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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

#861

Post by corethree »

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

The trendline is the only argument. What other predictor of the future is there?

Given the available information there is no condition where one would bet against the trendline.

Common sense is basically trendline following. It's the basis of our existence. You get out of bed without worrying about whether or not there is no ground under your feet because the trendline points to a reality where the ground is always there.

The basis of AI tomorrow being better than today is common sense. chatGPT has improved since inception. Are we predicting improvement will suddenly stop? That AI technology will degrade? Such predictions as stated before, go against common sense.

The big question here isn't about the future of AI. The future is as stated previously predictable by common sense. The big question here is why are so many people abandoning common sense?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#862

Post by sonicanatidae »

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…

AI is a tool. Like all tools, it can be useful, when applied the right way, to the right circumstances. I use it to write powershell scripts, then just clean them up, and voila.

That being said, humans watch too much tv/movies. ;)

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#863

Post by rapind »

One of the concerns I have with AI assisted programming is it might make us more accepting of badly designed APIs and libraries, and eventually APIs designed for AI intuitiveness rather than human intuitiveness (assuming these don't always align). If AI takes away the pain of working with badly designed APIs (good), it will also change our perception and acceptance of these badly designed APIs (bad).

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#864

Post by number6 »

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…

I might be a bit out of the loop: how did you do it? I thought ChatGPT is text based?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#865

Post by itsoktocry »

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…

>The article points this out: middling generalists can now compete with specialists.

This is why you're going to get a ton of gatekeepers asking you to leetcode a bunch of obscure stuff with zero value to business, all to prove you're a "real coder". Like the OP.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#866

Post by itsoktocry »

steveBK123 wrote: post #646
lucideer wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Really? Please explain how chatGPT can not, but you can? What magic is it that you know that it's incapable of explaining?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#867

Post by minzi »

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

Yeah that is a much more succinct way to put it!

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#868

Post by itsoktocry »

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.

>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.

Exactly.

chatGPT is the single smartest person you can ask about anything, and has unlimited patience.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#869

Post by croddin »

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…

Are the junior devs expected to code it without running it and without seeing it rendered, or are they allowed to iterate on the code getting feedback from how it looks on screen and from the dev tools? If it is the second one, you need to give the agent the same feedback including screen shots of any rendering issues to GPT4-V and all relevant information in dev tools for it to be a fair comparison. Eventually there will be much better tooling for this to happen automatically.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#870

Post by itsoktocry »

miiiiiike wrote: post #447
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’d need to see it. I can’t get ChatGPT to outperform a novice. And now I’m having candidates argue that they don’t need to learn the fundamentals because LLMs can do it for them.. Good luck HTML/CSS expert who couldn’t produce a valid HTML5 skeleton. Reminds me of the pre-LLM guy who said he was having trouble because usually uses React.. So I told him he could use React. I don’t mean to rag on novices but these guy…

>If you want to get back into front-end read “CSS: The Definitive Guide”. Great book, gives you a complete understanding of CSS by the end.

Do you realize for how many technologies you can say the same thing? I don't want to read a 600 page tome on CSS. The language is a drop in the bucket of useful things to know. How valuable is a "complete understanding" of CSS? I just want something on my site to look a specific way.

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