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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

#91

Post by akira2501 »

zarzavat wrote: post #45
akira2501 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly wouldn't expect it to be the first application, when the technology eventually does get developed, and we have the power budget necessary to actually operate one of these units. Until then, it's not a question of "eclipsed," it's a labor market, so it's a question of "efficiency" and the large language model people have a very long way to go to produce something that's generally as capable as a programmer.…

You don’t think the technology will improve at all in the next ~16 years? It will just be stuck at it being able to write simple scripts even in 2040? I fully expect human programming to be completely obsolete by then.

> will improve at all in the next ~16 years?

Improve "at all?" Well, of course it will, but you're just moving the goalposts here. I'm telling you I don't think it's going to be anywhere near the level of AGI that can solve most programming tasks with less effort an energy cost than a human in that time.

> It will just be stuck at it being able to write simple scripts even in 2040?

Pretty much. You can improve the technology, but you have some massive gaps you have to cover, and electrical use is going to be one of them. Short a massive improvement in transistor technology or a move to an entirely new computing platform, I don't see it happening in that time.

> I fully expect human programming to be completely obsolete by then.

You seem that you mostly _want_ that to be true, so much so, that you've failed to complete the analysis. What's worse is, I'm just hedging your bet. If I'm wrong, no big deal, if you're wrong, you're in for a world of pain and problems. I get that this is hacker news and untamed expectations are en vogue here, but I'm content to be the hipster on this issue.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#92

Post by rsanek »

stcroixx wrote: post #69
waldohatesyou wrote: post #33

I feel like the headline does not match the article here. The headline implies that programming as a craft is to be replaced but the article ultimately argues that it will change significantly which matches my intuition as well. At the end of the day, the bar is being lowered. Is that a bad thing? From a selfish perspective, yes. From a societal perspective, no. At the risk of digressing, I think one of the issues th…

If software dev is simplified to the point people working jobs like you describe are able to do it, wages will also plummet, so it’s not like their situation is going to improve.

This is a zero-sum way of thinking about the world.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#93

Post by somewhereoutth »

Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #71
alexmuro wrote: post #10

I don't feel like we are in the waning days of the craft at all. Most of the craft is creating an understanding between people and software and most human programmers are still bad at it. AI might replace some programmers but none who program as a craft.

"Chess engines might get better than some chess players, but none who play Chess as a craft." Do you think people in the 90s thought this? Probably... In the article, the author mentions that Chess centaurs (a human player consulting an engine) can still beat an engine alone. But the author is wrong. There was a brief period a while ago when that was true, but chess engines are so strong now that any human interventi…

Chess is a closed problem. Whereas software development very much isn't.

You will also have to provide a source for 'chess engines are so strong now that any human intervention just holds them back', a cursory search suggests this is by no means settled.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#94

Post by NateEag »

zarzavat wrote: post #45
akira2501 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly wouldn't expect it to be the first application, when the technology eventually does get developed, and we have the power budget necessary to actually operate one of these units. Until then, it's not a question of "eclipsed," it's a labor market, so it's a question of "efficiency" and the large language model people have a very long way to go to produce something that's generally as capable as a programmer.…

You don’t think the technology will improve at all in the next ~16 years? It will just be stuck at it being able to write simple scripts even in 2040? I fully expect human programming to be completely obsolete by then.

Just like human-driven cars.

I mean, it could happen. I don't know it can't, and I won't be totally shocked if it does.

I'm not totally sold either, though.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#95

Post by crotchfire »

armchairhacker wrote: post #89

I think people underestimate the level of general intelligence required to write even seemingly basic "glue-code" (which btw, 90+% of software consists of). If we ever get an AI which can write complex enough "glue code" with a low enough failure rate to replace even junior developers, it's going to cause much, much bigger impacts than people losing jobs. The "boilerplate" and "bureaucracy" which is currently handled…

> dystopia due to a small minority getting control over the world to a precise

Unfortunately this is how nearly all technologies pan out in the end.

The Internet of the 1990s unavoidably us the surveillance-industrial complex of the 2010s/2020s.

The running-wafers-in-an-old-strip-mall Silicon Valley of the 1980s unavoidably led us to the current "world economy can support only 1.5 leading-edge fabs" situation where having an ME/PSP/TrustZone in your chip is not something you can opt out of anymore.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#96

Post by layman51 »

I’m so confused by this article’s comparison of GPT-4 to a powerful Go or chess engine. First, is coding some sort of competition like Go or chess? I have heard of competitive programming or code golf, but have little clue how that compares to “the craft of code” or why using GPT-4 diminishes it. Is it cheating if I use GPT-4’s assistance to write code? On the other hand, I do see why it would be harmful for people who don’t have the knowledge or experience to be relaying answers from an LLM to others on forums.

Second, I am seeing a parallel here with the college educators being preoccupied with how to teach calculus. Yesterday, I was reading the preface that Martin Gardner wrote to “Calculus Made Easy” by Silvanus P. Thompson and he wrote something along the lines of how many students and even educators (circa 1998) do not see the point in knowing how to differentiate or integrate by hand. I suppose now more than ever, some people even suggest to stop teaching calculus to high school (and even college students) in favor of some kind of vague statistics, data science, or information literacy course. But most mathematicians would discourage that kind of approach.

I think I agree with the last point about how it is not really about the knowledge of code itself but rather it is about being curious and knowing enough to not let yourself be taken advantage of.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#97

Post by macNchz »

woodruffw wrote: post #38
atleastoptimal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people I feel fear losing their siloed prestige built on arcane software knowledge. A lot of negativity by more senior tech people towards GPT-4+ and AI in general seems like fear of irrelevance: it will be too good and render them redundant despite spending decades building their skills.

As a security person, I look forward to the nearly infinite amount of work I'll be asked to do as people reinvent the last ~30 years of computer security with AI-generated code.

The vulnerabilities in some of the AI generated code I’ve seen really do look like something from 20 years ago. Interpolate those query params straight into the SQL string baby.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#98

Post by DougMerritt »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #39
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…

If a successor to GPT4 produced 5% of the errors it currently does, it would change programming, but there would still be programmers, the focus of what they worked on would be different. I'm sure there was a phase were some old school coders who were used to writing applications from scratch complained about all the damn libraries ruining coding -- why, all programmers are now are gluing together code that someone e…

I agree, but mind you, libraries have always been consciously desired and heavily implemented. Lady Ada did it. Historically but more recently, the first operating systems began life as mere libraries.

But the worst problem I ever had was a vice president (acquired when our company was acquired) who insisted that all programming was, should, and must by-edict be only about gluing together existing libraries.

Talk about incompetent -- and about misguided beliefs in his own "superior intelligence".

I had to protect my team of 20+ from him and his stupid edicts and complaints, while still having us meet tight deadlines of various sorts (via programming, not so much by gluing).

Part of our team did graphical design for the web. Doing that by only gluing together existing images makes as little sense as it does for programming.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#99

Post by swatcoder »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #72
swatcoder wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at its best, GPT promises the opposite: streamlining the least arcane tasks so that experts don’t need to waste so much time on them. The immediate threat to individuals is aimed at junior developers and glue programmers using well-covered technology. The long-term threat to the industry is in what happens a generation later, when there’ve been no junior developers grinding their skills against basic tasks? In th…

Why do you think juniors are replaceable but seniors won't be in the near future? Is there some limit where AI just can't get better? That's like seeing the first prototype car ever built, which can go 20 miles per hour, and saying "Cars will never replace horses that can go 21 miles per hour"

LLM’s synthesize new material that looks most like material they’ve been trained on.

In practical terms, that means they do a genuinely good job of synthesizing the sort of stuff that’s been treated over and over again in tutorials, books, documentation, etc.

The more times something’s been covered. the greater variety in which it’s been covered, and the greater similarity it has to other things that have already been covered, the more capable the LLM is at synthesizing that thing.

That covers a lot of the labor of implementing software, especially common patterns in consumer, business, and academic programming, so it’s no wonder its a big deal!

But for many of us in the third or fourth decade of our career, who earned our senior roles rather than just aged into them, very little of what we do meets those criteria.

Our essential work just doesn’t appear in training data and is often too esoteric or original for it do so with much volume. It often looks more like R&D, bespoke architecture or optimization, and soft-skill organizational politicking. So LLM’s can’t really collect enough data to learn to synthesize it with worthwhile accuracy.

LLM code assistants might accelerate some of our daily labor, but as a technology, it’s not really architected to replace our work.

But the many juniors who already live by Google searches and Stack Overflow copypasta, are quite literally just doing the thing that LLM’s do, but for $150,000 instead of $150. It’s their jobs that are in immediate jeopardy.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#100

Post by epcoa »

This article is inadvertently more about bullshit jobs and post clown world low interest rate free money.

> He dialled up an FTP server (where files were stored) in an MS-DOS terminal and typed obscure commands.

This is some code a UI in Visual Basic to trace a IP address level exposition right here (this is from a self proclaimed subject matter expert, so no excuse), they’re not deeply knowledgeable and just because they got paid 6 figures at some dumb post recession startup doesn’t change anything.

(Others have already addressed the other howlers in this article)

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