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In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

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Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#71

Post by simonw »

majormajor wrote: post #25
moonchrome wrote: post #13

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…

I think there's two camps of think-piece authors emerging - the ones who've tried a bunch of different examples of things and got passable-to-great-looking results; and the ones going deeper into specific areas and hitting the wall in terms of expertise and specificity. Using the GPT 4 API, I'm definitely often hitting limitations, especially around depth of information, and having to "prompt engineer" my way around…

I think there are two camps of authors using. The ones who tried a bunch of different examples and got terrible results and wrote the whole thing off, and the ones who pushed on through that, kept exploring the capabilities of the model and couldn't believe how useful it could be once they figured out how best to use it.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#72

Post by simonw »

AverageDude wrote: post #56
moonchrome wrote: post #13

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…

Yup. I always wonder why is my experience not like others? Are those PR people for Microsoft? Example: I gave chatgpt a list. Which looked like st street av avenue Convert this to yaml format as st: name: street And so on. It failed spectacularly. Not even once but about 10 times. Even if it succeeded, it kept changing the output by doing ops which I never mentioned in the prompt (like reordering and merging duplicat…

I have human intelligence and I can't figure out what the output you're hoping for here is.

Update: I tried that with GPT4 and got this:

    st:
      name: street
    av:
      name: avenue
GPT 3.5 didn't know what to do with it.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#73

Post by gwoolhurme »

fauxpause_ wrote: post #55
gwoolhurme wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve never learned about it in university? It’s still a semi important concept to learn how a compiler is kind of rewriting your code and optimizing things. In rare occasions it can mess things up when you use optimization options. Even in rare iOS and Android development cases and LLVM. Not exactly assembly but similar logic. I think that goes to the original point, if you are just trying to make something? Sure J…

I’m a programmer. I’m not a computer scientist. I didn’t study computer science. I agree it’s probably important to computer science.

Sorry I didn’t mean it that way. What I mean to say is that even in cases of iOS and Android, there are edge cases where assembly knowledge does help. While LLVM isn’t exactly assembly it’s similar in logic. It’s not to say “computer science” more so, than it is to say it’s still a decently good topic to at least know and be familiar with when you get the build button on a native app even. Granted these are rare edge cases. It was similar to someone in this thread mentioned street navigation and how we don’t care about it anymore. I do… there will be a time and place in my life that a GPS will not be in my pocket, so it’s still important to familiarize how to physically navigate the world. As we abstract more and more away from our workflows, it’s still a good mentality to familiarize your self with the old tools. It’s why math is still important for programmers ti know! You won’t need a matrix multiplication anytime soon, but it helps if you are suddenly doing graphics and you want to know how something is working (or AI…)

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#74

Post by simonw »

ducktective wrote: post #38

I asked GPT-4 for the Imagemagick command to make the white parts of an image, semi-transparent. It generated a command that made the fuzzy white parts [+1 on fuzzy] fully transparent [bad]. I told it that the result is not semi-transparent. It apologized and gave me another command that produced a blank image. In another case a grayish image. I told it this is not what I wanted, and it just looped here saying I'm so…

What did you conclude from this?

Was your conclusion "GPT-4 isn't any good for imagemagick commands" or "GPT-4 isn't useful for anything"?

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#75

Post by gwoolhurme »

nonethewiser wrote: post #65
xg15 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and you can thank those abstractions that today, we have Microsoft bragging that they got the Teams chat client down to only 9 seconds loading time on a machine with several multi-GHz cores and gigabytes of RAM. But that's all fine I guess, because it's good enough . Good enough for what? Good enough that people will grudgingly use it because instantly quitting their job over it would be overblown. Their life w…

Teams is probably written in C# right? Are we really sure C# isn’t performant enough for desktop apps? Seems like a rather hot take. Otherwise what is the non performant abstraction? I think the reality is just that teams is poorly done.

I don’t think so. I’m fairly certain it’s edge webview2. A lot of MS tools these days are web related. Which is why they run so poorly.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#76

Post by KeplerBoy »

nonethewiser wrote: post #65
xg15 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and you can thank those abstractions that today, we have Microsoft bragging that they got the Teams chat client down to only 9 seconds loading time on a machine with several multi-GHz cores and gigabytes of RAM. But that's all fine I guess, because it's good enough . Good enough for what? Good enough that people will grudgingly use it because instantly quitting their job over it would be overblown. Their life w…

Teams is probably written in C# right? Are we really sure C# isn’t performant enough for desktop apps? Seems like a rather hot take. Otherwise what is the non performant abstraction? I think the reality is just that teams is poorly done.

that's the thing: it's not C#, it's chromium+react.

They can't be bothered to write a truly native app for their own platform. Heck, they can't even be bothered to dogfood their in-house react alternatives.

All of that for an app that's used by hundreds of millions of people every day. It's those things that make me think Casey Muratori really is onto something.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#77

Post by Syonyk »

nico wrote: post #64
Syonyk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom? You've got a weird definition of "freedom" if you think surrendering your autonomy to whoever happens to be running the services you rely on is "freedom." The problem is that long term, you won't have any idea if what it's spitting out is reasonable or not. We already have more than enough problems with systems being too complex to understand. Solving that with "more complexity we can't understand" doesn't s…

That is already case. Are you able to verify every single news article you read? Every source? Every journalist? All the info you read or hear? You can’t, so you just trust. And let go of the complexity, you don’t need to consciously manage it and you are still ok. Just like you trust your body to breath or to digest.

> You can’t, so you just trust. And let go of the complexity, you don’t need to consciously manage it and you are still ok.

Or I can read a variety of sources from across the political spectrum to look for common elements, and I can try to avoid news articles and such in favor of longer form magazine articles written after the fact, and I can, and do, prefer to read "multiple books" on a topic instead of a simple article. I tell people to recommend three books on a topic they think I should learn, instead of an hour long video. By the time I've read a few books, I have a sense of what the authors agree and disagree on, and enough material to have a useful framework to try and hang the rest of the information I receive on.

As far as complexity... my career is literally "dealing with the complexity of modern computers," from a variety of angles - so I can explain, in long form detail, just how badly broken the assumptions we put on computers are.

And I use them to, fundamentally, do the same stuff I used a 486 for a couple decades ago. Write code, use basic webpages, talk to people, listen to music. The details have changed, but the category of "The tasks I use it for" really hasn't changed. We just have a couple orders of magnitude more CPU performance, RAM, disk, etc... to do the same things. Nobody blinks about a modern chat app being hundreds of megabytes, requiring a gig or two of RAM. Yet it's still used to send text to other people.

I'm sorry, I reject your "Just relax and let the algorithms sweep over me!" approach to dealing with all this. That guarantees that I will feed myself with whatever is the most profitable to someone else, think that which is most profitable to someone else, etc. And that's not a way to live life.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#78

Post by ducktective »

simonw wrote: post #74
ducktective wrote: post #38

I asked GPT-4 for the Imagemagick command to make the white parts of an image, semi-transparent. It generated a command that made the fuzzy white parts [+1 on fuzzy] fully transparent [bad]. I told it that the result is not semi-transparent. It apologized and gave me another command that produced a blank image. In another case a grayish image. I told it this is not what I wanted, and it just looped here saying I'm so…

What did you conclude from this? Was your conclusion "GPT-4 isn't any good for imagemagick commands" or "GPT-4 isn't useful for anything"?

GPT-4 isn't good for tasks it was not trained on.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#79

Post by professoretc »

AverageDude wrote: post #56
moonchrome wrote: post #13

All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…

Yup. I always wonder why is my experience not like others? Are those PR people for Microsoft? Example: I gave chatgpt a list. Which looked like st street av avenue Convert this to yaml format as st: name: street And so on. It failed spectacularly. Not even once but about 10 times. Even if it succeeded, it kept changing the output by doing ops which I never mentioned in the prompt (like reordering and merging duplicat…

> Even if it succeeded, it kept changing the output by doing ops which I never mentioned in the prompt (like reordering and merging duplicated values to a single key)

That's something I don't see mentioned enough; if you change the input to a LLM, that may potentially change the probabilities of all the output tokens. Most of us would be surprised if we told a junior developer to fix a bug in a specific module, and they submitted a PR which modified literally every file in the source tree, but that's entirely plausible with a LLM. Asking it to "fix" one thing may change/break completely unrelated things.

Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy

#80

Post by waboremo »

mrbombastic wrote: post #43
waboremo wrote: post #14

In a way, people who are concerned about skills atrophying are repeating the cycle of previous generations, shaking their fist at higher level programming languages or drawing digital images. How dare you not keep the skills of those who came before you! Time will not be so kind to this view. Some skills will atrophy, as article mentions we don't really care about road navigation anymore. But this is not a bad thing,…

Its not a bad thing until its a bad thing. There are certainly computer related tasks I am happy to relegate to AI, my concern is that we are already bad at maintaining software made by humans. If old school software engineering becomes an arcane art as everyone becomes prompt engineers and software starts to explode in complexity we better hope AI learns to maintain it too.

Funny you mention old school software engineering, because it has become an arcane art! We do not feed punch cards into our computers anymore. Should also mention I don't believe "prompt engineer" will be a serious long term role, that task will just be incorporated into everyone's roles instead.

IMO maintaining software will become easier, so much of what we do today with maintenance is really just tedious. It's tedious to keep packages updated, to write documentation every update, to keep the community informed on what's going to happen in the next. It's tedious to rewrite the exact same functionality but in a modern language. List goes on, so much tedious busywork. What if these things were handled for core maintainers, so they can allocate funds to more complex problems?

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