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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

#851

Post by andrei_says_ »

Xelynega wrote: post #393
andrei_says_ wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’m doing something thousands of people have coded before me then yes please hold my hand while I write this CSV import. When I’m writing business logic unique to this specific domain then please stop mumbling bs at me.

If thousands of people have done it before you than why isn't it abstracted to the point that it's just as easy to tell an LLM to do it as it is to do it yourself?

I just can't invest cycles into pondering this question. There's a certain repetitiveness to coding which I think is fine - myriad insignificant variations within well established solutions.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#852

Post by grozmovoi »

Exuma wrote: post #782
anonzzzies wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the new feature of creating a custom gpt and I keep adding new information ; files, structures etc by editing the gpt. It seems to work well.

Ah ok so you have to paste entire files in 1 by 1, you can't just add it locally somehow? too bad you cant just upload a zip or something...

you can upload zips. Make a new GPT and go to the custom settings.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#853

Post by [deleted] »

girvo wrote: post #562
chalcolithic wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm used to HN being sensible, and seeing your comment being downvoted makes me wonder what's happening? What's the reason for that optimism?

HN’s culture has changed somewhat and downvotes are now used more often to signal disagreement, sadly. But also “use common sense” and “but the trendline” are only partially compelling arguments as presented if you already believe what is being argued. They’re not compelling enough to those who aren’t convinced yet

[deleted]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#854

Post by golergka »

998244353 wrote: post #220
golergka wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writers and musicians wont be replaced with AI because the authors persona is part of the product.

Poets and novelists maybe, but not many people pay particular attention to who exactly wrote a particular magazine article.

I mean, it's the New Yorker.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#855

Post by hanzmanner »

ern wrote: post #444
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 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…

> It had zero business value, but such was the state of our team…being pixel perfect was a source of pride

UX and UI are not some secondary concerns that engineers should dismiss as an annoying "state of our team" nuance. If you can't produce a high quality outcome you either don't have the skills or don't have the right mindset for the job.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#856

Post by golergka »

meheleventyone wrote: post #376
golergka wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why on Earth would you expect something so unjust and unfair? Do you expect to pay a tax to former travel agents when you buy a plane ticket online? Do you pay to descendants of calculators (as in profession — the humans who did manual calculations) every time you use a modern…

We expect the workers displaced to suffer something worse. It’s not just or fair that people lose their source of income and ability to support their families through no fault of their own. Slippery slope arguments to one side. We have a choice about how society is organized our current setup isn’t ‘natural’ and it’s largely one of accelerating inequality.

> It’s not just or fair that people lose their source of income and ability to support their families through no fault of their own.

There's nothing unfair about it. No person or company is entitled to other people or companies buying their services or goods. Your "source of income" is just other people making decisions with their money. Which they are free to make however they want (as long as they honour agreements that already exist, of course).

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#857

Post by kragen »

girvo wrote: post #525
kragen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they already could, they just had to debug it, which is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place

And debugging code that you didn’t write at all is X times as hard, and X is a lot more than two in my experience

actually i find it easier to debug other people's code than my own, because most bugs really only exist in your mind

a bug is an inconsistency between what you intended a piece of code to do and the logical results of your design choices: for example, you thought for (i=0;ithe expectation that the code will do what you intended it to do makes it hard to understand what the code actually does. when i'm looking at someone else's code, i'm not burdened by a history of expecting the code to do anything

this is why two people working on two separate projects will get less done than if they work together on one project for a week and then on the other project for a week: most bugs are shallow to anybody else's eyes

the ones that aren't can be real doozies tho

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#858

Post by golergka »

4death4 wrote: post #218
golergka wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why on Earth would you expect something so unjust and unfair? Do you expect to pay a tax to former travel agents when you buy a plane ticket online? Do you pay to descendants of calculators (as in profession — the humans who did manual calculations) every time you use a modern…

What is just and what is fair? To quote George Costanza: "We're living in a society!"

Anything that people decide to do with their property is just and fair.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#859

Post by olddustytrail »

fumeux_fume wrote: post #812
sadtoot wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the only way I'd find people credible when they're claiming they can predict 2 to 5 years in the future from now.

If they couldn't see ChatGPT coming, I'm not convinced of the whole "it'll never be able to..." spiel.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#860

Post by Tostino »

ern wrote: post #607
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have stayed away from chatGPT etc (mostly due to my work simply banning its use in an understandable conservative approach) What's the best starting point for my personal stuff? I am generally put off by youtube tutorials promising to make me a better coder.

Open a ChatGPT account. Set up a GitHub account if you don’t have one. Think of a common problem and see if a library exists in your favourite language to do what you want. If it doesn’t exist, explain your requirements to ChatGPT. You can even tell it the same thing you put in your comment here: “I want to learn how to use ChatGPT to augment my programming skills”. Make sure it’s done properly with automated tests a…

Honestly I've had it guide me to better practices (like described) on side projects than I would have implemented on my own.
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