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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

#821

Post by savanaly »

muldvarp wrote: post #803
alm1 wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

I don't think a "so-so programmer" would need to google to figure out how to select random lines from a file.

I would have to Google. You really have the library methods you would need for that memorized? I think the last time I had to select random elements from a list at work was...never. Why would I still know that?

Would it be Random.int()? Or Random.range()? Or maybe there's a better choice that operates directly on a list? Or wait is it gonna return the value or a Generator of the value? Etc. Even if you remember how to do random number generation in your language, this specific use case probably necessitates a Google unless you have a godlike memory, or you don't mind half-assing it.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#822

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #620
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. For every 100 problems that would be convenient to solve in software, maybe 1 is important enough to the whims of the market that there are actually programmers working on it. If software becomes 100x easier to make, then you don't end up with fewer programmers, you end up with more problems being solved. And once 100% of the problems that can be solved with software are already solved with software... th…

Why do you think this is post-scarcity?

The assumption (from the comment I was replying to, and which I'm taking for granted here) is that software will be drastically easier to make. When things become easier they become cheaper. When things become cheaper we end up with more of them.

Also, things that are currently too complex to be worth bothering with currently will become viable because taming that complexity becomes easier. Together these things mean that a greater percentage of our problems will be solved by software.

So what kinds of problems does software solve anyway? Well, it's things that we already know how to do but would prefer not to spend time doing: Drudgery.

Our concept of value is coupled to scarcity. Even if two people have vastly different perspectives, they can both trade a scarce thing for progress towards their goals. We used to use gold as that scarce thing. Now, the scarce thing is intervals of time where a human is willing to tolerate drudgery.

So in a world where the scope of software is maximized, the existence of drudgery is minimized. That breaks our scarcity based economic system, so unless you have an idea for some third thing--not gold, not willingness to endure drudgery, but something else whose pursuit can be used to underpin "value", the conclusion is that we'll have to come up with something else to do. Something other than blindly chasing value without a thought about whose agenda were furthering by doing so.

It can't happen soon enough, because our scarcity based system is currently causing us to do a lot of really dumb things.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#823

Post by dontupvoteme »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #644
anonzzzies wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, don't leave us in suspense; what do you ask of it? Because I'm quite sure it can already pass it. Your experience is very different from mine anyway. I am a grumpy old backend dev that uses formal verification in anger when I consider it is needed and who gets annoyed when things don't act logical. We are working with computers, so everything is logical, but no; I mean things like a lot of frontend stuff. I ask o…

I'm not the person you're responding to, but here's an example of it failing subtly: https://chat.openai.com/share/4e958c34-dcf8-41cb-ac47-f0f6de... finalAlice's Children have no parent. When you point this out, it correctly advises regarding the immutable nature of these types in F#, then proceeds to produce a new solution that again has a subtle flaw: Alice -> Bob has the correct parent... but Alice -> Bob -> Alice…

>F#

Barely exists in training data.

Might as well ask it to code some microcontroller specifically assembly, watch it fail and claim victory.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#824

Post by chrisfinazzo »

happycube wrote: post #673
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…

On the flip side, one can use ChatGPT as only a starting point and to learn from there. One isn't stuck with actually using what it outputs verbtim, and really shouldn't until at least a hypothetical GPT-6 or 7... and to use it fully now, one has to know how to nudge it when it goes into a bad direction. So overall it's more an amplifier than anything else.

This has been my experience as well - For repetitive things, If what you're looking for is the shitty first draft, it's a way to get things started.

After that, you can shape the output - without GPT's help - into something that you can pull off the shelf again as needed and drop it into where you want it to go, because at that point in the process, you know it works.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#825

Post by doctorpangloss »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #644
anonzzzies wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, don't leave us in suspense; what do you ask of it? Because I'm quite sure it can already pass it. Your experience is very different from mine anyway. I am a grumpy old backend dev that uses formal verification in anger when I consider it is needed and who gets annoyed when things don't act logical. We are working with computers, so everything is logical, but no; I mean things like a lot of frontend stuff. I ask o…

I'm not the person you're responding to, but here's an example of it failing subtly: https://chat.openai.com/share/4e958c34-dcf8-41cb-ac47-f0f6de... finalAlice's Children have no parent. When you point this out, it correctly advises regarding the immutable nature of these types in F#, then proceeds to produce a new solution that again has a subtle flaw: Alice -> Bob has the correct parent... but Alice -> Bob -> Alice…

I'm not really sure what I'm looking at. It seems to perform flawlessly for me... when using Python: https://chat.openai.com/share/7e048acb-a573-45eb-ba6c-2690d2...

I only made two changes to your prompt: one to specify Python, and another to provide explicit instructions to trigger using the Advanced Data Analysis pipeline.

You also had a couple typos.

I'm not sure if "Programming-like tool that reflects programming language popularity performs poorly on unpopular programming language" is the gotchya you think it is. It performs extremely well authoring Kubernetes manifests and even makes passing Envoy configurations. There's a chance that configuration files for reverse proxy configuration DSLs have better representation than F# does. I guess if you disagree at how obscure F# is, you're observing a real, objective measurement of how obscure it is, in the fascinating performance of this stochastic parrot.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#826

Post by somewhereoutth »

Philpax wrote: post #457
somewhereoutth wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’re only going to get better from here. Every AI apology seems to include this statement. It is more likely that LLMs have already hit a local maximum, and the next iterations will provide diminishing incremental returns - if anything at all.

What makes you say that? There are constant improvements in how they’re being trained and what they’re being trained with; there really isn’t any particular reason to believe we’re at a maxima. Especially with multimodality being introduced!

My understanding is that essentially they have been trained on everything (meaning the whole internet), so there is not much left except niche sources adding incremental benefit. But granted I can imagine the data being used more effectively for training, though I doubt there would be a step change in capabilities coming from that - my suspicion is that as well as the data, the techniques have reached a maximum or close to it.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#827

Post by doctorpangloss »

karaterobot wrote: post #820
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?

I agree this is the first time there is sort of irrefutable objective evidence that the tests are not measuring something secularly useful for programming anymore. There has been an industry wide shift against leetcode for a long time nonetheless.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#828

Post by raducu »

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…

> But, if you have a conversation with it

It can't tell you a straight answer or halucinates API. It can't tell you "no, this cannot be done", it tries to "help" you.

For me it's great for writing simple isolated functions, generating regexes, command line solutions, exploring new technologies, it's great.

But after making it write a few methods, classes, it just gets extremelely tedious to make it add/change code, to the point I just write it myself.

Further, when operating at the edge of your knowledge, it also leads you on, whereas a human expert would just tell you "aaah, but that's just not possible/not a good idea".

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#829

Post by schnable »

lucideer wrote: post #469
ern wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

> ChatGPT is actually best suited to use by a specialist who has enough contextual knowledge to construct targeted prompts & can then verify & edit the responses into something optimal.

I agree with this, but what that means is that specialists will be able to create next generation tools--across all professions including coding--that do supercharge novices and generalists to do more.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#830

Post by raducu »

happycube wrote: post #673
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…

On the flip side, one can use ChatGPT as only a starting point and to learn from there. One isn't stuck with actually using what it outputs verbtim, and really shouldn't until at least a hypothetical GPT-6 or 7... and to use it fully now, one has to know how to nudge it when it goes into a bad direction. So overall it's more an amplifier than anything else.

> nudge it when it goes into a bad direction

It happenes a few times for me that Chat GPT gets stuck in a bullshit loop and I can't get it unstuck.

Sure I could summarise the previous session for Chat GPT and try again, but I'm too tired at that point.

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