3rd option. They got complacent and old and have trouble learning (don’t realize it) and can’t grok the new medium.
That seems possible. There is a frequent bias against the new even in progressive technology circles.
yeah, I wasn't referring to agism or anything like that. Just that they had been there a while, got complacent with the code base or the style of programming. That's all. It can take an entire mind shift to understand what's going on when all you've been building is administrative portals and internal sites.
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 you can get it to stop parroting clauses about how "as an AI model" it can't give advice or just spewing a list of steps to achieve something - I have found it to be a pretty good search engine for obscure things about a technology or language and for searching for something that would otherwise require a specific query that google is unhelpful searching for.
This will test how egoless each programmer is. If you’re truly egoless and care about the outcome and not the path to the outcome… you’ll see how exciting this is.
Why does that matter?
A lot of folks chose programming as a career because they enjoy the path at least as much as the outcome, and I think that's a perfectly fine reason to choose a career.
It also gives them good reason to mourn the loss of something that brings them happiness. They might be losing the only part of their job they actually enjoy.
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…
ChatGPT goes from zero to maybe 65th percentile? There or thereabouts. It's excellent if you know nothing. It's mediocre and super buggy if you're an expert. A big difference is that the expert asks different questions, off in the tails of the distribution, and that's where these LLMs are no good. If you want a canonical example of something, the median pattern, it's great. As the ask heads out of the input data dist…
I would prefer that google search didn't suck. Instead, I ask ChatGPT. The best case scenario, IMO, would be for people to lay out excellent documentation and working code and train the LLM specifically on that in a way that it can provide reference links to justify its answers. Then, I will take what it says and go directly to the source to get the knowledge as it was intended to be ingested by a human. We get a lot more value than we're initially looking for when we dive into the docs, and I don't want to lose that experience.
Not to be unkind but simply factual: the author is clearly not a great developer. e.g.: "At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling." Really? "But he had no idea what a pain it is to make an iPhone app. I’d tried a few times and never got beyond something that half worked. I…
In author's defense he doesn't claim to be exceptional and even concludes his essay with labeling this A.I. moment as “the revenge of the so-so programmer.” I actually enjoyed author's nuanced take, different from the common narrative of AI takeover. To the contrary I think LLM-driven coding is not a tool of power users, but rather a tool of disempowered users. They will bring many more people into the engineering profession and change the profession for many in it towards more complex tasks. Quickbooks hasn't destroyed the need for accountants, yet it allowed millions to become the "so-so accountants", when that's all their business needed.
Base64: https://chat.openai.com/share/3793da6d-4634-4e13-9cc4-ce9983... ROT13: https://chat.openai.com/share/ae7c311d-ab23-4425-bdfa-c2314e... HEX: https://chat.openai.com/share/4b0740b7-53c0-4776-bb00-ab65b4... What kind of encoded string did you use?
Thank you for taking the time to call BS on someone who obviously never tried asking a LLM AI to decipher a string's encoding. That is exactly the kind of thing they are good ar.
Two people can try similar prompts and get very different results from LLM’s.
I agree it's amazing. But your comment doesn't touch on the key economic question that will decide for how many people it will be this amazing new dev experience. If AI makes developers twice as productive (maybe a few years down the road with GPT-6), will this additional supply of developer capacity get absorbed by existing and new demand? Or will there be half as many developers? Or will the same number of develope…
> “ If AI makes developers twice as productive (maybe a few years down the road with GPT-6), will this additional supply of developer capacity get absorbed by existing and new demand? Or will there be half as many developers? Or will the same number of developers get paid far less than today? ” Something to remember is that every new innovation in software development only raises the expectations of the people paying…
Blacksmiths didn't die, they became mechanical engineers?
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-…
Using better languages like Powershell or Python becomes a lot more valuable here. I definitely think bash is going to be mostly useless in 5 years, you'll be able to generate legible code that does exactly what you want rather than having to do write-only stuff like that. Really we're already there. I've long switched from bash to something else at the first sign of trouble, but LLMs make it so easy. Poorly written python is better than well-written bash.
Of course, LLMs can generate go or rust or whatever so I suspect such languages will become a lot more useful for things that would call for a scripting language today.
> What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession. Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles. This captures the reason I'm optimistic about AI-assisted programming. The learning curve for getting started programming is horribly steep - and it's not because it's hard, it's because it's frustrating. You have to s…
Honestly I think its a step back. This is like saying google translate has made everyone fluent in Spanish. At the end of the day you still need to do some vetting and understanding how code works to effectively use chatgpt. the actual writing of the code was never the hard part of software development. If this thing is only speeding up developers by six months time, then thats kind of a waste of compute compared to…
> At the end of the day you still need to do some vetting and understanding how code works to effectively use chatgpt. the actual writing of the code was never the hard part of software development
I completely agree with you on that. Most of being a good software engineer is skills that ChatGPT won't help you with.
But you can't even start to learn those skills if you quit in the first six months because of the vertical learning curve tied to all of that syntax trivia.