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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

#811

Post by evantbyrne »

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…

Certain programming jobs will be replaced with AI. My prediction is that by the end of 2024 we will have a commercial AI that does an okay job of converting UI designs to frontend code. By the end of 2025 a commercial AI will be able to create UI designs and produce frontend code that's at least 80% complete.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#812

Post by fumeux_fume »

sadtoot wrote: post #746
minzi wrote: post #743

It 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

Yes I also only find people to be credible if they have a solid track record of magically predicting events 2 to 5 years in the future.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#813

Post by notjoemama »

ChatGTP cannot provide an actual solution to a multi-tenant application framework for a SaaS product...because I haven't found that in the stack I work in. So I created it but it is closed source. If LLMs rely on open source, it will never provide the value that exists from experienced closed source engineers. I suppose LLM/AI providers can snaekily suck in closed source code for long enough time that once they're caught the cat is out of the bag and the "industry" collapses. But so far, LLMs are cool, but not AGI, nor are they likely to mature into AGI alone.

As far as generalization goes, I'm still waiting for an answer from Tolman-Eichenbaum machines. Or, an integration of LLMs and cognitive maps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qOaII_PzGY

http://brilliant.org/ArtemKirsanov/

And his references from the YouTube video:

REFERENCES (in no particular order): 1. Behrens, T. E. J. et al. What Is a Cognitive Map? Organizing Knowledge for Flexible Behavior. Neuron 100, 490–509 (2018). 2. Constantinescu, A. O., O’Reilly, J. X. & Behrens, T. E. J. Organizing conceptual knowledge in humans with a gridlike code. Science 352, 1464–1468 (2016). 3. Aronov, D., Nevers, R. & Tank, D. W. Mapping of a non-spatial dimension by the hippocampal–entorhinal circuit. Nature 543, 719–722 (2017). 4. Whittington, J. C. R., McCaffary, D., Bakermans, J. J. W. & Behrens, T. E. J. How to build a cognitive map. Nat Neurosci 25, 1257–1272 (2022). 5. Whittington, J., Muller, T., Mark, S., Barry, C. & Behrens, T. Generalisation of structural knowledge in the hippocampal-entorhinal system.

CREDITS: Icons by biorender.com and freepik.com Brain 3D models were created with Blender software using publicly available BrainGlobe atlases (https://brainglobe.info/atlas-api)

This video was sponsored by Brilliant

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#814

Post by necrotic_comp »

JohnMakin wrote: post #770
steveBK123 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, agreed. The best way of putting this is "using google when google was actually good."

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#815

Post by redblacktree »

katzgrau wrote: post #642
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 also cases where it produces bs, and it's not always obvious Particularly annoying because I wind up risking not actually saving time because it’s producing subtle bugs that I wouldn’t have written myself. So, you save yourself the time of thought and research at the risk of going down new and mysterious rabbit holes

For me the trick to avoiding this trap is to limit usage to small areas of code, test frequently, and know its limits. I love using copilot/GPT for boilerplate stuff.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#816

Post by corethree »

epcoa wrote: post #364
corethree wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human nature. https://radiolab.org/podcast/91618-lying-to-ourselves I know this is a rando podcast and you most likely won't listen to it. But it's totally worth it, just 10 minutes. It's about the science of how and why we lie to ourselves.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Your trendline argument in DOA. “Use some common sense here.” As you are proving, it’s not very common.

Everytime you take an action you do so in anticipation of a predicted future.

How did you predict that future? Using the past. Does your action always anticipate the correct future?

No. There's no way we can "know" the future. We can only do the best possible prediction.

And that is literally how all humans walk through life. We use the best possible predictor of the future to predict it. Right now the best possible predictor of the future points to one where AI will improve. That is a highly valid and highly likely outcome.

It's literally part of what common sense is at a very fundamental level here.

Your argument here is just wrong on every level. It's more akin to wishful thinking and deliberate self blindness or lying to oneself.

When your career, when your mastery over programming, when your intelligence which you held in high regard along with your career is threatened to be toppled as a useless and replaceable skill. Of course you lie to yourself. Of course you blind yourself to the raw reality of what is most likely to occur.

I mean the most realistic answer is that it's a probability. AI taking over may occur, it may not. That's a more neutral scientific answer. But this is not what I'm seeing. I'm seeing people trying to bend the narrative into one where there's no problem and nothing to worry about. When these people talk about AI they can't remain neutral.

They always have to turn the conversation into something personal and bend the conversation towards their own skillet relative to AI. Why? Because that is the fundamental thing that is driving their viewpoint. Their own personal role in society relative to AI.

The truly neutral party views the whole situation impartially without bringing his own personal situation into the conversation. The parent is not a neutral party and he's acting cliche. The pattern is classic and repeated over and over again by multitudes of people, especially programmers who hold their career and intelligence in high regard.

Don't believe me? Ask yourself. Are you proud of your career? Do you think of yourself as intelligent and good at programming? If so you fit the bill of what I described above. A biased person can never see his own bias but if I predict classic symptoms of bias without prompt maybe, just maybe he can move out of the zone of denial. But most likely this won't happen.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#817

Post by cbozeman »

whynotminot wrote: post #798
steveBK123 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ChatGPT is not going to tell you how to design a system, architect properly, automate, package, test, deploy, etc. If you ask the right questions it absolutely can. I’ve found that most people thinking ChatGPT is a rube are expecting too much extrapolation from vague prompts. “Make me a RESTful service that provides music data.” ChatGPT will give you something that does that. And then you’ll proceed to come to hack…

This has been my experience as well.

Every person I've noticed who says that ChatGPT isn't good at what it does has the same thing in common - they're not great at talking to people, either.

Turns out when you train an AI on the corpus of human knowledge, you have to actually talk to it like a human. Which entirely too many people visiting this website don't do effectively.

ChatGPT has allowed me to develop comprehensive training programs for our internal personnel, because I already have some knowledge of training and standardization from my time in the military, but I also have in-depth domain knowledge so I can double-check what it's recommending, then course correct it if necessary.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#818

Post by dmansen »

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…

This is essentially the conclusion the author comes to at the end of the piece

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#819

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#820

Post by karaterobot »

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…

I have to ask, though: if ChatGPT has by most accounts gotten better at coding by leaps and bounds in the last couple years, might that not also indicate that your test isn't useful?
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