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Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

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Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#601

Post by gwoolhurme »

weatherlite wrote: post #586
gwoolhurme wrote: post #300

I guess my genuine question is to the people who are saying this is a big deal and it will take our jobs. I am a bit lucky to where at the moment I am working in a "novel" field. Lets say though for the sake of argument that AI does come for SWE jobs. To be honest? I don't know what to do in that case, I have no backup plan, not enough to retire. The country I've lived in for 9 years is still through a work visa (hop…

We all need to save up money and think of a plan B. If there is no problem, worst case you'll have a bunch of money saved and a plan B you won't be using.

That’s not really an option for a lot of people outside of the US. The average SWE here makes 50K USD a year. Good luck saving up a safety net that large if AI is ready to take all our jobs. That’s kind of my point. Nobody has a good answer to the question IF AI does take SWE jobs, what then?

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#602

Post by janeway »

nwienert wrote: post #8

In before all the comments about how “most code is trivial” or “most programming is stuff that already exists” or “you’re missing the point look how it’s getting better”. I really am in awe of how much work people seem willing to do to justify this as revolutionary and programmers as infantile, and also why they do that. It’s fascinating. Thinking back to my first job out of college as a solid entry level programmer.…

I think this clip section says a lot - if videos are permitted as replies.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=MNtjSMvcjzs&t=211s

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#603

Post by zarzavat »

blibble wrote: post #485
WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you tried GPT4, you probably understood it's not about feeding all the code in the world. GPT4 analyzes and "understands" your code and will answer based on this. Clearly, it will read the variable names and make deductions based on this. It will actually read the comments, the function names and make decisions based on this. And it knows the rules of the language. I mean, I'm writing this because this is what I'v…

it is entirely about feeding it all the code in the world it doesn't understand anything, it doesn't make deductions it's a probability model, and I understand how it's implemented perfectly well, thank you

Does a chess engine “understand” the position? If you define “understanding” as the ability to think like a human then Stockfish is obviously much worse at that. If you define understanding as the ability to choose the correct move, then Stockfish understands the position much better than any human.

The point being, you can choose to laden the word “understand” with the meaning of human-like thinking, in which case humans will always be superior by definition. Or you can choose a “many ways to Rome” definition of understanding that is purely focused on results.

Large language models understand language in their own way. Currently their results are inferior to humans’ but one day the results may be superior.

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#604

Post by ldhough »

whateveracct wrote: post #519
stormfather wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying a calculator isn't useful just because you're good at mental math. The ability to adapt and extract value from new tools is a mark of competence.

Using natural language to code isn't going to help me. It's less dense informationally already. I don't have a stream of natural language in my head when I program or build software, so it's not free to use GPT. This may be a Haskell thing. But I did try and even for small programs it was cute but not actually an efficiency gain over me just doing it. Not to mention in real life, I have to deal with fallout and bugs…

I mostly work in Clojure and I've noticed this as well, it is usually more efficient to just write it myself if I know what I want to do. However for a language or stack I don't understand well where I just need something quick and dirty it really shines... I had to work with a JS visualization library and got it to write what I needed over 10-15 iterations, much faster than if I actually had to learn the library. General programming knowledge sufficed for noticing things that didn't look right and since the output was visual that helped to sanity check the output as well.

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#605

Post by hnfong »

osigurdson wrote: post #391
osigurdson wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is better to assume that we are at the beginning of the s-curve, not the end.

Wow. I never expected to be downvoted for such a comment. Downvotes please elucidate as to why we are in the asymptomatic phase with LLMs.

"Luddites" refusing to accept that we might be onto something that is going to change humanity forever...

The sad thing is that real luddites would go out and actively sabotage AI development because they think it's a real threat. Yet these people just makes bold and false claims in online forums and continue to move the goalposts once they're proven wrong. Sad. Pathetic. (and obviously, I don't mind being downvoted. Whatever! :)

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#606

Post by pixl97 »

comfypotato wrote: post #589
JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> … instead of the 97% unemployment … we’re instead 30x as productive. Economic productivity simply means output per worker. So, we could make 97% of the US population permanently unemployed tomorrow, and as long as the AI replacement labor yielded equal or greater proceeds to the remaining 3%, we’d see a colossal increase in “productivity.” That would be in the interest of the 3% to do (or attempt), which is what ma…

But that’s never happened in the past. Why should it happen now? The Industrial Revolution is used as an example because it was the biggest spike in productivity, but the general trend has been the same since the invention of tools. Agriculture, another perfect example, lead to others having time to produce things instead of hunting/gathering. It’s easy to grasp with the agriculture example that “unemployment” wasn’t…

> Why should it happen now?

What are S-curves.

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#607

Post by pixl97 »

protomolecule wrote: post #529
WillPostForFood wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If increased productivity equaled job loss, there would be two programmers alive today Increased productivity doesn't necessarily lead to overall job loss, but it will eventually in the area where the productivity is realized. Agricultural employment is a very clear example. https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/assets/4565243/Ag_workforce.png

Well, yes, it got down, but only from 12 mln to 5.5 mln people in agriculture.

Agriculture is still automating and the population has increased what, 4x since then

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#608

Post by kneel »

kneebonian wrote: post #516
kneel wrote: post #511

I self taught myself how to code and have never been very good, I don't code often and when I do I spend a lot of time relearning some simple programming detail I forgot. ChatGPT (also copilot) allows me to focus on the project that I'm working on and offload the stack overflow searches to prompting. I don't have to find a similar error someone else posted on SO and figure out how it applies to my current problem. I…

> I imagine there are a lot of people who are in a similar situation, it's crazy that we've just unleashed this massive productivity booster onto millions of people. Maybe it makes me sound like an elitist git, but I remember when the coding bootcamps started "unleashing massive productivity boosts" by promising to make people "full-stack engineers" in just a 6 weeks, and I still shudder to remember the code horrors…

To be clear, I don’t think we are getting a bunch of rockstar coders from chatGPT prompt engineering.

It’s more about the CFO who can now write his own SQL queries and dashboards, project managers can dive into details they don’t understand and come to meetings a little more prepared.

This boosts everyone’s productivity, not just coders.

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#609

Post by eestrada »

illiarian wrote: post #261
nitwit005 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you're doing is very simple crud apps and transforming API responses, your coding is already replaceable with "no code" tools.

I've been a programmer for 23 years now. In all these years every year was the year of no-code tools. And you know what? We went from having actual no- or low-code tools (UI builders, forms in Access and FoxPro etc.) to zero no-code tools worth a damn [1]. There was a brief dream of Yahoo! Pipes in mid-to-late 2000s, but it's dead as well. [1] Except some applications like Unreal Blueprints and similar node-based too…

I think the reason Unreal Blueprints and cousins work and are useful is: they are used in a relatively narrow domain, the primitives of that domain are well understood/defined, and the primitives are easily compossible.

Once you create a general purpose no-code option, it is so complicated and sprawling that the mental burden to understand it is just as great (if not greater) as just using plain old code again. Or conversely, it is so constraining (for the sake of "simplicity") that it can't do anything useful.

Re: Testing GPT 4's code-writing capabilities with some real world problems

#610

Post by tornato7 »

jjkeddo199 wrote: post #507
nicholasjarnold wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors. Yep. This is where I'm at in terms of personal armchair predictions of the future. I expect the labor market will be tough for more junior software engineers in the coming years. This might indeed cause backpressure in the supply of new grads/new labor force entrants in this family of fields ("software…

Disagree -- I think chatGPT will make juniors more palatable to hire. ChatGPT will basically give juniors a free pair programmer to baby-sit their work/progress. Why pay extra for senior devs when juniors can become much more efficient thanks to ChatGPT becoming stack-overflow on steroids. I think the wage gap between junior and senior will actually drop massively. I predict teams will keep 1-3 architect level positi…

I think it could go either way depending on the product. For example in app/game/web development where code quantity > quality, hire more juniors who can bust out code with ChatGPT all day. But if you're developing software for medical devices, vehicle control systems, HFT, etc. Then nobody's going to let some college grad using ChatGPT touch it. You'd hire senior engineers who can be responsible for the reliable operation of the software and they can use ChatGPT for code review, test suites, etc.
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