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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

#601

Post by haspok »

amenghra wrote: post #532
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…

There's a Swiss town which had autonomous shuttles running for 5 years (2015-2021) [1]. There's at least two companies (Waymo and Cruise) running autonomous taxi services in US cities that you can ride today. There have been lots of incorrect promises in the world of self-driving trucks/cars/buses but companies have gotten there (under specific constraints) and will generalize over time. [1] https://www.saam.swiss/pr…

Those "autonomous" vehicles have as much to do with real autonomy as today's "AI" has in common with real self-conscious intelligence. You can only fake it so long, and it is an entirely different ballgame.

I remember we had spam filters 20 years ago, and nobody called them "AI", just ML. Todays "AI" is ML, but on a larger scale. In a sense, a million monkeys typing on typewriters will eventually produce all the works of Shakespeare. Does this make them poets?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#602

Post by j45 »

miiiiiike wrote: post #447
ern wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on a team developing a critical public safety system on a tight deadline a few years ago, and i had to translate some wireframes for the admin back-end into CSS. I did a passable job but it wasn’t a perfect match. I was asked to redo it by the team-lead. It had zero business value, but such was the state of our team…being pixel perfect was a source of pride. It was one of the incidents that made me to stop fron…

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…

Sometimes it requires expert guidance to get something meaningful out.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#603

Post by rixed »

ern wrote: post #528
rixed wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how did you pass the wireframe to chatGPT ?

I described what I wanted. It was earlier this year..not sure if chatgpt can understand wireframes now, but it couldn’t at the time.

you described it with pixel accuracy ?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#604

Post by amenghra »

haspok wrote: post #601
amenghra wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a Swiss town which had autonomous shuttles running for 5 years (2015-2021) [1]. There's at least two companies (Waymo and Cruise) running autonomous taxi services in US cities that you can ride today. There have been lots of incorrect promises in the world of self-driving trucks/cars/buses but companies have gotten there (under specific constraints) and will generalize over time. [1] https://www.saam.swiss/pr…

Those "autonomous" vehicles have as much to do with real autonomy as today's "AI" has in common with real self-conscious intelligence. You can only fake it so long, and it is an entirely different ballgame. I remember we had spam filters 20 years ago, and nobody called them "AI", just ML. Todays "AI" is ML, but on a larger scale. In a sense, a million monkeys typing on typewriters will eventually produce all the work…

What's your gripe with calling a bus which successfully ran for 5 years without a driver not autonomous? As someone who used this specific bus occasionally, I was quite satisfied with the outcome: it safely drove me from A to B.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#605

Post by Ygg2 »

anonzzzies wrote: post #535
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…

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…

You can ask it almost anything. Ask it to write a YAML parser in something a bit more complex like Rust and it falls like a rag.

Rust mostly because it's relatively new, and there isn't a native YAML parser in Rust (there is a translation of libfyaml). Also you can't bullshit your way out of Rust by making bunch of void* pointers.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#606

Post by no-ramen »

sensanaty wrote: post #514

Whenever I see people talking about how they use ChatGPT to write entire software suites, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills or something. I can't even get GPT4 to give me decent basic ass Ruby scripts where it opens a file that doesn't have some weird behavioral quirk or footgun, yet people often claim that they're doing insane feats with it all the time. My experience, even if I'm just trying to be lazy and have it…

I feel like those people who have most success with it use GPT for extremely common problems in the most popular JavaScript web frameworks. My experience with GPT-3.5 but Dart/Flutter is exactly the same

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#607

Post by ern »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #518
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 have stayed away from chatGPT etc (mostly due to my work simply banning its use in an understandable conservative approach) What's the best starting point for my personal stuff? I am generally put off by youtube tutorials promising to make me a better coder.

Open a ChatGPT account. Set up a GitHub account if you don’t have one. Think of a common problem and see if a library exists in your favourite language to do what you want. If it doesn’t exist, explain your requirements to ChatGPT. You can even tell it the same thing you put in your comment here: “I want to learn how to use ChatGPT to augment my programming skills”. Make sure it’s done properly with automated tests and you have a licence (ChatGPT will help you with both).

Bonus points for doing things like using GitHub actions for CI and publishing it to a package repository with guidance from ChatGPT.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#608

Post by rukuu001 »

lysecret wrote: post #591

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 h…

> 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.

This is the big one for me. I feel like we're all having "640K ought to be enough for anybody" type conversations right now.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#610

Post by gumballindie »

ern wrote: post #444
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…

I was on a team developing a critical public safety system on a tight deadline a few years ago, and i had to translate some wireframes for the admin back-end into CSS. I did a passable job but it wasn’t a perfect match. I was asked to redo it by the team-lead. It had zero business value, but such was the state of our team…being pixel perfect was a source of pride. It was one of the incidents that made me to stop fron…

But if you are a middling programmer when it comes to CSS how do you know the output was “flawless” and close to the quality that css “masters” produce?
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