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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

#841

Post by arolihas »

amenghra wrote: post #532
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…

There's a Swiss town which had autonomous shuttles running for 5 years (2015-2021) [1]. There's at least two companies (Waymo and Cruise) running autonomous taxi services in US cities that you can ride today. There have been lots of incorrect promises in the world of self-driving trucks/cars/buses but companies have gotten there (under specific constraints) and will generalize over time. [1] https://www.saam.swiss/pr…

Didn't Cruise have people remotely controlling the vehicle making it semi-autonomous at best?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#842

Post by jpatt »

Affric wrote: post #154
jpatt wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really think law, medicine, and software engineering are the main drivers of wage inequality, though. If the lowest wage was minimum wage and the highest wage was a programmer salary, the Americas would be a very equitable economy. Automating America's remaining paths to the middle class will only serve to widen the gap between capital owners who will own infrastructure for automation and those shoved into a…

The comment you’re replying to is making that point: that people who earn a decent wage from the knowledge economy are threatened by AI and oppose it because of their interest in the current system’s inequality. It follows that if it is unjust for those who are knowledge workers then it is unjust for those who are service workers (unless you can morally differentiate them). Perhaps if inequality is wrong then it’s th…

I think you're reading a lot more into my comment than is there, tbh.

The comment I'm replying to said something to the effect of: "this may be a good thing because by democratizing highly paid professions, lower income workers will be lifted."

My comment said something to the effect of: "I disagree, I think capital owners will simply get more rich and the middle class will collapse further without raising anyone."

Of course our society doesn't give service workers a fair shake. My partner worked in a grocery store for a large chunk of our relationship. The schedule inconsistency, the sleep deprivation, the lack of healthcare, no vacation, no real sick leave, and on. Much of my family works in blue collar oil positions. There you're paid a bit better, but you throw away your body to make a dime. I know.

I'm just not convinced the default outcome of automating some knowledge workers is that magically somehow that makes everyone's lives better. I think legislative change of some kind would have to happen if that's the outcome we want.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#843

Post by raducu »

yodsanklai wrote: post #729
mrtksn wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try breaking down the problem. You don't have to do it yourself, you can tell ChatGPT to break down the problem for you then try to implement individual parts. When you have something that kind of works, tell ChatGPT what the problems are and ask for refinement. IMHO currently the weak point of LLMs is that they can't really tell what's adequate for human consumption. You have to act as a guide who knows what's good…

I'd be curious to see how a non expert could perform a non-trivial programming task using ChatGPT. It's good at writing code snippets which is occasionally useful. But give it a large program that has a bug which isn't a trivial syntax error, and it won't help you. > In programming you don't have to worry too much about hallucinations because it won't work at all if it hallucinates. You still have to worry for your j…

> give it a large program that has a bug which isn't a trivial syntax error, and it won't help you

That's not fair, humans can't do that, and if you walk Chat GPT through it, it might surprise you with its debugging abilitis... or thankfully it might suck(so we still have a job).

Complex code is complex code, no general inteligence thing will be able to fix it at first sight without running it, writing tests and so on.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#844

Post by ben_w »

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…

> Every few months I see if ChatGPT can pass it. It hasn’t. It can’t. It isn’t even close.

As someone currently looking for work, I'm glad to hear that.

About 6 months ago, someone was invited to our office and the topic came up. Their interview tests were all easily solved by ChatGPT, so I've been a bit worried.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#846

Post by ben_w »

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. Tell it more of the things you’re considering. Some of the trades off you’re making—how the schema might grow over time, it’s kind of remarkable.

You're not wrong, but I would caution that it can get really confused when the code it produces exceeds the context length. This is less of a problem than it used to be as the maximum context length is increasing quite quickly, but by way of example: I'm occasionally using it for side projects to see how to best use it, one of which is a game engine, and it (with a shorter context length than we have now) started by creating a perfectly adequate Vector2D class with `subtract(…)` and `multiply(…)` functions, but when it came to using that class it was calling `sub(…)` and `mul(…)` — not absolutely stupid, and a totally understandable failure mode given how it works, but still objectively incorrect.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#847

Post by tjr »

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…

I think that's a fair description. While I have not yet found ChatGPT useful in my "real" day job (its understanding of aerospace systems is more than I would have guessed, but yet not enough to be super helpful to me), I have found it generally useful in more commonplace scripting tasks and what-not.

With the caveat of, I still need to understand what it's talking about. Copy-pasting whatever it says may or may not work.

Which is why I remain dubious that we're on the road to LLMs replacing software engineers. Assisting? Sure, absolutely.

Will we get there? I don't know. I mean, like, fundamentally, I do not trust LLMs. I am not going to say "hey ChatGPT, write me a flight management system suitable for a Citation X" and then just go install that on the plane and fly off into the sunset. I'm sure things will improve, and maybe improve enough to replace human programmers in some contexts, but I don't think we're going to see LLMs replacing all software engineers across the board.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#848

Post by Tostino »

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…

Bing is far and away worse than gpt4 through ChatGPT or the API, just FYI. Don't even consider it comparable, even if they say it is the same model under the hood. Their "optimizations" have crippled it's capabilities if that is the case.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#849

Post by atoav »

lewhoo wrote: post #594
atoav wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried for 2 hours to get ChatGPT to write a working smooth interpolation function in python. Most of the functions it returned didn't even go through the points between which it should be interpolating. When I pointed that out it returned a function that went through the points but it was no longer smooth. I really tried and restarted over multiple times. I believe we have to choose between a world with machine lea…

That's weird to read. Interpolations of various sorts are known and solved and should probably be digested by chatgpt in training by the bulk. I'm not doubting your effort by any means, I'm just saying this sounds like one of those things it should do well.

This is why I asked it that and was surprised with the questionable quality of the results. My goal wasn't even to break ChatGPT, it was to learn about new ways of interpolating that I hadn't thought about.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#850

Post by ben_w »

mlinhares wrote: post #695
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…

Bless this person your team, he is creating work out of thin air and will keep your team and possibly other teams employed for a really long time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
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