Post by mike_hearn »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #334
bruce511 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading is a foundational skill. (Its necessary as a precursor to pretty much everything.) Writing (as in can construct words) pretty much goes with reading. Writing (as in quality, coherent, communication) is clearly less ubiquitous. Math is something that everyone who can do math, thinks is essential. Unlike reading though there's a continum of skills from iteracy, to arithmetic, to calculus and so on. Very few peo…

Yeah, I'm saying - it could be now, or it could be soon. Math and reading weren't always foundational, it's a pretty recent thing.

Maths, yes, but it's also not really foundational. Most people don't need to do maths once they leave high school, not even basic arithmetic. Machines do it for them better than they ever could. The heavy emphasis on maths in the school curriculum is probably a mistake and should be rolled back.

Reading and (basic) writing was always foundational. You can go back to ancient Egypt and there are merchants who have mastered a simplified form of hieroglyphs. They weren't doing maths any more sophisticated than adding and subtracting small numbers, but they needed to know writing.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#528

Post by ern »

rixed wrote: post #498
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…

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

I described what I wanted. It was earlier this year..not sure if chatgpt can understand wireframes now, but it couldn’t at the time.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#529

Post by fdgjgbdfhgb »

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…

If it's not a life or death situation (like a self-driving truck slamming into a van full of children or whatever), I don't think people will care much. Non-tech people (i.e. managers, PMs) don't necessarily understand/care if the code is not perfect and the barrier for "good enough" is much lower. I think we will see a faster adoption of this tech...

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#530

Post by lionkor »

welder wrote: post #458
kdmccormick wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll admit that I read up until this point: > At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. and concluded that this person is not a skilled enough programmer to be making any statements about the demise of the craft, nuanced or not.

That's the point.. "revenge of the so-so coder".

so-so? Thats a problem too basic to ask in a coding interview, almost.
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