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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

#651

Post by LaGrange »

flir wrote: post #501
miiiiiike wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm always asking it to stitch together ad hoc bash command lines for me, eg "find all the files called *.foo in directories called bar and search them for baz". (`find / -type d -name 'bar' -exec find {} -type f -name '*.foo' \; | xargs grep 'baz'` apparently.) I would have done that differently, but it's close enough for government work.

This is funny to me, because I would _always_ use -print0 and xargs -0, and for good reasons, I believe. But if you base your entire knowledge on what you find online, then yes, that's what you get - and what _most people will get too_. Also, I can still update that command if I want.

So it's not any worse than good-old "go to stack overflow" approach, but still benefits from experience.

FYI, this is the correct, as-far-as-I-can-tell "good" solution:

find . -type d -name 'bar' -print0 | \ xargs -0 -I{} find {} -type f -name '*.foo' -print0 | \ xargs -0 grep -r baz

This won't choke on a structure like this: ls -R .: bar foo

./bar: test.foo 'test test.foo'

./foo: bar bleb.foo

./foo/bar:

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#653

Post by aleph_minus_one »

ugh123 wrote: post #403
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…

My sense is that the doomers in software these days are either inexperienced and lack perspective from industry shifts over the years or weren't very good to begin with and could not build beyond basic crud and data shipping applications of varying complexity.

> My sense is that the doomers in software these days are either inexperienced and lack perspective from industry shifts over the years or weren't very good to begin with and could not build beyond basic crud and data shipping applications of varying complexity.

My experience rather is that such people often (though not always) are quite good programmers, but came to a different conclusion on how it makes sense to develop software than the direction which the industry shifted to (and often have good, though sometimes non-mainstream reasons for their opinions). Thus, despite being good programmers, "they fell out fashion" with "how you are (by today's fashion/hype) supposed to build software on this current day". So, they became more and more hard to employ and thus more and more frustrated (just to be clear: in my experience they are often quite right in their opinions).

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#654

Post by steveBK123 »

hospitalJail wrote: post #648
steveBK123 wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been my experience both with Tesla AP/FSD implementation & with LLMs. Super neat trick the first time you encounter it, feels like alien tech from the future. Then you find all the holes. Use it for months/years and you notice the holes aren't really closing.. The pace of improvement is middling compared to the gap to it meeting the marketing/rhetoric. Eventually using them feels more like a chore than not usi…

Yep, lots of people are using LLMs for problems LLMs aren't good at. They still do an alright job, but you get that exact situation of 'eh, its just okay'. Its the ability to use those responses when they are good, and knowing when to move on from using an LLM as a tool.

Not terribly different than Google Translate.

Ff you have a familiarity with the foreign language, you can cross check yourself & the tool against each other to get to a more competent output.

If you do not know the foreign language at all, the tool will produce word salad that sort of gets your point across while sounding like an alien.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#655

Post by fauigerzigerk »

rjrodger wrote: post #643
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To me this looks like a Jevons Paradox situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox [1] Increased developer productivity will lead to a lot more software development, at all levels, rather than less. 1. "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the fall…

Yes, demand grows as prices drop. I don't doubt this general principle for a second. But the question is about degrees. If the cost of making software at today's level of quality and quantity drops by half, what share of the savings is going to be spent on more and better software, what share is going to be spent on other things and what share will be used to cut prices?

I think there is no general answer to this question. What would Netflix do if software development costs dropped by half? Develop twice as much software? Spend it on more content? Cut the price of subscriptions? In this specific case, my bet would be on content.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#656

Post by Closi »

miiiiiike wrote: post #470
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…

I’ve gone through every permutation that I can think of. It’s a very basic question. If it understood the CSS spec it wouldn’t be difficult to answer the questions or perform the task. At a certain point going down the rabbit hole of proompter engineering levels feels like an apologist’s hobby. I’m rooting for the tech but there’s a lot of hyperbole out there and the emperor might be naked for a few more years.

Well surely if it's easy to find these basic questions, could you not share one example? Or quickly find a new one?

Your idea of very basic might not be my idea of very basic.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#657

Post by aleph_minus_one »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #578
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 honestly think we’re entering an age where a skilled entrepreneur will be able to run a $10M/year business all by themselves with AI assisted coding, design and marketing.

> I honestly think we’re entering an age where a skilled entrepreneur will be able to run a $10M/year business all by themselves with AI assisted coding, design and marketing.

You forgot the accounting, taxation, legal and compliance stuff, which at least in Germany takes a huge amount of the entrepreneur's time. :-(

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#658

Post by ioseph »

gwd wrote: post #618
clnq wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never found GPT-4 capable of producing a useful solution in my niche of engineering. When I’m stumped, it’s usually on a complex and very multi-faceted problem where the full scope doesn’t fit into the human brain very well. And for these problems, GPT will produce some borderline unworkable solutions. It’s like a jack of all trades and master of none in code. It’s knowledge seems a mile wide and an inch deep. G…

Well no, you shouldn't use it for your top-end problems, but your bottom-end problems. Aren't there things that you have to do in your job that really could be done by a junior programmer? Don't you ever have one-off (or once-a-year) things you have to do that each time you have to invest a lot of time refreshing in your brain, and then basically forgetting for lack of use? Here's an example I used the other day: Our…

Perhaps by learning to use the YT API (seriously something that should take 2 hours max if you know how http works) you'll learn something from their design choices, or develop opinions on what makes a good API. And by learning a bit more python you'll get exposed to patterns you could use in your own language.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#659

Post by wrzuteczka »

steveBK123 wrote: post #637
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…

That's been my experience both with Tesla AP/FSD implementation & with LLMs. Super neat trick the first time you encounter it, feels like alien tech from the future. Then you find all the holes. Use it for months/years and you notice the holes aren't really closing.. The pace of improvement is middling compared to the gap to it meeting the marketing/rhetoric. Eventually using them feels more like a chore than not usi…

With the AI "revolution," I began to appreciate the simplicity of models we create when doing programming (and physics, biology, and so on as well).

I used to think about these things differently: I felt that because our models of reality are just models, they aren't really something humanity should be proud of that much. Nature is more messy than the models, but we develop them due to our limitations.

AI is a model, too, but of far greater complexity, able to describe reality/nature more closely than what we were able to achieve previously. But now I've begun to value these simple models not because they describe nature that well but because they impose themselves on nature. For example, law, being such a model, is imposed on reality by the state institutions. It doesn't describe the complexity of reality very well, but it makes people take roles in its model and act in a certain way. People now consider whether something is legal or not (instead of moral vs immoral), which can be more productive. In software, if I implement the exchange of information based on an algorithm like Paxos/Raft, I get provable guarantees compared to if I allowed LLMs to exchange information over the network directly.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#660

Post by ta-run »

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…

What is the test?
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