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But he made a good living out of it, so in the end it was a good idea?
It certainly puts a ceiling on a career. And I'd argue it probably gave him a pretty rough shelf life. At some point he has to understand what he's doing. Unless he's so good at selling his services he can consistently find new clients. And if that's the case, he'd probably kill it in sales.
I had a related episode at work when my coworker asked me why his seemingly trivial 10 line piece of code was misbehaving inexplicably. It turned out he had two variables `file_name` and `filename` and used one in place of another. I asked him how he ended up with such code, he said he used copilot to create it. Using code from a generative AI without understanding what it does is never a good idea.
Copilot wouldn't make a typo. He just made that up and / or broke the code himself.
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What percentage of web traffic today would you say is composed of bits that the user--if they bothered to inspect it--would prefer to not have anything to do with? I'd say it's more than half. Computers treat people like garbage all the time.
you're right, but I have a hard time picturing the computer as having emotions to be able to treat me like garbage in the first place. you won't rm the file? sudo rm file! the computer could fight back and say access denied still because of extended attributes, but for some reason I don't equate poorly written software as being treated like garbage. I always imagine some hapless programmer is doing the best they coul…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I knew a guy that made a good living as a freelance web developer decades ago. He would pretty much just copy and paste code from tutorials or stack overflow and had no real idea how anything worked. Using code without understanding it is never a good idea, it doesn’t need to be from AI for that to be true.
But he made a good living out of it, so in the end it was a good idea?
That business model only works until customers are sophisticated enough to understand tech debt. In the future, more customers will be less willing to pay the same good wages for low quality code.
I had a related episode at work when my coworker asked me why his seemingly trivial 10 line piece of code was misbehaving inexplicably. It turned out he had two variables `file_name` and `filename` and used one in place of another. I asked him how he ended up with such code, he said he used copilot to create it. Using code from a generative AI without understanding what it does is never a good idea.
A lot of businesses are going to either think they can have generative AI create all of their apps with the help of a cousin of the wife of the accountant, or they unknowingly contract a 10x developer from Upwork or alike who uses generative AI to create everything. Once they realize how well that's working out, the smart ones will start from scratch, the not-so-smart will attempt to fix it.
Develop a reputation for yourself for getting companies out of that pickle, and you can probably retire early.
I will take all of these customers. Please forward them to me.
Why don't you use AI to provide support? I'm serious actually. This sounds like something AI can do really well.
I'm a bit torn. My first thought was "If the current state of the art LLMs made the mistakes it's unlikely an LLM would be able to correct them." But I'm not sure that's true if the support LLM (chat bot) is given very specific instructions so as to limit the possible answers. Still I think that's gonna break down pretty quick for other reasons. Maybe the chat bot can recognize a botched request and even suggest a fi…
But, I mean, that doesn't make sense even for humans, right? 99% of the errors I make, I can easily correct myself because they're trivial. But you still have to go through the process of fixing them, it doesn't happen on its own. Like, for instance, just now I typoed "stil" and had to backspace a few letters to fix it. But LLMs cannot backspace (!), so you have to put them into a context where they feel justified in going back and re-typing their previous code.
That's why it's a bit silly to make LLM code, try to run it, see an error and immediately run to the nearest human. At least let the AI do a few rounds of "Can you spot any problems or think of improvements?" first!
I had a related episode at work when my coworker asked me why his seemingly trivial 10 line piece of code was misbehaving inexplicably. It turned out he had two variables `file_name` and `filename` and used one in place of another. I asked him how he ended up with such code, he said he used copilot to create it. Using code from a generative AI without understanding what it does is never a good idea.
Sounds like javascript "code". A normal language with proper type system would not allow that.