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A coder considers the waning days of the craft

newyorker.com

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Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#881

Post by skeaker »

btbuildem wrote: post #761
happytiger wrote: post #395

Do 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…

The author of the article seems to be a mediocre coder; perhaps they have not had enough experience in the domain to arrive at a big-picture perspective.

This is funny because the conclusion GP arrives at as more or less the exact same one that TFA ends on. Literally, the last two sentences: "I shouldn’t worry that the era of coding is winding down. Hacking is forever."

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#882

Post by skeaker »

happytiger wrote: post #395

Do 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…

You're actually relating perfectly given that you essentially rephrased TFA almost beat for beat. It's not as cynical as its title would imply.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#883

Post by akkartik »

kragen wrote: post #857
girvo wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;i the 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 som…

This is a really good point -- once you import somebody else's code into your head. Which I think imposes hard constraints on the size of code we're taking about..

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#884

Post by ryandrake »

livrem wrote: post #715
ryandrake wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real point. 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. In fact it would be great for society! But that's not what's going to happen. The AI (and robots) will be owned by the Shrinking Few, all the profits and benefits will go to the owners, and the people who used to do Job X will have to re-skill to gamble on…

"Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this wou…

In the same vein:

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Buckminster Fuller

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#885

Post by throwaway4aday »

clnq wrote: post #482
danenania wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s your niche? I think much of using it well is understanding what it can and can’t do (though of course this is a moving target). It’s great when the limiting factor is knowledge of APIs, best practices, or common algorithms. When the limiting factor is architectural complexity or understanding how many different components of a system fit together, it’s less useful. Still, I find I can often save time on more d…

My niche is in video game programming, and I am very specialized in a specific area. So I might ask things like how would one architect a certain game system with a number of requirements, to meet certain player expectations, and be compatible with a number of things. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been helpful once, and often due to the same reason - when the question gets specific enough, it hallucinates because it doesn…

I'm interested to know if you've tried creating a custom GPT with their builder or the API. If you have enough old example code, notes, or those rare textbooks you mention you could add those as files and see if the built in RAG improves the answers it gives.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#886

Post by [deleted] »

ken47 wrote: post #371

It feels like this article was not written by a programmer, and it feels like a number of the commenters are not professional engineers. What part of a programmer jobs can AI realistically replace in the near term? For the sake of argument, let’s say it could replace the coding part cost effectively . Can it still do all the other parts? Take ambiguous requirements and seek clarity from design, product, etc. (instruc…

[deleted]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#887

Post by Aeolos »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #737
StableAlkyne wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the ability to ask followup questions and immediately get clarification on anything that is unclear. Not only that, but it has the patience of a saint. It never makes you beg for a solution because it thinks there's an XY problem. It never says "RTFM" before posting an irrelevant part of the documentation because it only skimmed your post. It never says "Why would you use X in 2023? Everyone is using framework Y, I…

> Not only that, but it has the patience of a saint. It never makes you beg for a solution because it thinks there's an XY problem. It never says "RTFM" before posting an irrelevant part of the documentation because it only skimmed your post. It never says "Why would you use X in 2023? Everyone is using framework Y, I would never hire anyone using X." > The difference comes down to this: unlike a human, it doesn't ha…

On the other hand, ChatGPT will helpfully run a bing search, open the relevant manual, summarize the information, and include additional hints or example code without you needing to do anything. It will also provide you the link, in case you wish to verify or read the source material itself.

So while RTFM is a useful answer when you (the expert) are limited by your own time & energy, LLMs present a fundamental paradigm shift that is both more user-friendly and arguably more useful. Asking someone to go from an LLM back to RTFM today would be ~akin to asking someone to go from Google search back to hand-written site listings in 2003.

You could try, but for most people there simply is no going back.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#888

Post by [deleted] »

cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. While GPT4 is incredible, it fails OFTEN. And it fails in ways that aren’t very clear. And it fails harder when there’s clearly not enough training resources on the subject matter. But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of t…

[deleted]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#889

Post by trealira »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #293
jrumbut wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for this, as long as we programmers continue to capture a reasonable amount of the value we create. The danger doesn't come from some immutable law of nature, it comes from humans organizing. Some people want to be able to hire programmers cheaply, programmers want to continue to be expensive (maybe get more expensive because now we can deliver more value?). It will be up to us, the people living in this mome…

I don't really know what "value" means in a post scarcity world. We're probably going to have to rethink it. It made a lot of sense when we were all worried about the same things, e.g. not starving. In such a world, anything you could trade for food was objectively valuable because you could use it to fend off starvation--and so could everybody else. But if efficiencies improve to a point where we can easily meet eve…

The idea behind the market economy is that people still will always strive for more. Some examples of commodities that aren't strictly necessary, but can always be improved:

- video games with more beautiful or realistic graphics

- food that tastes better, costs less, or is healthier

- wedding dresses that are cheaper and look nicer

- houses that are comfortable and affordable

- to be able to take more education (some people I know wish they could take more classes unrelated to their major in college)

And what's considered the minimum standard of having one's needs met is subjective, and varies by person. For example, some people wouldn't consider raising children without buying a house first, but it's not strictly necessary for survival; my parents rented a house until I was 19.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#890

Post by doug_durham »

manicennui wrote: post #228
GabeIsko wrote: post #22

Do people have problems with Leetcode stuff or something? Aside from generating code I already know how to write before hand quickly, I find AI super useless for coding. It's never been able to solve a single problem I have worked on - mostly involving infrastructure deployment and config.

"AI" helps the people who rely on Stack Overflow to do their jobs. Then they come to HN and worry that we will all be out of jobs soon. The problem it solves is "I don't actually know what I am doing at all". These people are not a threat to anyone competent and no amount of questionable code generated by "AI" will change that.

It sounds like you have the luxury of working in a narrow environment, single language in one layer of the stack. I've had that experience to where I can memorize all of the relevant APIs, and code idioms by working in a single area. Many find ourselves working across the stack working in many languages to develop a solution. It is not humanly possible to have knowledge of all of the APIs and idioms at your fingertips. This is where a tool like GPT is incredibly valuable. I believe this is the future of the software profession. Having deep knowledge of software architecture and being able to develop a solution that employs several languages and frameworks.
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