who is james somers?
A coder considers the waning days of the craft
871–880 of 1001 posts
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#872Earlier 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
This could even play out on a broader scale and even increase the demand for software engineers.
What is going to happen if more and more people are creating lots of software that delivers value but is difficult to maintain and extend?
First it's going to be more high-level stuff, then more plumbing, more debugging and stitching together half-baked solutions than ever before.
AI might make our jobs suck more, but it's not going to replace them.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#873Am I the only one becoming less impressed by LLMs as time passes? I will admit, when Copilot first became a thing in 2021, I had my own “I’m about to become obsolete” moment. However, it’s become clear to me, both through my own experience and through research that has been conducted, that modern LLMs are fundamentally flawed and are not on the path to general intelligence. We are stuck with ancient (in AI terms) tec…
> We are stuck with ancient (in AI terms) technology.
What are you talking about? ChatGPT came out only a year ago, GPT-4 less than a year ago. That's the opposite of ancient technology, it's extremely recent.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#874Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Boy you (or whatever LLM you are using) are verbose and presumptuous. You can continue to state simple falsehoods surrounded with patronizing bloviation, but that doesn't magically make them true.
I don't make my living from programming for one (which makes your rhetoric: "Are you proud of your career? Do you think of yourself as intelligent and good at programming?" retarded as a non-sequitur) and just highlights your own small minded points of view and lack of imagination.
> 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 not valid because it is vacuous. Technology generally improves. But it is the specifics and details that matter, they are the only thing that matters. Saying "AI will improve" is saying nothing useful.
I think global thermonuclear war is a more likely disruptor in the rest of my lifetime than some AI nerd rapture.
> "Of course you lie to yourself. Of course you blind yourself to the raw reality of what is most likely to occur."
I am sorry that whatever schooling or training you had did not manage to explain that this style of rhetoric does nothing more than portray you as a condescending asshole.
> Their own personal role in society relative to AI.
You're just being a condescending twatwaffle since you are arguing with individuals in a forum of which you know nothing about. You clearly have no respect for others' opinions and feel the need to write walls of text to rationalize it.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#875Not to be unkind but simply factual: the author is clearly not a great developer. e.g.: "At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling." Really? "But he had no idea what a pain it is to make an iPhone app. I’d tried a few times and never got beyond something that half worked. I…
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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#876I 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…
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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#877Do 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…
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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#878Not to be unkind but simply factual: the author is clearly not a great developer. e.g.: "At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling." Really? "But he had no idea what a pain it is to make an iPhone app. I’d tried a few times and never got beyond something that half worked. I…
I agree with the sentiment, but cars did put stalls and horse and buggy drivers out of business. Google translate may not have put translators completely out of business but when I travel I dont stress about needing one because I can fall back to translate for emergencies. The new voicebox model from Meta does seem like it really could put translators out of business. Some technologies really do kill entire industries (but I dont think the current iteration of LLMs will do so for programmer)
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#879Earlier 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…
In a similar vein, ChatGPT can be an amazing rubber duck. If I have strange and obscure problems that stumps me, I kinda treat ChatGPT like I would treat a forum or an IRC channel 15 - 20 years back. I don't have "prompting experience or skills", but I can write up the situation, what we've tried, what's going on, and throw that at the thing.
And.. it can dredge up really weird possible reasons for system behaviors fairly reliably. Usually, for a question of "Why doesn't this work after all of that?", it drags up like 5-10 reasons for something misbehaving. We usually checked like 8 of those. But the last few can be really useful to start thinking outside of the normal box why things are borked.
And often enough, it can find at least the right idea to identify root causes of these weird behaviors. The actual "do this" tends to be some degree of bollocks, but enough of an idea to follow-up.
Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft
#880Am I the only one becoming less impressed by LLMs as time passes? I will admit, when Copilot first became a thing in 2021, I had my own “I’m about to become obsolete” moment. However, it’s become clear to me, both through my own experience and through research that has been conducted, that modern LLMs are fundamentally flawed and are not on the path to general intelligence. We are stuck with ancient (in AI terms) tec…
> We are stuck with ancient (in AI terms) technology. What are you talking about? ChatGPT came out only a year ago, GPT-4 less than a year ago. That's the opposite of ancient technology, it's extremely recent.
I think the claim is that, from the point of view of when we have a real AI, this is the "ancient" stuff.