Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A coder considers the waning days of the craft

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 1001 posts

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#71

Post by Dave_Rosenthal »

alexmuro wrote: post #10

I don't feel like we are in the waning days of the craft at all. Most of the craft is creating an understanding between people and software and most human programmers are still bad at it. AI might replace some programmers but none who program as a craft.

"Chess engines might get better than some chess players, but none who play Chess as a craft." Do you think people in the 90s thought this? Probably...

In the article, the author mentions that Chess centaurs (a human player consulting an engine) can still beat an engine alone. But the author is wrong. There was a brief period a while ago when that was true, but chess engines are so strong now that any human intervention just holds them back.

I've been programming 30+ years, and am an accomplished programmer who loves the craft, but the writing is on the wall. ChatGPT is better than me at programming in most every way. It knows more languages, more tricks, more libraries, more error codes, is faster, cheaper, etc.

The only area that I still feel superior to ChatGPT is that I have a better understanding of the "big picture" of what the program is trying to accomplish and can help steer it to work on the right sub-problems. Funnily enough, is was the same with centuar Chess; humans would make strategic decisions while the engines would work out the tactics. But that model is now useless.

We are currently enjoying a time where (human programmer+AI > AI programmer). It's an awesome time to live in, but, like with Chess, I doubt it will last very long.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#72

Post by atleastoptimal »

swatcoder wrote: post #37
atleastoptimal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people I feel fear losing their siloed prestige built on arcane software knowledge. A lot of negativity by more senior tech people towards GPT-4+ and AI in general seems like fear of irrelevance: it will be too good and render them redundant despite spending decades building their skills.

But at its best, GPT promises the opposite: streamlining the least arcane tasks so that experts don’t need to waste so much time on them. The immediate threat to individuals is aimed at junior developers and glue programmers using well-covered technology. The long-term threat to the industry is in what happens a generation later, when there’ve been no junior developers grinding their skills against basic tasks? In th…

Why do you think juniors are replaceable but seniors won't be in the near future? Is there some limit where AI just can't get better? That's like seeing the first prototype car ever built, which can go 20 miles per hour, and saying "Cars will never replace horses that can go 21 miles per hour"

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#73

Post by fzeroracer »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #62
kragen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've fired a lot of negativity at people for treating the entropy monster as a trustworthy information source. it's a waste of my time to prove it wrong to their satisfaction. it's great at creativity and recall but shitty at accuracy, and sometimes accuracy is what counts most

I know it sucks now and I agree GPT-4 is not a replacement for coders. However the leap between GPT-3 and 4 indicates that by the 6 level, if improvements continue, it'll reach the scope and accuracy we expect from highly paid skilled humans. It's only a guess people make that AI improvements will stop at some arbitrary point, and since that point seems to always be a few steps down from the skill level of the person…

Fundamentally it cannot reach the scope or accuracy of a highly skilled person. It's a limitation of how LLMs function.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#74

Post by fzeroracer »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #72
swatcoder wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at its best, GPT promises the opposite: streamlining the least arcane tasks so that experts don’t need to waste so much time on them. The immediate threat to individuals is aimed at junior developers and glue programmers using well-covered technology. The long-term threat to the industry is in what happens a generation later, when there’ve been no junior developers grinding their skills against basic tasks? In th…

Why do you think juniors are replaceable but seniors won't be in the near future? Is there some limit where AI just can't get better? That's like seeing the first prototype car ever built, which can go 20 miles per hour, and saying "Cars will never replace horses that can go 21 miles per hour"

Do you believe individuals will drive flying cars in the next 10 years? How about 20? 40? People were predicting we'd have flying cars for over 50 years now, why don't we have them yet?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#75

Post by thomaslord »

swatcoder wrote: post #37
atleastoptimal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people I feel fear losing their siloed prestige built on arcane software knowledge. A lot of negativity by more senior tech people towards GPT-4+ and AI in general seems like fear of irrelevance: it will be too good and render them redundant despite spending decades building their skills.

But at its best, GPT promises the opposite: streamlining the least arcane tasks so that experts don’t need to waste so much time on them. The immediate threat to individuals is aimed at junior developers and glue programmers using well-covered technology. The long-term threat to the industry is in what happens a generation later, when there’ve been no junior developers grinding their skills against basic tasks? In th…

Honestly in my brief dabbling with ChatGPT, it hasn't really felt like it's good at the stuff that I'd want taken off my plate. At work I tend to build stuff that you'd describe as "CRUD plus business logic", so there are a decent number of mundane tasks. ChatGPT can probably fill in some validation logic if I tell it the names of the fields, but that doesn't speed things up much. I work primarily in Laravel, so there's not a huge amount of boilerplate required for most of the stuff I do.

The one thing I was really hoping ChatGPT could do is help me convert a frontend from one component library to another. The major issue I ran into was that the token limit was too small for even a modestly sized page.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#76

Post by atleastoptimal »

fzeroracer wrote: post #73
atleastoptimal wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it sucks now and I agree GPT-4 is not a replacement for coders. However the leap between GPT-3 and 4 indicates that by the 6 level, if improvements continue, it'll reach the scope and accuracy we expect from highly paid skilled humans. It's only a guess people make that AI improvements will stop at some arbitrary point, and since that point seems to always be a few steps down from the skill level of the person…

Fundamentally it cannot reach the scope or accuracy of a highly skilled person. It's a limitation of how LLMs function.

Do you honestly think no AI advancement will fix those limitations? That LLM's or their successors will just never reach human level no matter how much compute or data are thrown at them?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#77

Post by jelsisi »

The article came to a romantic end that doesn't satisfy how I feel about the workplace now. I have to admit a dirty truth, that I joined this field because of the pay and job stability, not simply for a love of programming. Because of this I feel distressed for its future. No longer can someone walk into a job slightly under qualified and grow with time. Companies will opt for smaller teams of 10xers that with the companionship of AI can pump out 10x10 more code then the rest of us. Simply put, as a 20 something out of college, I'm going to need to figure out how to make as much money as soon as possible.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#78

Post by acscott »

stcroixx wrote: post #69
waldohatesyou wrote: post #33

I feel like the headline does not match the article here. The headline implies that programming as a craft is to be replaced but the article ultimately argues that it will change significantly which matches my intuition as well. At the end of the day, the bar is being lowered. Is that a bad thing? From a selfish perspective, yes. From a societal perspective, no. At the risk of digressing, I think one of the issues th…

If software dev is simplified to the point people working jobs like you describe are able to do it, wages will also plummet, so it’s not like their situation is going to improve.

If a developer making $1/hour produces $10 output (of something people buy), then if you add another developer making $1/hour produces $10 of output, you have $20 total product. Developer A and B can compete on their rate down to the point that it's not sustainable, and thus, an equilibrium will be struck.

How is adding more developers going to reduce the output?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#79

Post by bugglebeetle »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #68
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…

If I’m doing something thousands of people have coded before me then yes please hold my hand while I write this CSV import. When I’m writing business logic unique to this specific domain then please stop mumbling bs at me.

Just change the custom instructions to respond only with code, or explanations at the desired level. This works for me thus far.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#80

Post by atleastoptimal »

fzeroracer wrote: post #74
atleastoptimal wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think juniors are replaceable but seniors won't be in the near future? Is there some limit where AI just can't get better? That's like seeing the first prototype car ever built, which can go 20 miles per hour, and saying "Cars will never replace horses that can go 21 miles per hour"

Do you believe individuals will drive flying cars in the next 10 years? How about 20? 40? People were predicting we'd have flying cars for over 50 years now, why don't we have them yet?

Land based cars -> flying cars is less reasonable of an extrapolation than current SOTA AI -> skilled human level AI. Flying cars already exist anyway, they're called helicopters.
Post reply on HN