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A coder considers the waning days of the craft

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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#81

Post by BigJono »

gtirloni wrote: post #43

Today I already have trouble doing git archeology to understand why a piece of code was done in a certain way. Now imagine debugging more and more code that was created by LLMs. Debugging will become more of a voodoo witchcraft kind of thing. I pity anyone who decides to make a living out of that. Probably will earn a lot and die young.

People are very quickly going to find out that "never rewrite" can't be taken as absolute advice.

If you have 5Mloc of third party dependencies and AI generated code that you can't extend and can barely keep functional in production, and a competitor pops up with 50Kloc nearing feature parity and adding more functionality by the day, you'll very quickly need to adapt or die.

Software companies already die to this risk aversion all the time.

Tons more die to rewrites because they get conned into hiring an army of idiot React consultants to do it, who are likely in these HN threads at the forefront of AI code gen themselves, and just end up making 2.0 more complex and worse.

All GPT does is widen the gap between good and bad engineering. If it widens it enough that non-technical people can finally tell the difference, then it's going to kill half the market, just not the half everyone thinks it will.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#82

Post by skepticATX »

Am 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) technology. GPT 4 is better than 3.5, but not in a fundamental way. I expect much the same from 5. This technology is incredibly flawed, and in hindsight, once we have actual powerful AI, I think we’ll laugh at how much attention we gave it.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#83

Post by ilaksh »

thomaslord wrote: post #75
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…

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 ther…

ChatGPT 3.5 is about 20-30 IQ points dumber than GPT-4. There is no comparison. It is not very similar.

GPT-4 now also has 128,000 context tokens.

They could charge $2000 per month for GPT-4 and it would be more than fair.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#84

Post by [deleted] »

kragen wrote: post #36
labster wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure New Yorker writer is the first job that LLMs will replace.

gladwell made a career out of compelling, convincing writing about things he didn't understand and came to the wrong conclusions about, like a human chatgpt, so probably; google 'igon value'

[deleted]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#85

Post by Philpax »

fzeroracer wrote: post #58

Much like how many people predicted we'd all be driving flying cars, the people predicting that coding will be replaced by AI just isn't realistic. Primarily because these AI models can literally only exist as long as there's humans constantly creating code for it to read (see: steal) in the first place. AI cannot sustain itself trained on AI work. If new languages, engines etc pop up it cannot synthesize new forms o…

> AI cannot sustain itself trained on AI work.

This isn’t true. You can train LLMs entirely on synthetic data and get strong results. [0]

> If new languages, engines etc pop up it cannot synthesize new forms of coding without that code having existed in the first place.

You can describe the semantics to a LLM, have it generate code, tell it what went wrong (i.e. with compiler feedback), and then train on that. For an example of this workflow in a different context, see [1].

> And most importantly, it cannot fundamentally rationalize about what code does or how it functions.

Most competent LLMs can trivially describe what some code does and speculate on the reasoning behind it.

I don’t disagree that they’re flawed and imperfect, but I also do not think this is an unassailable state of affairs. They’re only going to get better from here.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05463

[1]: https://voyager.minedojo.org/

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#86

Post by ryandrake »

teg4n_ wrote: post #29
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…

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.

This is the real point. If the profits from AI (or robots) replacing Job X were distributed among the people who used to do Job X, I don't think anyone would mind. In fact it would be great for society! But that's not what's going to happen. The AI (and robots) will be owned by the Shrinking Few, all the profits and benefits will go to the owners, and the people who used to do Job X will have to re-skill to gamble on some other career.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#87

Post by jelsisi »

decasia wrote: post #52

I have been having the following debate with my friend who does AI and neural network stuff: Him: Coding will soon be obsolete, it will all be replaced by chatgpt-type code gen. Me: OK but the overwhelming majority of my job as a "senior engineer" is about communication, organizational leadership, and actually understanding all the product requirements and how they will interface with our systems. Yes, I write code,…

> communication, organizational leadership, and actually understanding all the product requirements

These problems sound like a result of working with people. Smaller but more capable teams because of AI will need less leaders and less meetings. Everything will become much more efficient. Say goodbye to all the time spent mentoring junior engineers, soon you won't have any

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#88

Post by bugglebeetle »

woodruffw wrote: post #38
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.

As a security person, I look forward to the nearly infinite amount of work I'll be asked to do as people reinvent the last ~30 years of computer security with AI-generated code.

Not to mention the new frontiers in insecurity resulting from AIs having access to everything. The Bard stuff today on the front page was pretty nuts. Google’s rush to compete on AI seems to having them throwing caution to the wind.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#89

Post by armchairhacker »

I think people underestimate the level of general intelligence required to write even seemingly basic "glue-code" (which btw, 90+% of software consists of).

If we ever get an AI which can write complex enough "glue code" with a low enough failure rate to replace even junior developers, it's going to cause much, much bigger impacts than people losing jobs. The "boilerplate" and "bureaucracy" which is currently handled by "average" folk...that's what runs the world. If we ever develop AI which can handle that kind of work, barring some constraint like extreme resource usage or disaster like climate change; we'll either be brought into a utopia due to productivity being multiplied, or a dystopia due to a small minority getting control over the world to a precise, extreme extent no small minority has control now.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#90

Post by nemo »

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"

>Is there some limit where AI just can't get better?

Yes, without question. There must be, in fact. Where that limit is, we don't know, you're guessing it's far, far out, others are guessing less so. At this point the details of that future are unknowable.

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