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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

#621

Post by RecycledEle »

danielbln wrote: post #615
debok wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same experience with the test I give my back-end devs. ChatGPT can't even begin to decode an encoded string if you don't tell it which encoding was used. ChatGPT is great at some well defined, already solved problems. But once you get to the messy real world, the wheels come off.

Base64: https://chat.openai.com/share/3793da6d-4634-4e13-9cc4-ce9983... ROT13: https://chat.openai.com/share/ae7c311d-ab23-4425-bdfa-c2314e... HEX: https://chat.openai.com/share/4b0740b7-53c0-4776-bb00-ab65b4... What kind of encoded string did you use?

Thank you for taking the time to call BS on someone who obviously never tried asking a LLM AI to decipher a string's encoding. That is exactly the kind of thing they are good ar.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#623

Post by aleph_minus_one »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #573
Closi wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that I don't believe you, but without sharing the specific prompt it's hard to say if it's actually GPT4 failing, or if it's actually being poorly-prompted, or if actually the task it is being given is more complex than GPT's capabilities or you are implying. GPT4 does fail (often!) but fails less with good prompts, simple requirements, it is better at some frameworks and languages than others, and there is…

My failure rate with Cursor’s IDE that’s familiar with my codebase is substantially lower than just GPT-4 Most people shitting on GPT-4 are not really using it in the right context.

> Most people shitting on GPT-4 are not really using it in the right context.

Old excuse: "You're Holding It Wrong" (Apple's Response to the iPhone 4 antenna problem)

> https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

New excuse: "You are not using GPT-4 in the right context."

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#624

Post by gitgud »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #477
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 agree it's amazing. But your comment doesn't touch on the key economic question that will decide for how many people it will be this amazing new dev experience. If AI makes developers twice as productive (maybe a few years down the road with GPT-6), will this additional supply of developer capacity get absorbed by existing and new demand? Or will there be half as many developers? Or will the same number of develope…

> “If AI makes developers twice as productive (maybe a few years down the road with GPT-6), will this additional supply of developer capacity get absorbed by existing and new demand? Or will there be half as many developers? Or will the same number of developers get paid far less than today?”

Something to remember is that every new innovation in software development only raises the expectations of the people paying the software developers.

If developers are 3x as productive, then the goals and features will be 3x big.

The reason for this is that companies are in competition, if they lag behind, then others will eat up the market.

The company that fires 50% of their staff because of “AI Assistance” is not going to be able to compete with the company that doesn’t fire their staff and still uses “AI Assistance”…

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#625

Post by crabbone »

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…

It probably depends on the area. CSS is very popular on one hand and limited to a very small set of problems on the other.

I did try asking ChatGPT about system-related stuff several times and had given up since then. The answers are worthless if not wrong, unless the questions are trivial.

ChatGPT works if it needs to answer a question that was already answered before. If you are facing a genuinely new problem, then it's just a waste of time.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#626

Post by danielbln »

woodruffw wrote: post #38
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.

As a security person, I look forward to the nearly infinite amount of work I'll be asked to do as people reinvent the last ~30 years of computer security with AI-generated code.

Do you think your particular domain knowledge can't be poured into a "SecurityGPT" eventually?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#627

Post by mathgeek »

anonzzzies wrote: post #563
eloisant wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it can pass it when you ask it in a way only a coder can write, then we will still need coders. If you need to tweak your prompt until you get the correct result, then we still need coders who can tell that the code is wrong. Ask Product Managers to use ChatGPT instead of coders and they will ask for 7 red lines all perpendicular to each other with one being green. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

I didn't say we don't need coders. We need less average/bad ones and a very large amounts of coders that came after the 'coding makes $$$$' worldwide are not even average. I won't say AI will not eventually make coding obsolete; even just 2 years ago I would've said we are 50-100 years away from that. No i'm not so sure. However, I am saying that I can replace many programmers with gpt right now, and I am. The prompt…

In my mind, we need more folks who have both the ability to code and the ability to translate business needs into business logic. That’s not a new problem though.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#628

Post by lucideer »

jorams wrote: post #613
lucideer wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I recently asked ChatGPT to produce similar CSS and it did so flawlessly. I use ChatGPT every day for many tasks in my work and find it very helpful, but I simply do not believe this. > The article points this out: middling generalists can now compete with specialists. I'd say it might allow novices to compete with middling generalists, but even that is a stretch. On the contrary, ChatGPT is actually best suited to…

I agree with this. There are cases where it produces good results, but there are also cases where it produces bs, and it's not always obvious. I find it to work fine for cases where I know what I want but could use a starting point, but it often invents or misunderstands all kinds of things. The most frustrating situations are those where it invents a function that would miraculously do what's necessary, I tell it th…

Another very obvious thing it does when it comes to code is take the most common misconceptions & anti-patterns used within the programming community & repeats them in an environment where there's no-one to comment. People have critiqued Stack Overflow for having so many "wrong" answers with green checkmarks, but at least those threads have surrounding context & discussion.

A case in point: I asked ChatGPT to give me some code for password complexity validation. It gave me perfectly working code that took a password and validated it against X metrics. Obviously the metrics are garbage, but the code works, and what inexperienced developer would be any the wiser. The only way to get ChatGPT to generate something "correct" there would be to tell it algorithmically what you want (e.g. "give me a function measuring information entropy of inputs", etc.) - you could ask it 50 times for a password validator: every one may execute successfully & produce a desired UI output for a web designer, but be effectively nonsense.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#630

Post by tonyedgecombe »

golergka wrote: post #133
labster wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure New Yorker writer is the first job that LLMs will replace.

Writers and musicians wont be replaced with AI because the authors persona is part of the product.

That's not what the musicians think:

https://news.sky.com/story/ai-music-can-you-tell-if-these-so...

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