> What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession.
Damn, the secret is out.
A coder considers the waning days of the craft
741–750 of 1001 posts
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#742Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never found GPT-4 capable of producing a useful solution in my niche of engineering. When I’m stumped, it’s usually on a complex and very multi-faceted problem where the full scope doesn’t fit into the human brain very well. And for these problems, GPT will produce some borderline unworkable solutions. It’s like a jack of all trades and master of none in code. It’s knowledge seems a mile wide and an inch deep. G…
Well no, you shouldn't use it for your top-end problems, but your bottom-end problems. Aren't there things that you have to do in your job that really could be done by a junior programmer? Don't you ever have one-off (or once-a-year) things you have to do that each time you have to invest a lot of time refreshing in your brain, and then basically forgetting for lack of use? Here's an example I used the other day: Our…
> Aren't there things that you have to do in your job that really could be done by a junior programmer?
Hardly, because explaining how basically everything fits together is the hard and central part. Thus, the way to make things doable by a junior programmer is to teach him to become much better in programming and the software that is developed (which the company attempts). Until then, there are few things where a junior programmer is of productive help.
> Don't you ever have one-off (or once-a-year) things you have to do that each time you have to invest a lot of time refreshing in your brain, and then basically forgetting for lack of use?
Hardly, because I have a pretty good long-time memory.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#743It seems like lots of people are pointing out the inadequacies of the current state of the art models. It doesn't seem that unlikely that many of these problems will be solved in the coming years. I won't make any guesses about timelines, but there is certainly a large number of very well funded smart people working on these problems. I'm not sure if this current path leads to AGI, which is what I would consider the minimum requirement for truly replacing human jobs. However, it does suggest to me that building AGI is achievable.
In my mind there are two major architectural problems that still need to be solved if I am to be convinced AGI is close:
1. Medium term memory
2. The need to relive an entire conversation just to produce the latest response.
Here is another question: Suppose we develop AGI. What will the energy requirements be for that system? The scale at which ChatGPT is used today would be peanuts compared to a system that is supposed to replace millions of knowledge workers.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#744Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try breaking down the problem. You don't have to do it yourself, you can tell ChatGPT to break down the problem for you then try to implement individual parts. When you have something that kind of works, tell ChatGPT what the problems are and ask for refinement. IMHO currently the weak point of LLMs is that they can't really tell what's adequate for human consumption. You have to act as a guide who knows what's good…
I'd be curious to see how a non expert could perform a non-trivial programming task using ChatGPT. It's good at writing code snippets which is occasionally useful. But give it a large program that has a bug which isn't a trivial syntax error, and it won't help you. > In programming you don't have to worry too much about hallucinations because it won't work at all if it hallucinates. You still have to worry for your j…
Understanding on core principle is definitely needed, but it helps you to punch above your weight.
Generally, generative AI gives mastery of an art to a theorists. To generate an impressive AI Art, you still need to have understanding of aesthetics and have an idea, but don't have to know how to use the graphic editors and other tools. It's quite similar for programming too, You still need understanding of whatever you're building, but you no longer have to be expert in using the tools. To build a mobile app you will need to have a grasp on how everything works in general, but you don't have to be expert in Swift or Kotlin.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#745Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Google, "UI developer".
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#746It seems like lots of people are pointing out the inadequacies of the current state of the art models. It doesn't seem that unlikely that many of these problems will be solved in the coming years. I won't make any guesses about timelines, but there is certainly a large number of very well funded smart people working on these problems. I'm not sure if this current path leads to AGI, which is what I would consider the…
i wonder how many of the commenters who bemoan how GPT-4 can't do this or that task, could have predicted 2 or 5 years ago what GPT-4 can do easily today
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this a slight over-generalization from web dev? If you learned programming in the pre-web era then you weren't able to learn how programs work by studying the shipped artifacts, but the craft wasn't waning, far from it. I learned HTML in the mid nineties and even then I don't honestly recall learning very much from View Source. HTML has never been particularly easy to read even when written by the rare breed wh…
> If you learned programming in the pre-web era then you weren't able to learn how programs work by studying the shipped artifacts Why not? You can step through an assembly program just as easily as a javascript one...
There's a slight difference in abstraction level there. I've done more than my fair share of stepping through assembly in my life and learning things from even minified JS is a lot easier.
But I don't think many people learned programming by studying random real-world programs in a disassembler. It was once at least theoretically possible to do that with web programming, albeit not well and not anymore.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#748I suspect we're going to see this article in many different forms over the next few years. That's when the hype cycle will settle and people realize that LLMs are amazing search engines on steroid buy will never replace actual developers.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#749Earlier quoted context omitted.
Formal methods/dependent types are the future in the same way fusion is, it seems to be perpetually another decade away. In practice, our industry seems to have reached a sort of limit in how much type system complexity we can actually absorb. If you look at the big new languages that came along in the last 10-15 years (Kotlin, Swift, Go, Rust, TypeScript) then they all have type systems of pretty similar levels of p…
> If you look at the big new languages that came along in the last 10-15 years (Kotlin, Swift, Go, Rust, TypeScript) then they all have type systems of pretty similar levels of power, with the possible exception of the latter two which have ordinary type systems with some "gimmicks". Those are very different type systems: - Kotlin has a Java-style system with nominal types and subtyping via inheritance - TypeScript i…
Yes, I didn't say they're the same, only that they are of similar levels of power. Write the same program in all three and there won't be a big gap in level of bugginess.
Sometimes Rustaceans like to claim otherwise, but most of the work in Rust's type system goes into taming manual memory management which is solved with a different typing approach in the other two, so unless you need one of those languages for some specific reason then the level of bugs you can catch automatically is going to be in the same ballpark.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#750Maybe 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…
AI taking over one of the only professions able to afford someone a proper middle class existence is pretty shitty. It will be great for capitalists though.
The "people" at the top in charge want nothing less than the population to be poor and dependant. There's a reason they've done everything they can to suppress wages and eliminate good jobs.
Despite that here on HN you have people cheering them on, excited for it. Tech is one of the last good paying fields and these people don't realize it's not a matter of changing career, because there won't be anything better to retrain in.
They are cheering on their own doom.