A coder considers the waning days of the craft

So, a few months ago I wanted to lose some weight and wanted to count my calories. As a coder would, I thought why not build a swift app that uses the ChatGPT API to count them (instead of doing it the boring way).

I'm a fairly experienced backend dev I built a few toy websites and I am casually interested in frontend stuff (like watching Fireship) so I thought I'd give it a try.

Long story short, it worked well. I have my app it has all the features I need I used it every day (till I lost 10kg) and I didn't write a single line of code.

However, the coding itself was unlike anything I had done before. I felt much more like a manager/Slave driver.

The core thing was structure structure structure. As soon as the task gets too large, GPT will produce something kind of right that is difficult to understand and impossible to extend. So your task is to split it up, and split it up. Also to apply judgment (it started out using objective-c haha). You have to ask it for alternative libraries. For reference. I relied a lot on something like: "In Python/C#/Rust I would do it like this".

But yes, my overall experience is that I think we are in for an exciting new time, but we are lacking a new coding paradigm.

I know we're all biased here, as coders, but I don't see this as the end, but rather the beginning of something.

In the article, the non-coder was able to produce code with an AI's help, and therefore, coders are doomed.

But in fact what happened is it enabled two "developers" to offload the menial work and focus on the product itself.

The development of electric workshop tools didn't make woodworkers obsolete, it just enabled them to do the work of 5 people, and do it easier and faster.

We are moving from the era of hand-tools in coding.

The real risk is that we're going to see a lot of cheap shitty furniture made by people with no skills, but at least ChatGPT isn't going to chop anyones fingers off.

> Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly

"perfectly"? I mean this sounds dubious. ChatGPT gives interesting suggestions and advice when it comes to coding but I've never been able to get any close to a perfect solution.

I don't think coding AI assistant's are meant to be used in that way anyway...

I think this is just another fluff piece about how coding is now dead (long live coding). That's basically not true. LLM have gave us a leg up but they haven't removed the need for a competent programmer.

I’ve always saw computers as a means to an end. Even in the bladerunner movies no one is sitting around pecking at a phone or a pc keyboard, it’s just holographic AI they talk to and interface with. And that’s the future of technology. Eventually you might do some sort of brain interface and be a cyborg. Who knows but the truth is, we nearing the end of humans needing to sit down and actually write code.

I am quite surprised nobody has called out the elephant in the room yet:

A much superior solution than even the next few AI generations has been available for several decades now. You could just outsource your work to a contractor in a developing nation.