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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

#691

Post by renegade-otter »

w4ffl35 wrote: post #144
cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. While GPT4 is incredible, it fails OFTEN. And it fails in ways that aren’t very clear. And it fails harder when there’s clearly not enough training resources on the subject matter. But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of t…

I've been saying the same thing. Coding is the worst part of the process. I've been doing it for 20 years professionally and another 10 or more on top of that as a hobby. Don't care about code, just want to make things. Code sucks.

Because we solve the same problems with different tools, languages, and frameworks.

The core of what we do never changes - get input from user, show error, get input again, save the input, show the input.

Now it just got more complicated, even though 20 years later most of this could be a dull Rails or a Django app.

And AI will probably do the decent CRUD part, but you will still need an expert for the hard parts of software.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#692

Post by flir »

candiddevmike wrote: post #685
flir wrote: post #501

Earlier 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.

You can use gpt for government work??

Shh. What they don't know won't hurt me.

(Serious answer: it's just an expression. https://grammarist.com/idiom/good-enough-for-government-work...).

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#694

Post by steveBK123 »

happycube wrote: post #673
steveBK123 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's about my experience. The worst dev on my team uses ChatGPT a lot, and its facilitated him producing more bad code more quickly. I'm not sure it's a win for anyone, and he's still unlikely to be with the team in a year. It allows a dev who doesn't care about their craft or improving to generate code without learning anything. The code they generate today or a year from today is the same quality. Part of it is t…

On the flip side, one can use ChatGPT as only a starting point and to learn from there. One isn't stuck with actually using what it outputs verbtim, and really shouldn't until at least a hypothetical GPT-6 or 7... and to use it fully now, one has to know how to nudge it when it goes into a bad direction. So overall it's more an amplifier than anything else.

If the results were more akin to a google or stack overflow where there was a list of results with context.. sure.

But people are using the singular response as "the answer" and moving on..

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#695

Post by mlinhares »

steveBK123 wrote: post #646
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…

That's about my experience. The worst dev on my team uses ChatGPT a lot, and its facilitated him producing more bad code more quickly. I'm not sure it's a win for anyone, and he's still unlikely to be with the team in a year. It allows a dev who doesn't care about their craft or improving to generate code without learning anything. The code they generate today or a year from today is the same quality. Part of it is t…

Bless this person your team, he is creating work out of thin air and will keep your team and possibly other teams employed for a really long time

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#696

Post by singhrac »

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…

I’m very bullish. My dad and I were talking about this the other day, but there are still so many quality-of-life improvements that are bottlenecked by not having enough developers or enough time.

For example, deploying hardware to all subways to track their status and location with higher accuracy. I want a truly smart meal planner that can look in my fridge and my eating habits and tell me what I need to eat. I want a little plugin for Obsidian that will let me sync tasks with Linear.

There are tons of tiny little pieces of technology that would be useful but their economic value is low or unclear; if developers become more efficient at not only writing code but testing, deploying, getting feedback, these become possible. Or, the LLMs can’t become great at all of those things, and developers keep their jobs (and high pay). You can’t have it both ways.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#697

Post by ern »

scrollaway wrote: post #534
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…

You got everyone talking about how GPT isn’t that bad at coding etc but everyone is missing the point. The no code industry is massive. Most people don’t need a dev to make their website already. They use templates and then tweak them through a ui. And now you have Zapier, Glide, Bubble etc. LLMs won’t replace devs by coding entire full stack web apps. They’ll replace them because tools will appear on the market that…

I collaborate with front-end teams that use a low-code front-end platform. When they run into things that aren’t built-in, they try to push their presentation logic up the stack for the “real” programming languages to deal with.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#698

Post by d3w4s9 »

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…

Similar experience. I recently needed to turn a list of files into a certain tree structure. It is a non-trivial problem with a little bit of flavor of algorithm. I was wondering if GPT can save me some time there. No. It never gave me the correct code. I tried different prompts and even used different models (including the latest GPT 4 Turbo), none of the answers were correct, even after follow-ups. By then I already wasted 20 minutes of time.

I ended up implementing the thing myself.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#699

Post by worksonmine »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #512
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 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.

There are levels of fundamentals though, since parent mentioned HTML/CSS/React I guess they're referring to being able create a layout by hand vs using a CSS framework/library. You don't need to know how a CPU works to fix a CSS issue, but if all you know is combining the classes available you'll have trouble with even the simplest web development.

Everyone should know enough fundamentals to be able to write simple implementations of the frameworks they depend on.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#700

Post by gumballindie »

> For the new crossword project, though, Ben had introduced a third party. He’d signed up for a ChatGPT Plus subscription and was using GPT-4 as a coding assistant.

You have to give OpenAI credit. Their marketing campaign is beyond genius. A bit spammy and aggressive but it works.

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