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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

#541

Post by debok »

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 the same experience with the test I give my back-end devs. ChatGPT can't even begin to decode an encoded string if you don't tell it which encoding was used.

ChatGPT is great at some well defined, already solved problems. But once you get to the messy real world, the wheels come off.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#542

Post by dalbasal »

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…

>Am I the only one becoming less impressed by LLMs as time passes

Jaron Lanier has some ideas about the space in between turing test and blade runner.

The first film goers, watching simple black and white movies thought that they were uncanny. A train coming towards the screen, would make audiences jump and duck. When people first heard gramophones, they reported that it is indistinguishable from live orchestra.

As we learn a technology, we learn to recognize. Get a feel for its limitations and strengths. The ability to detect that technology, is a skill. Less impressive over time.

It's hard not to be impressed when a thing does a thing that you did not think it could do.

We didn't move on to being unimpressed when the thing cannot do the thing we thought it be able to do.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#543

Post by lordnacho »

cousin_it wrote: post #524
lordnacho wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equ…

Maybe there will be an intellectual version of sports? Regulated to only allow actual humans, done for much the same reason as physical sports?

I guess that sort of thing already exists (eg Chess).

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#545

Post by lionkor »

dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv wrote: post #346
manicennui wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"AI" helps the people who rely on Stack Overflow to do their jobs. Then they come to HN and worry that we will all be out of jobs soon. The problem it solves is "I don't actually know what I am doing at all". These people are not a threat to anyone competent and no amount of questionable code generated by "AI" will change that.

What domain do you work in that you never reference stack overflow?

There are workflows that dont include stackoverflow at all, like mine, usually.

If I need to know how to convert a u32 to little endian bytes in Rust, for example, my first instinct isnt to go to SO or chatgpt, my first instinct is usually to go to the docs and search for it. Or just try it out in an IDE. u23::to and hitting tab did the trick, so now I can click on that and read the in-source docs. Same for C++, C, bash, anything that has docs or manpages.

I use stackoverflow for problems like "i have this error and it doesnt tell me whats wrong", like "exception in docker-compose like 3, . missing resource ID" -- i need SO to tell me that this means I dont have an image-name.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#546

Post by mrtksn »

throwaway346434 wrote: post #537
mrtksn wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As I said, you are still responsible for the quality control. You are supposed to notice that everyone is named Dave and tell ChatGPT to fix it. Write tests, read code, run & observe for odd behaviours.

It's not an autonomous agent just yet.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#547

Post by eloisant »

anonzzzies wrote: post #535
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 o…

If it can pass it when you ask it in a way only a coder can write, then we will still need coders.

If you need to tweak your prompt until you get the correct result, then we still need coders who can tell that the code is wrong.

Ask Product Managers to use ChatGPT instead of coders and they will ask for 7 red lines all perpendicular to each other with one being green.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#548

Post by zacksiri »

I think it depends on what you do, if you are doing repetitive work between projects, you're going to find that yes GPT can do most of the work you're doing. However if you're creating new systems, with multiple components and parts. You're going to find that GPT is not that much help.

I pay for GPT-4 and Github Copilot, all I can say is when I'm trying to do repetitive work like writing tests, copilot swoops in and gives me 'mostly' working code. But when I go in to the real creative stuff, that needs real thought and is non-obvious, I don't get much help from copilot it either just doesn't suggest anything or suggests completely the wrong thing.

I think at least for me, the comparison I would use is, construction work. There are many different kinds of constructions, anything simple from making ikea furniture to building bridges. If the coding you do is the equivalent of making ikea furniture. Then yes that stuff is going away, because it's going to be replaced by machines that can produce those parts in bulk.

But if you're creating something special like the Burj Khalifa, or the Golden gate bridge equivalent but in code, no AI is not going to do that for you. It can help with some parts, but no way AI is going to do that sort of engineering, at least not in it's current state.

I think it's worth noting "Coding" spans so many kinds of systems and scale. Not all coding work is the same. Even if you're talking about things which are well-known like "e-commerce" in that industry there are so many variations / many different scales / many different ways to look at the problem.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#549

Post by vidarh »

59nadir wrote: post #420
vidarh wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I enjoy software development more because I can bounce obscure ideas off GPT4 and get sufficient quality questions and ideas back on subjects whenever it suits my schedule, as well as code snippets that lets me solve the interesting bits faster. Maybe it'll take the coding part of my job and hobbies away from me one day, but even then, I feel that is more of an opportunity than a threat - there are many hobb…

What do you mean by "low level" here? In the commonly accepted terminology I would take this to mean (nowadays) something that concerns itself more with the smaller details of things, which is exactly where I feel that current AI fails the most. I wouldn't trust it to generate even halfway decent lower-level code overall, whereas it can spit out reams of acceptable (in that world) high-level JavaScript.

I meant low level as in low on the value chain/simple here, which I accept could be misconstrued but thought would be clear since it's followed by "low skilled".

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#550

Post by jon-wood »

happytiger wrote: post #441
ikari_pl wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4th option. They're trying to enter the market and get a good job, but some companies consider them less experienced but more expensive than Copilot.

Fewer but more senior resources seems possible. I have already seen the impact of AI systems, reducing the number of junior coding positions and outsourcing. On the other hand, anyone who actually takes the time to get good with AI coding tools can be performing at senior levels, much more quickly, so there’s that too. I’m not convinced that it’s some kind of apocalypse as much as it is a massive shift that is going…

I keep seeing this argument for a bunch of different industries. Nobody appears to have an answer for where all these more senior people are going to come from when we're replacing the juniors with an LLM.

People don't magically become senior engineers, they need to get experience of the basics. Traditionally that's done by being hired as a junior engineer and doing a few years of fairly dull work under the supervision of the more senior engineers, who gradually prod you into doing things well.

Bootcamps have been somewhat filling the ever increasing void for junior positions to some extent (in the process making the barrier to entry into the industry higher for people who can't afford to literally pay for the junior roles that used to pay them), but there's still a chasm between someone fresh out of a bootcamp program and a developer who you can let loose on a project unsupervised.

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