A coder considers the waning days of the craft • Hacker News Board

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#531

Post by RayVR » Tue, Nov 14, 2023, 9:38 AM UTC

kdmccormick wrote: post #286

RayVR wrote: post #59

I think more people in these comments should read the whole article before responding. The author intentionally takes several turns to arrive at a nuanced view, with a final statement that I think most here would agree with: "Hacking is forever"

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.

Totally understand. I definitely took issue with a lot of the article and wondered what this person does for a job but a lot of the comments are fighting a narrative that only existed in the headline.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#532

Post by amenghra » Tue, Nov 14, 2023, 9:38 AM UTC

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…

There's a Swiss town which had autonomous shuttles running for 5 years (2015-2021) [1].

There's at least two companies (Waymo and Cruise) running autonomous taxi services in US cities that you can ride today.

There have been lots of incorrect promises in the world of self-driving trucks/cars/buses but companies have gotten there (under specific constraints) and will generalize over time.

[1] https://www.saam.swiss/projects/smartshuttle/

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#533

Post by janosdebugs » Tue, Nov 14, 2023, 9:39 AM UTC

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.

They can maybe compete in areas where there has been a lot of public discussion about a topic, but even that is debatable as there are other tasks than simply producing code (e.g. debugging existing stuff). In areas where there's close to no public discourse, ChatGPT and other coding assistance tools fail miserably.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#534

Post by scrollaway » Tue, Nov 14, 2023, 9:39 AM UTC

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 got everyone talking about how GPT isn’t that bad at coding etc but everyone is missing the point.

The no code industry is massive. Most people don’t need a dev to make their website already. They use templates and then tweak them through a ui. And now you have Zapier, Glide, Bubble etc.

LLMs won’t replace devs by coding entire full stack web apps. They’ll replace them because tools will appear on the market that handle the 99% cases so well that there is just less work to do now.

This has all happened before of course.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#535

Post by anonzzzies » Tue, Nov 14, 2023, 9:39 AM UTC

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…

So, don't leave us in suspense; what do you ask of it? Because I'm quite sure it can already pass it.

Your experience is very different from mine anyway. I am a grumpy old backend dev that uses formal verification in anger when I consider it is needed and who gets annoyed when things don't act logical. We are working with computers, so everything is logical, but no; I mean things like a lot of frontend stuff. I ask our frontend guy; 'how do I center a text', he says 'text align'. Obviously I tried that, because that would be logical, but it doesn't work, because frontend is, for me, absolutely illogical. Even frontend people actually have to try-and-fail; they cannot answer simple questions without trying like I can in backend systems.

Now, in this new world, I don't have to bother with it anymore. If copilot doesn't just squirt out the answer, then chatgpt4 (and now my personal custom gpt 'front-end hacker' who knows our codebase) will fix it for me. And it works, every day, all day.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#536

Post by meiraleal » Tue, Nov 14, 2023, 9:40 AM UTC

miiiiiike wrote: post #475

ern wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity: is the code generated by ChatGPT not what you expected or is it failing to produce the result that you wanted. I suspect you mean the latter, but just wanted to confirm.

The statements are factually inaccurate and the code doesn’t do what it claims it should.

Right. That's an experience completely different from the majority here that have been able to produce code that integrates seamlessly into their projects. Do you have any idea why?

I guess we should start by what version of ChatGPT you are using.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#537

Post by throwaway346434 » Tue, Nov 14, 2023, 9:40 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #461

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…

Try breaking down the problem. You don't have to do it yourself, you can tell ChatGPT to break down the problem for you then try to implement individual parts. When you have something that kind of works, tell ChatGPT what the problems are and ask for refinement. IMHO currently the weak point of LLMs is that they can't really tell what's adequate for human consumption. You have to act as a guide who knows what's good…

... What.

It hallucinates and it doesn't compile, fine. It hallucinates and flips a 1 with a -1; oops that's a lot of lost revenue. But it compiled, right? It hallucinates, and in 4% of cases rejects a home loan when it shouldn't because of a convoluted set of nested conditions, only there is no one on staff that can explain the logic of why something is laid out the way it is and I mean, it works 96% of the time so don't rock the boat. Oops, we just oppressed a minority group or everyone named Dave because you were lazy.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#538

Post by blauditore » Tue, Nov 14, 2023, 9:40 AM UTC

Wake me up when the current AI hype is over. Eventually people will realize that getting the last few percent right is extremely hard, just like the last few times where we got just so close to AGI.

What will stay are some nice tools for whatever tasks, maybe programming too. But bots won't replace software engineers. If they could do the current tasks, we'd just engineer one level higher, just like when high-level language compilers made low-level code largely obsolete (yes yes, not completely of course).

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#539

Post by jon-wood » Tue, Nov 14, 2023, 9:41 AM UTC

Dunati wrote: post #463

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'm probably bad at writing prompts, but in my limited experience, I spend more time reviewing and correcting the generated code than it would have taken to write it myself. And that is just for simple tasks. I can't imagine thinking a llm could generate millions of lines of bug free code.

Asking GPT to do a task for me currently feels like asking a talented junior to do so. I have to be very specific about exactly what it is I'm looking for, and maybe nudge it in the right direction a couple of times, but it will generally come up with a decent answer without me having to sink a bunch of time into the problem.

If I'm honest though I'm most likely to use it for boring rote work I can't really be bothered with myself - the other day I fed it the body of a Python method, and an example of another unit test from the application's test suite, then asked it to write me unit tests for the method. GPT got that right on the first attempt.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#540

Post by swells34 » Tue, Nov 14, 2023, 9:41 AM UTC

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 have a very similar train of thought roll through my head nearly every day now as I browse through github and tech news. To me it seems wild how much serious effort is put into the misapplication of AI tools on problems that are obviously better solved with other techniques, and in some cases where the problem already has a purpose built, well tested, and optimized solution.

It's like the analysis and research phase of problem solving is just being skipped over in favor of not having to understand the mechanics of the problem you're trying to solve. Just reeks of massive technical debt, untraceable bugs, and very low reliability rates.