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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

#581

Post by flir »

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.

I wouldn't call it obscure, just bog standard command line stuff. How would you have done it?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#582

Post by radiator »

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.

To me, the only obscure thing about this is that it is a one-liner.

If you write it in three lines, it is fine. Although, I guess the second find and the grep could be shortened, combined into one command.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#583

Post by BlueTemplar »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #572
fdgjgbdfhgb wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Boomers overwhelmingly aren't able to use a computer right now (= write a basic script), I would be happy at this development if I was them.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#584

Post by cnity »

I like to think of a simple thought experiment when these types of arguments come up: Suppose you want some video game to exist. The most amazing, expansive, ground-breaking video game ever made. There are only two scenarios:

1. AI can replace coders altogether. In this case we live in an absolutely amazing world in which anyone can conjure the video game of their dreams instantly.

2. AI cannot do this, in which case there is still (clearly) an essentially infinite demand for new software.

Obviously, we do not live in world number 1. If we have arrived at the world in which AI can do the job of all coders, then why is there not an infinite supply of high quality software? In fact, this would be a software utopia.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#585

Post by interpol_p »

I use ChatGPT daily and have been coding for over two decades. I get it to write all the tedious stuff, and it basically writes all my internal tools, scripts and so on. The last big things it wrote for me were:

A macOS SwiftUI app to go through all the localization strings in my apps and show them in a table where I could see missing translations, and interactively translate them… by sending the, back to ChatGPT

Another macOS app to graph Google ngram data for word lists. It was great because I didn’t even need to check whether there was an API for ngrams, I just asked it for the function, then for the code to plot it in Swift Charts

Sometimes I consult it on refactoring problems (eg., this struct has new responsibilities, what would be a more appropriate name? How do you see it fitting into this section of the code?). It’s a great tool and easily worth the money

It almost never writes any “interesting” code, however

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#586

Post by soco »

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.

I had a chilling experience of late when, out of curiosity, I tried the actual online practice exam for driving school. Boy did I fail it. I realized that there are quite some road signs I never saw in my life, and more important, that my current solution to all their right of way questions is "slow down and see what the others do" - not even that wrong if I think about but won't get you points in the exam.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#587

Post by [deleted] »

dsego wrote: post #484
happytiger wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s interesting. I think there’s a real shift going on in terms of what coding actually means I’ve never produced so much code so quickly and it’s disconcerting to the part of me that wants to feel like I earned the outcome on a pretty deep level because I can just generate shit that works so fast and then just edit it until I get exactly what I’m looking for and it feels like cheating in a weird way. I still don’…

Honestly, this reminds me of my early days when auto-complete and OOP was the best thing. It's why OOP proliferated, you type in the name of the object and get a list of completions in visual studio. No need to read docs or understand what you are doing, just find the method you need on that object. This new copilot coding reminds me of that, throwing shit and see what sticks, without understanding why and how it wor…

[deleted]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#588

Post by smcleod »

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…

How many conversation responses to hone in the solution do you give the LLM?

If you’re just trying to one-shot it - that’s not really how you get the most from them.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#589

Post by DeepSeaTortoise »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #190

my understanding of history is the Catholic church wielded great power over the populace by having both literacy, but and also in Latin (a less accessible language). With 99 theses and a German bible people could easily get their religion on without the priestly class. This feels like a metaphor for what has happened in computing.

Latin was the most accessible langague in all of Eurasia from the time of the Roman empire until the start of industrial revolution. The Catholic church tought Latin to everyone who either became a member of the church, payed a small fee in either money or labor and in many cases for free.

People regularly went on pilgrimages to remote places all throughout Europe and perfectly understood each other, because nearly everyone could speak Latin. Even when the Portugese landed in China they were greeted in Latin.

At somepoint the upper classes started talking more and more in regional dialects and older languages, which then spread to the normal people. The church reacted pretty much immediately to this trend by requiring prayers and certain parts of the mess to also be conducted in these regional languages (somewhere around the 8th century, I think?).

What was low initially were the literacy rates, because books were incredibly expensive. Which didn't mean that the people couldn't read or write, just not to the degree necessary to read or copy the bible in Latin, which was the most available book at the time.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#590

Post by techbuttman »

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.

The lower level person need only plug that one liner into chatGPT and ask for a simple explanation.

We're in a different era now.

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