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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

#661

Post by collyw »

soco wrote: post #586
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't practiced or needed to use the fundamentals in literal years; I'm sure I'd fumble some of these tests, and I've got err, 15 years of experience. It's good to know the fundamentals and be able to find them IF you find a situation where you need them (e.g. performance tuning), but in my anecdotal and limited experience, you're fine staying higher level.

I had a chilling experience of late when, out of curiosity, I tried the actual online practice exam for driving school. Boy did I fail it. I realized that there are quite some road signs I never saw in my life, and more important, that my current solution to all their right of way questions is "slow down and see what the others do" - not even that wrong if I think about but won't get you points in the exam.

And I suspect you would be a lot less likely to be involved in a crash than someone who had just passed the test.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#662

Post by cultureswitch »

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…

It should be noted that the Waymo and Cruise experiments in their cities are laughably unprepared for actual chaotic traffic, often fail in completely unpredictable ways and are universally hated by locals. Autonomous buses and trams are much more successful because the problem is much easier too.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#663

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Regular expressions are pretty tricky. You can be an expert and it can still take time to tweak. I've been using regular expressions for decades, and now find myself using GPT as a kind of pre-compiler. I'll test regular expressions with GPT and it gets really close or the final result.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#664

Post by bryanrasmussen »

mike_hearn wrote: post #496
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasons why (supposition, not necessarily in agreement, just arguments I am familiar with) - It's because foundations are now free but nobody understands how they work anymore - or soon won't hence the waning as opposed to disappeared. There are whole levels that a coder needed to understand in the past that recent entrants to the field do not understand, that can still subtly affect how things work, if no one unders…

Isn't this a slight over-generalization from web dev? If you learned programming in the pre-web era then you weren't able to learn how programs work by studying the shipped artifacts, but the craft wasn't waning, far from it. I learned HTML in the mid nineties and even then I don't honestly recall learning very much from View Source. HTML has never been particularly easy to read even when written by the rare breed wh…

>Isn't this a slight over-generalization from web dev? If you learned programming in the pre-web era then you weren't able to learn how programs work by studying the shipped artifacts, but the craft wasn't waning, far from it.

people understand the waxing and waning of the craft based on their experience. Someone can be an old greybeard now and have only done "web programming" starting at a young age·

Perhaps I'm wrong but I have seen this argument multiple times so I believe it is nonetheless a belief about the waning of the craft prevalent among some people.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#665

Post by victorbjorklund »

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…

It is way "easier" to be productive as a developer today vs 20 years ago. I can easily build web apps fast that would have taken a big team to build if even possible. Yet, more devs today than 20 years ago. If every dev is suddenly 20 times more productive (however that would be measured) means that some projects that in the past would not be "profitable"/"worth it" are now no brainers and companies will invest in doing those projects.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#666

Post by strken »

hackerlight wrote: post #481
jeffreygoesto wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Every hockey stick is just the beginning of an s-curve. It will saturate, probably sooner than you think.

Some parts of AI will necessarily asymptote to human-level intelligence because of a fixed corpus of training data. It's hard to think AI will become a better creative writer than the best human creative writers, because the AI is trained on their output and you can't go much further than that. But in areas where there's self-play (e.g. Chess, and to a lesser extent, programming), there is no good reason to think it'…

How does programming have self-play? I'm not sure I understand. Are you going to generate leetcode questions with one AI, have another answer them, and have a third determine whether the answer is correct?

I'm struggling to understand how an LLM is meant to answer the questions that come up in day-to-day software engineering, like "Why is the blahblah service occasionally timing out? Here are ten bug reports, most of which are wrong or misleading" or "The foo team and bar team want to be able to configure access to a Project based on the sensitivity_rating field using our access control system, so go and talk to them about implementing ABAC". The discipline of programming might be just a subset of broader software engineering, but it arguably still contains debugging, architecture, and questions which need more context than you can feed into an LLM now. Can't really self-play those things without interacting with the real world.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#667

Post by FrustratedMonky »

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…

Let's not forget that reduced cotton prices (because of a technological improvement) did make cotton more affordable, lots of new clothes at reduced prices, increased demand, but it didn't turn out that great for the slaves.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#668

Post by steveBK123 »

wrzuteczka wrote: post #659
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…

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,…

I think you've found a good analogy there in the concept of moral vs legal. We defined a fixed system to measure against (rule of law) to reduce ambiguity.

Moral code varies with time, place, and individual person. It is a decimal scale of gray rather than a binary true/false.

Places historically that didn't have rule of law left their citizens to the moral interpretation whim of whoever was in charge. The state could impose different punishments on different people for different reasons at different times.

AI models I find a similar fixed&defined vs unlimited&ambiguous issue in ADAS in cars.

German cars with ADAS are limited&defined, have a list of features they perform well, but that is all.

Tesla advertises their system as an all knowing, all seeing system with no defined limits. Of course every time there is an incident they'll let slip certain limits "well it can't really see kids shorter than 3ft" or "well it can't really detect cross traffic in this scenario" etc.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#669

Post by api »

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…

We have devs that use AI assist, but it’s to automate the construction of the most mindless boilerplate or as a more advanced form of auto complete.

There is no AI that comes close to being able to design a new system or build a UI to satisfy a set of customer requirements.

These things just aren’t that smart, which is not surprising. They are really cool and do have legitimate uses but they are not going to replace programmers without at least one order of magnitude improvement, maybe more.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#670

Post by anonzzzies »

Exuma wrote: post #640
anonzzzies wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you make a custom gpt which knows a specific code base? I have been wanting to do this

I use the new feature of creating a custom gpt and I keep adding new information ; files, structures etc by editing the gpt. It seems to work well.
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