"Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles.", maybe my new favorite quote.
A coder considers the waning days of the craft
681–690 of 1001 posts
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#682I 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…
> Self-driving trucks were going to upend the trucking industry in ten years, ten years ago.
And around the same time, 3D printing was going to upend manufacturing; bankrupting producers as people would just print what they needed (including the 3D printers themselves).
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#683Earlier 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.
$ find . -type f -regex '.*bar/[^/]*.foo' -exec grep baz {} +
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#684I 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…
A few weeks ago, I was stumped on a problem, so I asked ChatGPT (4) for an answer.
It confidently gave me a correct answer.
Except that it was "correct," if you used an extended property that wasn't in the standard API, and it did not specify how that property worked.
I assume that's because most folks that do this, create that property as an extension (which is what I did, once I figured it out), so ChatGPT thought it was a standard API call.
Since it could have easily determined whether or not it was standard, simply by scanning the official Apple docs, I'm not so sure that we should rely on it too much.
I'm fairly confident that could change.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#685Earlier 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.
You can use gpt for government work??
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> How does programming have self-play?
I think there's potentially ways to generate training data, since success can be quantified objectively, e.g. if a piece of generated code compiles and generates a particular result at runtime, then you have a way to discriminate outcomes without a human in the loop. It's in the grey area between pure self-play domains (e.g. chess) and domains that are more obviously constrained by the corpus of data that humans have produced (e.g. fine art). Overall it's probably closer to the latter than the former.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#687Earlier 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…
ChatGPT goes from zero to maybe 65th percentile? There or thereabouts. It's excellent if you know nothing. It's mediocre and super buggy if you're an expert. A big difference is that the expert asks different questions, off in the tails of the distribution, and that's where these LLMs are no good. If you want a canonical example of something, the median pattern, it's great. As the ask heads out of the input data dist…
I encountered this with particular problem in python. Seemed like GPT wanted to always answer with something that had a lot of examples on the web, even if most answers were not correct. So garbage in, garbage out problem. I'm bit worried that the LLM's will continue to degrade as the web has increasing amount of LLM generated content. Seems to already be occurring.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#688Earlier 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…
Sometimes it requires expert guidance to get something meaningful out.
This is the correct answer. I have 23 years of experience in datacenter ops and it has been a game changer for me. Just like any tool on one's arsenal, it's utility increases with practice and learning to use it correctly. ChatGPT is no different. You get out of it what you put in to it. This is the way of the world.
I used to be puzzled as to why my peers are so dismissive of this tech. Same folks who would say "We don't need to learn no Kubernetes! We don't need to code! We don't need ChatGPT". They don't!
And it's fine. If their idea of a career is working in same small co. doing the same basic Linux sysadmin tasks for a third of the salary I make then more power to them.
The folks dismissive of the AI/ML tech are effectively capping their salary and future prospects in this industry. This is good for us! More demand for experts and less supply.
You ever hire someone that uses punch cards to code?
Neither have I.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#689I’m disappointed, but not really surprised I guess, with how poorly so many programmers seem to understand what chatgpt is and does. It’s great and amazing tech, but it’s very much a kind of search engine, and indeed, writes just the kind of code you find on the internet… sometimes great, often flawed, very often incomplete. Its breadth of knowledge is stunning, but it’s not like it’s actually useful to be able to wr…
> We will perhaps need fewer programmers as people spend less time on grunt work.
If programmers become more productive, it means the price of development will decrease. This will, in turn, increase the demand for development.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
$ find . -type f -regex '.*bar/[^/]*.foo' -exec grep baz {} + I wonder if you created a GPT and fed it the entirety of Linux man pages (not that it probably didn't consume them already, but perhaps this weights them higher), if it would get better at this kind of thing. I've found GPT-4 is shockingly good at sed, and to some extent awk; I suspect it's because there are good examples of them on SO.
If SO had known to block GPTBot before it was trained, GPT4 would be a lot less impressive.