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A coder considers the waning days of the craft

newyorker.com

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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#761

Post by btbuildem »

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…

The author of the article seems to be a mediocre coder; perhaps they have not had enough experience in the domain to arrive at a big-picture perspective.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#762

Post by soulofmischief »

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…

Are you using GPT-3.5, or GPT-4?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#763

Post by Dowwie »

Most of the software engineers I've known are problem solvers who use code to accomplish their goals. Problem solvers will use the best tools available for the job. Perhaps engineers will use natural language UI's to build software and "drop down" into a languages for debugging or optimization, just as today some drop into assembly.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#764

Post by andy99 »

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…

> The worst dev on my team uses ChatGPT a lot, and its facilitated him producing more bad code more quickly.

This is great. The exact same is true with writing, which I think it's trivial for anyone to see. Especially non-native speakers or otherwise bad writers can now write long-winded nonsense, which we're starting to see all over. It hasn't made anyone a good writer, it's just helped bad ones go faster.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#765

Post by barrkel »

fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #710
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encountered this with particular problem in python. Seemed like GPT wanted to always answer with something that had a lot of examples on the web, even if most answers were not correct. So garbage in, garbage out problem. I'm bit worried that the LLM's will continue to degrade as the web has increasing amount of LLM generated content. Seems to already be occurring.

Why do people that hand wave away the entire concept of LLMs because of one instance of it doing one thing poorly that they could do better, and yet always seem to fail to just show us their concrete example?

FWIW I didn't wave away the entire concept. LLMs definitely have uses.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#766

Post by d3w4s9 »

fdgjgbdfhgb wrote: post #529
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…

If it's not a life or death situation (like a self-driving truck slamming into a van full of children or whatever), I don't think people will care much. Non-tech people (i.e. managers, PMs) don't necessarily understand/care if the code is not perfect and the barrier for "good enough" is much lower. I think we will see a faster adoption of this tech...

No. If the code generated by chatgpt cannot even pass the unit test it generates in the same response (or is just completely wrong) and requires significant amount of human work to fix it, it is not usable AI.

That's what I am running into on an everyday basis.

I don't want my program to be full of bugs.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#767

Post by rewmie »

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…

> Self-driving trucks were going to upend the trucking industry in ten years, ten years ago.

At the risk of going off on a tangent, we already have the technology to allow self-driving trucks for a few decades now.

The technology is so good that it can even be used to transport multiple containers in one go.

The trick is to use dedicated tracks to run these autonomous vehicles, and have a central authority monitoring and controlling traffic.

These autonomous vehicles typically go by the name railway.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#768

Post by zrobotics »

nkozyra wrote: post #703
jorams wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. There are cases where it produces good results, but there are also cases where it produces bs, and it's not always obvious. I find it to work fine for cases where I know what I want but could use a starting point, but it often invents or misunderstands all kinds of things. The most frustrating situations are those where it invents a function that would miraculously do what's necessary, I tell it th…

> There are cases where it produces good results, but there are also cases where it produces bs, and it's not always obvious. Pessimistically, this is the medium term role I see for a lot of devs. Less actual development, more assembly of pieces and being good enough at cleaning up generated code. If an LLM can get you even 25% there most of the time, that's a massive disruption of this industry.

I mean, especially in webdev we've been heading in that direction for a while now anyway. So much of the job is already just wiring up different npm packages and APIs that someone else has written. I've read substantially similar comments back in the mid 2010s about how people weren't learning the fundamentals and just pulling things like left pad off of a repo. That did cause a disruption in how people coded by abstraction away many of the problems and making the job more about integrating different things together.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#769

Post by frereubu »

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…

When studying fine art, a tutor of mine talked about "things that look like art", by which she meant the work that artists produce when they're just engaging with surface appearances rather than fully engaging with the process. I've been using GitHub Copilot for a while and find that it produces output that looks like working code but, aside from the occasional glaring mistake, it often has subtle mistakes sprinkled throughout it too. The plausibility is a serious issue, and means that I spend about as much time checking through the code for mistakes as I'd take to actually write it, but without the satisfaction that comes from writing my own code.

I dunno, maybe LLMs will get good enough eventually, but at the moment it feels plausible to me that there's some kind of an upper limit caused by its very nature of working from a collection of previous code. I guess we'll see...

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#770

Post by JohnMakin »

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…

I use “chatGPT” (really bing chat which is openAI under the hood as I understand) more than anyone on my team but it is very rarely for code.

I most often use it for summarizing/searching through dense documentation, creating quick prototypes, “given X,Y,Z symptoms and this confusing error message, can you give me a list of possible causes?” (basically searches Stack Overflow far better than I can).

Anyway basically the same as I was using google when google was actually good. sometimes I will forget some obscure syntax and ask it how to do something, but not super often. I’m convinced using it solely to generate code is a mistake unless it’s tedious boilerplate stuff.

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