Wow what a terrible article. The guy just got tired of programming. Everything his buddy looked up he could have hacked out but chose not to. All the tools exist to code at whatever level he wants to. Just sounds like he lost the spark. The other day on hacker news a 17 year old kid wrote a debugger and was asking for help. That’s the spark.
A coder considers the waning days of the craft
731–740 of 1001 posts
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#732Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’ll see - but given the gap between chatgpt 3 and 4, I think AIs will be competitive with mid level programmers by the end of the decade. I’d be surprised if they aren’t. The training systems we use for LLMs are still so crude. ChatGPT has never interacted with a compiler. Imagine learning to write code by only reading (quite small!) snippets on GitHub. That’s the state llms are in now. It’s only a matter of time b…
With today's mid level programmers, yes. But by that time, many of today's mid level programmers will be able to do stuff high level programmers do today. Many people underestimate an LLM's most powerful feature when comparing it with something like Stackoverflow: the ability to ask followup questions and immediately get clarification on anything that is unclear. I wish I had had access to LLM's when I was younger. S…
> But by that time, many of today's mid level programmers will be able to do stuff high level programmers do today.
Not without reason some cheeky devils already renamed "Artificial Intelligence" to "Artificial Mediocracy". AIs generate code that is mediocre. This is a clear improvement if the programmer is bad, but leads to deterioration if the programmer is above average.
Thus, AI won't lead to your scenario of mid level programmers being able to do stuff high level programmers do today, but will rather just make bad programmers more mediocre.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#733Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yes, demand grows as prices drop. I don't doubt this general principle for a second. But the question is about degrees. If the cost of making software at today's level of quality and quantity drops by half, what share of the savings is going to be spent on more and better software, what share is going to be spent on other things and what share will be used to cut prices? I think there is no general answer to this que…
To me software _is_ content because it's tied to attention and consumption. There will always be humans producing it and consuming it, it isn't a limited resource that goes away once a tool comes along to make it easier to produce. If the costs halve, then more is produced.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#734Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The relevant aspect of what you're referencing is that it led to more slaves.
For more than a decade, software developers have easily been able to get low 6 figure jobs right out of college. We're pretty far from slaves.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#735Earlier 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…
You may think it did a good job because of your limited CSS ability. I'd be amazed if ChatGPT can create pixel-perfect animations and transitions along with reusable clean CSS code which supports all of the browser requirements at your org. I've seen the similar claims made on Twitter by people with zero programming ability claiming they've used ChatGPT to build an app. Although 99% of the time what they've actually…
>I'd be amazed if ChatGPT can create pixel-perfect animations and transitions along with reusable clean CSS code which supports all of the browser requirements at your org.
Personally, I'd be more amazed if a person could do that than if a LLM could do it.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#736Am I the only one becoming less impressed by LLMs as time passes? I will admit, when Copilot first became a thing in 2021, I had my own “I’m about to become obsolete” moment. However, it’s become clear to me, both through my own experience and through research that has been conducted, that modern LLMs are fundamentally flawed and are not on the path to general intelligence. We are stuck with ancient (in AI terms) tec…
> Am I the only one becoming less impressed by LLMs as time passes? Not at all. I was very impressed at first but it's gotten to the point where I can no longer trust anything it says other than very high level overviews. For example, I asked it to help me implement my own sound synthesizer from scratch. I wanted to generate audio samples and save them to wave files. The high level overview was helpful and enabled me…
> It's pretty great at reducing the loneliness of solo programming though. Just bouncing ideas and seeing what it says helps a lot. It's not like other people would want to listen.
It's really great for this.
I've found it useful for taking some pattern I've cranking on with an extensive API and finishing the grunt work for me... it generally does a very good job if you teach it properly. I recently had to do a full integration of the AWS Amplify Auth library and instead of grinding for half a day to perfect every method, it just spits out the entire set of actions and reducers for me with well-considered state objects. Again, it needs guidance from someone with a clue, so don't fear it taking my job anytime soon.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#737Earlier quoted context omitted.
With today's mid level programmers, yes. But by that time, many of today's mid level programmers will be able to do stuff high level programmers do today. Many people underestimate an LLM's most powerful feature when comparing it with something like Stackoverflow: the ability to ask followup questions and immediately get clarification on anything that is unclear. I wish I had had access to LLM's when I was younger. S…
> the ability to ask followup questions and immediately get clarification on anything that is unclear. Not only that, but it has the patience of a saint. It never makes you beg for a solution because it thinks there's an XY problem. It never says "RTFM" before posting an irrelevant part of the documentation because it only skimmed your post. It never says "Why would you use X in 2023? Everyone is using framework Y, I…
>
Not only that, but it has the patience of a saint. It never makes you beg for a solution because it thinks there's an XY problem. It never says "RTFM" before posting an irrelevant part of the documentation because it only skimmed your post. It never says "Why would you use X in 2023? Everyone is using framework Y, I would never hire anyone using X."
> The difference comes down to this: unlike a human, it doesn't have an ego or an unwarranted feeling of superiority because it learned an obscure technology.
The reason for these harsh answers is not ego or feeling of superiority, but rather a real willingness to help the respective person without wasting an insane amount of time for both sides. Just like one likes to write concise code, quite some experienced programmers love to give very concise, but helpful answers. If the answer is in the manual, "RTFM" is a helpful answer. Giving strongly opinionated technology recommendations is also very helpful way to give the beginner a strong hint what might be a good choice (until the beginner has a very good judgement of this on his own).
I know that this concise style of talking does not fit the "sugar-coated" kind of speaking that is (unluckily) common in society. But it is much more helpful (in particular for learning programming).
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#738Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Am I the only one becoming less impressed by LLMs as time passes? Not at all. I was very impressed at first but it's gotten to the point where I can no longer trust anything it says other than very high level overviews. For example, I asked it to help me implement my own sound synthesizer from scratch. I wanted to generate audio samples and save them to wave files. The high level overview was helpful and enabled me…
> It's pretty great at reducing the loneliness of solo programming though. Just bouncing ideas and seeing what it says helps a lot. It's not like other people would want to listen. It's really great for this. I've found it useful for taking some pattern I've cranking on with an extensive API and finishing the grunt work for me... it generally does a very good job if you teach it properly. I recently had to do a full…
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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#739I 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…
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…
I suspect that the "depth" of most CSS code is significantly shallower than what gets written in general purpose programming languages. In CSS you often align this box, then align that box, and so forth. A lot of the complexity in extant CSS comes from human beings attempting to avoid excessive repetition and typing. And this is particularly true when we consider the simple and generic CSS tasks that many people in this thread have touted GPT for performing. There are exceptions where someone builds something really unique in CSS, but that isn't what most people are asking from GPT.
But the good news is that "simple generic CSS" is the kind of thing that most good programmers consider to be essentially busywork, and they won't miss doing it.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#740Earlier 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.
This is funny to me, because I would _always_ use -print0 and xargs -0, and for good reasons, I believe. But if you base your entire knowledge on what you find online, then yes, that's what you get - and what _most people will get too_. Also, I can still update that command if I want. So it's not any worse than good-old "go to stack overflow" approach, but still benefits from experience. FYI, this is the correct, as-…
...actually
find . -path '/bar/.foo' -print0 | xargs -0 grep baz
;-) no regex, no nested suff, much shorter. My brain went back to it ;-)