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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

#61

Post by chii »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #11
cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. While GPT4 is incredible, it fails OFTEN. And it fails in ways that aren’t very clear. And it fails harder when there’s clearly not enough training resources on the subject matter. But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of t…

Some people I feel fear losing their siloed prestige built on arcane software knowledge. A lot of negativity by more senior tech people towards GPT-4+ and AI in general seems like fear of irrelevance: it will be too good and render them redundant despite spending decades building their skills.

At this moment, it is still not possible to do away with people in tech that have "senior" level knowledge and judgements.

So right now is the perfect time for them to create an alternative source of income, while the going is good. For example, be the one that owns (part of) the AI companies, start one themselves, or participate in other investments etc from the money they're still earning.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#62

Post by atleastoptimal »

kragen wrote: post #28
atleastoptimal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people I feel fear losing their siloed prestige built on arcane software knowledge. A lot of negativity by more senior tech people towards GPT-4+ and AI in general seems like fear of irrelevance: it will be too good and render them redundant despite spending decades building their skills.

i've fired a lot of negativity at people for treating the entropy monster as a trustworthy information source. it's a waste of my time to prove it wrong to their satisfaction. it's great at creativity and recall but shitty at accuracy, and sometimes accuracy is what counts most

I know it sucks now and I agree GPT-4 is not a replacement for coders. However the leap between GPT-3 and 4 indicates that by the 6 level, if improvements continue, it'll reach the scope and accuracy we expect from highly paid skilled humans.

It's only a guess people make that AI improvements will stop at some arbitrary point, and since that point seems to always be a few steps down from the skill level of the person making that prediction, I feel there's a bit of bias and ego driven insecurity in those predictions.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#64

Post by chii »

maximinus_thrax wrote: post #51
Uptrenda wrote: post #5

>At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed Wow, this guys working on rocket science, everyone. Watch out! We might get replaced!

> Wow, this guys working on rocket science, everyone. Watch out! We might get replaced! The issue here is that it doesn't matter what you or I think. What matters is what boardmembers, CEOs and CTOs of companies which start cargo cults. You know.. the mainstream tech companies which everyone else follows. If they start shrinking development budgets (I mean shrinking the workforce) under the guise of 'with GPT, you're…

> If they start shrinking development budgets

the outcomes aren't controlled by a reality warping field from these CEO's and CTO's. If dev budgets shrink without actually being justifiable, the software suffers. Those who are made redundant still have their skills, and can offer competing products.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#65

Post by crest »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #12
Uptrenda wrote: post #5

>At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed Wow, this guys working on rocket science, everyone. Watch out! We might get replaced!

Do you honestly believe that the skills of software devs will never be eclipsed by AI tools?

Only by a true AGI, but better non-general AI tools will change how the software is developed. Instead I foresee a tragicomedy of LLMs stuck in endless repetitive e-mail threads as more and more APIs are replaced by bad chatbots to keep customers away.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#66

Post by atleastoptimal »

UncleMeat wrote: post #48
atleastoptimal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you honestly believe that the skills of software devs will never be eclipsed by AI tools?

It'll be interesting to see what happens. But I won't take the opinion of somebody who struggles with a task that I'd expect first year undergraduates to accomplish as the key source of insight here.

What about opinion of the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, pivotal deep learning researchers, etc?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#68

Post by andrei_says_ »

cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. While GPT4 is incredible, it fails OFTEN. And it fails in ways that aren’t very clear. And it fails harder when there’s clearly not enough training resources on the subject matter. But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of t…

If I’m doing something thousands of people have coded before me then yes please hold my hand while I write this CSV import.

When I’m writing business logic unique to this specific domain then please stop mumbling bs at me.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#69

Post by stcroixx »

waldohatesyou wrote: post #33

I feel like the headline does not match the article here. The headline implies that programming as a craft is to be replaced but the article ultimately argues that it will change significantly which matches my intuition as well. At the end of the day, the bar is being lowered. Is that a bad thing? From a selfish perspective, yes. From a societal perspective, no. At the risk of digressing, I think one of the issues th…

If software dev is simplified to the point people working jobs like you describe are able to do it, wages will also plummet, so it’s not like their situation is going to improve.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#70

Post by danparsonson »

qup wrote: post #14
cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. While GPT4 is incredible, it fails OFTEN. And it fails in ways that aren’t very clear. And it fails harder when there’s clearly not enough training resources on the subject matter. But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of t…

It'll be amazing if anyone can request any basic program they want. Totally amazing if they can request any complex program. I cannot really envision a more empowering thing for the common person. It should really upset the balance of power. I think we'll see, soon, that we've only just started building with code. As a lifelong coder, I cannot wait to see the day when anyone can program anything.

From my experience, most people have only the vaguest idea of what they want, and no clue about the contradictions or other problems inherent in their idea. That is the real value that a good software engineer provides - finding and interpreting the requirements of a person who doesn't understand software, so that someone who does can build the right thing.
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