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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

#941

Post by clnq »

girvo wrote: post #520
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…

It struggles with (industrial, not hobbyist) embedded firmware a fair bit. I can almost coax decent results for simple tasks out of it, sometimes.

LLMs almost never write good senior quality code at first in niche disciplines. You need to finesse it a lot to have it produce the correct answer. And that makes it unusable for when you genuinely do not know the answer to the question you’re asking, which is kind of the entire point.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#942

Post by clnq »

gwd wrote: post #618
clnq wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never found GPT-4 capable of producing a useful solution in my niche of engineering. When I’m stumped, it’s usually on a complex and very multi-faceted problem where the full scope doesn’t fit into the human brain very well. And for these problems, GPT will produce some borderline unworkable solutions. It’s like a jack of all trades and master of none in code. It’s knowledge seems a mile wide and an inch deep. G…

Well no, you shouldn't use it for your top-end problems, but your bottom-end problems. Aren't there things that you have to do in your job that really could be done by a junior programmer? Don't you ever have one-off (or once-a-year) things you have to do that each time you have to invest a lot of time refreshing in your brain, and then basically forgetting for lack of use? Here's an example I used the other day: Our…

> Don't you ever have one-off (or once-a-year) things you have to do that each time you have to invest a lot of time refreshing in your brain, and then basically forgetting for lack of use?

Not really. In AAA game programming, you mostly own the same systems you specialize in throughout the production process.

For example, someone in Rockstar North might work on the minimap for the entire production of a game.

In smaller AAA companies, a person might own vehicles or horses, or even the entire progression system. But still, programmers are rarely working on disconnected things.

You rarely step out of your expertise zone. And you are usually expected to perform much better than GPT would in that zone.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#943

Post by kristopolous »

kristopolous wrote: post #13
StrangeSmells01 wrote: post #2

It's interesting and kind of a bummer that all this learning is made obsolete.

This is the conceit of knowledge work in general. You're only as relevant as much as you keep up. It's why it continues to tend young. The older you get, the more opinionated you get and with opinions come inflexibility so the less you are open to new ways of thinking, even those which may be superior. Essentially people have criticisms of newer tools that have become industry standards as unnecessary and inferior. R…

I was reminded that Karate borrows the term Shoshin (beginner's mind) from Buddhism to express overcoming this dialectical.

In the world of martial arts this is expressed essentially by the fact that you work with the same people so this tends to a false sense of generality in ones understanding. Within any particular discipline there's confinements because there's a core focus and rubric of things you do with is necessarily exclusionary and reductive because of the constraints of time.

Serious martial arts practitioners (think career professionals) claim people will plateau indefinitely, as in for the remainder of their lives, unless they effectively practice shoshin. This can go in odd directions. Take George Dillman for example, who has developed a mechanism that he, and maybe nobody, really understands and as a result he's considered a fraud although he and his students experience it as genuine.

True shoshin demands an open investigation as to why, where, and how people feel a mechanism and a good faith assumption that there's something poorly understood there.

People will widely agree with the concept of shoshin but when it's demonstrated with an example, that previous consensus disappears. It's not easy or popular.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#944

Post by clnq »

Tainnor wrote: post #493
clnq wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never found GPT-4 capable of producing a useful solution in my niche of engineering. When I’m stumped, it’s usually on a complex and very multi-faceted problem where the full scope doesn’t fit into the human brain very well. And for these problems, GPT will produce some borderline unworkable solutions. It’s like a jack of all trades and master of none in code. It’s knowledge seems a mile wide and an inch deep. G…

Same. Even for technologies that it supposedly should know a lot about (e.g. Kafka), if I prompt it for something slightly non-standard, it just makes up things that aren't supported or is otherwise unhelpful. The one time I've found ChatGPT to be genuinely useful is when I asked it to explain a bash script to me, seeing as bash is notoriously inscrutable. Still, it did get a detail wrong somehow.

Yes, it is good at summarizing things and regressing things down to labels. It’s much worse at producing concrete and specific results from its corpus of abstract knowledge.

I think that’s the case with every discipline for it, not only programming. Even when everyone was amazed it could make poetry out of everything, if you asked for a specific type of poem and specific imagery in it, it would generally fail.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#945

Post by galaxyLogic »

hnick wrote: post #935
galaxyLogic wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me best part of AI is I can ask it a question and then a follow-up question, about how some code- or API construct works. THEN I can ask it a follow-up question. That was not possible before with Google. I can ask exactly what I want in English, not by entering a search-term. A search-term is not a question, but a COMMAND: "Find me web-pages containing this search-term". By asking exactly the question I'm looking…

This is the main benefit I get from the free ChatGPT. I ask a question more related to syntax e.g. how to make a LINQ statement since I haven't been in C# for a few weeks and I forget. If it gets things a little wrong I can drill down until it works. It's also good for generic stuff done a million times like a basic API call with WebClient or similar. We tested CoPilot for a bit but for whatever reason, it sometimes…

Good points

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#946

Post by kragen »

kragen wrote: post #179
Longlius wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a complex problem - this is something you do with built-in standard libraries in pretty much any programming language. Like I would expect anyone who claims to know even basic file I/O in their given language to be able to produce a mostly working version of this in less than 30 minutes.

80% of the time they'll produce a subtly biased shuffle, most people don't intuitively know the fisher-yates method unless they've been taught it like, try this import collections, random def shuffle(xs): # naive intuitive shuffle for i in range(len(xs)): j = random.randrange(len(xs)) xs[i], xs[j] = xs[j], xs[i] def first_of(n): xs = list(range(n)) shuffle(xs) return xs[0] print(collections.Counter([first_of(3) for i…

i'm an idiot, 3³ = 27. but that's still not divisible by 6. that explains how it's possible to be only 25% more likely

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#947

Post by crabmusket »

4death4 wrote: post #939
crabmusket wrote: post #931

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my point! What you were doing was theory-building, creating a mostly-shared mental understanding of the program.

Ah, ok. I see. I originally interpreted your comment as “there was some natural language spec, therefore you could feed it into an LLM” but I see I was mistaken.

I highly recommend the Naur paper, I think it is a pretty accurate view of the dynamics of software production.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#948

Post by spaceman_2020 »

totallywrong wrote: post #760
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think we’re entering an age where a skilled entrepreneur will be able to run a $10M/year business all by themselves with AI assisted coding, design and marketing.

Will GPT talk to customers, generate leads, manage sales cycles, customer support, etc. Come on.

Why not?

Do people forget how new this tech is?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#949

Post by spaceman_2020 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #657
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think we’re entering an age where a skilled entrepreneur will be able to run a $10M/year business all by themselves with AI assisted coding, design and marketing.

> I honestly think we’re entering an age where a skilled entrepreneur will be able to run a $10M/year business all by themselves with AI assisted coding, design and marketing. You forgot the accounting, taxation, legal and compliance stuff, which at least in Germany takes a huge amount of the entrepreneur's time. :-(

All of which can be handed off to competent professionals part-time for a fee.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#950

Post by miiiiiike »

itsoktocry wrote: post #870
miiiiiike wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don't want to read a 600 page tome on CSS.

The latest edition is closer to 1,100 pages.

It’s worth it.

It’s usually worth it for any long-standing technology you’re going to spending a significant amount of time using. Over the years you’ll save time because you’ll be able to get to the right answer in less time, debug faster, and won’t always be pulling out your hair Googling.

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