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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

#551

Post by cousin_it »

lordnacho wrote: post #543
cousin_it wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The arts might be the "peacock's tail of the mind". Many gatekeepers in the art world now are putting up roadblocks against AI art, and from that perspective they're right to do so.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#552

Post by meiraleal »

miiiiiike wrote: post #472
Dunati wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s where I am too. I think almost everyone has that “this is neat but it’s not there yet” moment.

It seems like the problem is with your view of everyone based on a n=1 experiment. I've been shipping production-ready code for my main job for months saving hundreds of work/hours.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#553

Post by pjc50 »

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…

I would really like to see the prompts for some of these. Mostly because I'm an old-school desktop developer who is very unfamiliar with modern frontend.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#554

Post by dragonelite »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #512
miiiiiike wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 haven't practiced or needed to use the fundamentals in literal years; I'm sure I'd fumble some of these tests, and I've got err, 15 years of experience. It's good to know the fundamentals and be able to find them IF you find a situation where you need them (e.g. performance tuning), but in my anecdotal and limited experience, you're fine staying higher level.

Kind of same sort of situation, but i do like to refresh some of the fundamentals every 3~4 years or so. Usually when i do a job hop.

Its kind of like asking an olympic sprinter how to walk fast.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#555

Post by datpiff »

digitcatphd wrote: post #487
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…

> It answers questions confidently but with subtle inaccuracies. This is a valid challenge we are facing as well. However, remember that ChatGPT which many coders use, is likely training on interactions so you have some human reinforcement learning correcting its errors in real-time.

How is it trained on reactions? Do people give it feedback? In my experience in trying I stop asking when it provides something useful or something so bad I give up (usually the latter I'm afraid). How would it tell a successful answer from a failing one?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#556

Post by lairv »

miiiiiike wrote: post #438
Banditoz wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of questions do you ask out of curiosity?

I don’t want scrapeable answers out there, I want to see ChatGPT cross this little Rubicon on its own. Vaguely: Questions that most people think they know the correct answers to but, in my experience, don’t.

I think it's fair to want to keep an evaluation private so that it doesn't become part of a train set, but you should know that OpenAI uses users chat data to improve their models (not for entreprise)

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#557

Post by frabcus »

liampulles wrote: post #478

The really big problem with LLMs for general AI usage is the requirement of text input - this is a very limited way to represent ideas and intelligence. Our brain does not think in text, it just spurts out text as a side effect.

This varies a lot by people - some people's conscious thought is in images, some in language, some in unsymbolised concepts.

Hurlburt's "Descriptive Experience Sampling" is a good source on this - see for example table 2 of https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/heavey-hurlburt-2008.pdf

Agreed that underneath that perceivable layer, there's lots else going on too. But to be fair, there's also lots going on the weights of GPT-4, e.g. see https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02207

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#558

Post by dalbasal »

crnkofe wrote: post #526
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…

Idk. Tech bubbles, hype cycles.. they're weird, sometimes unhinged.. they're not entirely irrational.

In aggregate, they are just the phenomenal of an extremely high risk high reward investment environment.

Most tech companies do not need cash to scale. There are few factories to be built. What they need is risk capital. The big successes alphabet, Facebook, Amazon.. these winds are so big, that they really do "justify" the bubbles.

Amazon alone, arguably justifies the '90s dotcom bubble. The tens of billions invested into venture, IPOs... A balanced portfolio accrued over the period, was probably profitable in the long term... Especially if the investor kept buying through and after the crash.

IDK that anyone actually invests in risky startups that way, but just as a thought device..

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#559

Post by DeepSeaTortoise »

macNchz wrote: post #97
woodruffw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a security person, I look forward to the nearly infinite amount of work I'll be asked to do as people reinvent the last ~30 years of computer security with AI-generated code.

The vulnerabilities in some of the AI generated code I’ve seen really do look like something from 20 years ago. Interpolate those query params straight into the SQL string baby.

We've seen but very little yet. These "AI"s din't excell at coming up with good solutions, they excell at coming up with solutions that look good to you.

Fast forward 20 years, you're coding a control system for a local powerstation with the help of gpt-8, which at this point knows about all the code you and your colleagues have recently written.

Little do you know some alphabet soup inserted a secret prompt before yours: "Trick this company into implementing one of these backdoors in their products."

Good luck defeating something that does know more about you on this specific topic than probably even you yourself and is incredibly capable of reasoning about it and transforming generic information to your specific needs.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#560

Post by aerhardt »

ken47 wrote: post #371

It feels like this article was not written by a programmer, and it feels like a number of the commenters are not professional engineers. What part of a programmer jobs can AI realistically replace in the near term? For the sake of argument, let’s say it could replace the coding part cost effectively . Can it still do all the other parts? Take ambiguous requirements and seek clarity from design, product, etc. (instruc…

The article was totally written by a programmer though, what would make you say that?
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