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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

#571

Post by datpiff »

digitcatphd wrote: post #568
datpiff wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It appears to ask users to rate if the response is better or worse than the first, in other cases, it seems to be A/B testing the response. Lastly, I for instance, will correct it and then confirm it is correct to continue with the next task, which likely creates a footprint pattern.

That's interesting, I haven't come across this.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#572

Post by spaceman_2020 »

fdgjgbdfhgb wrote: post #529
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...

Among bootstrapped “barely technical” founders, its already replacing freelancers for developing initial prototypes

HN’s takes are honestly way too boomer-tier about LLMs.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#573

Post by spaceman_2020 »

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…

My failure rate with Cursor’s IDE that’s familiar with my codebase is substantially lower than just GPT-4

Most people shitting on GPT-4 are not really using it in the right context.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#574

Post by Zababa »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #561
flir wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except you should at least try to write code for someone else (and probably of lower level of competence - this also helps for your own debugging later) - obscure one-liners like these should be rejected.

Assuming there is a comment just above the one-liner saying "find all directories named 'bar', find all files named '*.foo' in those directories, search those files for 'baz'", this code is perfectly clear. Even without the comment, it's not hard to understand.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#575

Post by pydry »

lom wrote: post #565
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’re missing the point of the article. ChatGPT in combination with a mediocre could solve your problem faster than the best junior dev has before

I tried doing this and it actually took longer due to all of the blind alleys it led me down.

There is stuff that it can do that appears magically competent at but it's almost always cribbed from the internet, tweaked with trust cues removed and often with infuriating, subtle errors.

I interviewed somebody who used it (who considered that "cheating") and the same thing happened to him.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#576

Post by somewhereoutth »

mrtksn wrote: post #546
throwaway346434 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

As we all know, it is much easier to read and verify code you've written yourself - perhaps it is only code you've written yourself that can be properly read and verified. As ever, tests can be of only limited utility (separate discussion).

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#577

Post by BlueTemplar »

eloisant wrote: post #547
anonzzzies wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

TFA's point is not that «coders» won't be needed any more, it's that they will hardly spend their time «coding», that is «devot[ing themselves] to tedium, to careful thinking, and to the accumulation of obscure knowledge», «rob[bing them] of both the joy of working on puzzles and the satisfaction of being the one[s] who solved them».

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#578

Post by spaceman_2020 »

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 honestly think we’re entering an age where a skilled entrepreneur will be able to run a $10M/year business all by themselves with AI assisted coding, design and marketing.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#579

Post by d_tr »

corethree wrote: post #323
Der_Einzige wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life is zero sum. Space I exist in is space someone else literally can’t exist in. Anyone telling you something else is lying to you and doesn’t have your best interests at heart.

Yes. Finally. I'm tired of people spewing this zero sum buzz word. Literally everything has a limit. It's all zero sum. Actually it's negative sum. Entropy only increases. It's not just space that's taken up. There's a fixed amount of energy in the known universe. The usability of that energy continuously becomes less and less and less.

We have gone from living to caves to quantum computers and curing several types of cancer, and we are several orders of magnitude away from any kind of hypothetical energy usage limit imposed by the known universe. This could grow to hundreds of orders of magnitude easily as we learn more.

In the everyday life, there are negative-sum, zero-sum and positive-sum situations and events all over the place.

So, I don't get what your comment is supposed to mean and what it is exactly that you are tired of.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#580

Post by TDiblik »

as a high school student, I'm more hesitant to go into CS degree not because of chatgpt but because it is constantly marketed as a high income job and A LOT of people are choosing/learning it. I wonder if it's gonna be the same in 10 years or so. Chatgpt/copilot make stuff easier and there are only so much CRUD apps to be made :/
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