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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

#951

Post by j45 »

Art9681 wrote: post #688
j45 wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it requires expert guidance to get something meaningful out.

This is the correct answer. I have 23 years of experience in datacenter ops and it has been a game changer for me. Just like any tool on one's arsenal, it's utility increases with practice and learning to use it correctly. ChatGPT is no different. You get out of it what you put in to it. This is the way of the world. I used to be puzzled as to why my peers are so dismissive of this tech. Same folks who would say "We…

I think many folks have those early chats with friends where one side was dismissing llms for so many reasons, when the job was to see and test the potential.

While part of me enjoyed the early gpt much more than the polished version today, as a tool it’s much more useful to the average person should they make it back to gpt somehow.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#952

Post by pacomerh »

ken47 wrote: post #419
Closi wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect automated code reviews and doing high-quality automatic documentation (i.e. better than current standards in most projects) will be fully within the capabilities of LLMs soon. Fixing random build failures will probably follow... So then the question is what % of a programmers job might be taken by this, and does the remaining % require a different skillset. There are programmers that are great at coding, bu…

Both code review and documentation require architectural knowledge to execute properly for a large app. This is not within the reach of current AI, and won’t be for a long time.

that's right, but at some degree it could actually help code review in a slightly higher level. Maybe detecting bad patterns and practices that are not in reach for a linting utility.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#953

Post by apersona »

wkipling wrote: post #808
mike_hearn wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is. Later in the article he explains a task he did during the working day to his wife. It seemed like his employer uses some sort of custom tableview control, or he was working on a business report. Honestly it sounded like the bigger threat to that particular task was someone finding an open source library that did it already, but it illustrated the point and the story was nicely written.

Yeah there's lot's of people in this thread who didn't read the full article and the conclusion the Author comes to.

I saw someone say they stopped reading after this line:

> 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.

...and I don't fault them for doing so and making the assumption that the author is not an experienced coder

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#954

Post by dragonwriter »

mike_hearn wrote: post #456
tangjurine wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author isn't a professional programmer. He has a couple side projects and doesn't seem very good at coding.

He is. Later in the article he explains a task he did during the working day to his wife. It seemed like his employer uses some sort of custom tableview control, or he was working on a business report. Honestly it sounded like the bigger threat to that particular task was someone finding an open source library that did it already, but it illustrated the point and the story was nicely written.

The author is very obviously the caliber of writer you'd expect for someone who regularly writes prose for the New Yorker and the Atlantic.

And also, apparently, the level of programmer you'd expect of someone who regularly writes prose for the New Yorker and the Atlantic.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#955

Post by dragonwriter »

tangjurine wrote: post #402
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 isn't a professional programmer. He has a couple side projects and doesn't seem very good at coding.

> The author isn't a professional programmer.

The author asserts that he is a professional programmer as one of his day jobs, as well as handling the “serious programming” in his hobby projects with a mostly-hardware guy who is also an ex-professional-programmer, but whose coding skills are out-of-date.

His LinkedIn has nothing more current than Jan 2017 at Genius, and that role (one of only two jobs with what looks like an IC-like title, “Developer”, that lasted more than a couple months), has a description that indicates it wasn't mostly an IC position but drifting among recruiting, acting product lead, PM, and something like an assistant to the CEO roles.

He really has a resume that screams of having decent communications skills and professional network (and maybe manangement skills) and wanting to be seen as a programmer but consistently either needing to find a way out of an environment or into a different role in the same org before the checks his communications skills wrote that his tech skills couldn't back caught up to him.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#956

Post by mediumsmart »

Why do people think the AI needs to learn how to write programs like a human? It’s going to be a framework with well documented chunksize modules the AI can iterate on using tests it writes itself. People will be out of work because they can’t write those bugfree modules the startup needs for the slots in its version of the AI provided code base framework and if they could the company has no time or money to deal with a human programmer.

that being said it might still be a non issue if civilization as we know it has less time than currently projected

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#957

Post by ehnto »

Xelynega wrote: post #389
w4ffl35 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been saying the same thing. Coding is the worst part of the process. I've been doing it for 20 years professionally and another 10 or more on top of that as a hobby. Don't care about code, just want to make things. Code sucks.

I think LLMs are the wrong solution for this problem. Why make something that produces low level code based off of existing low level code instead of building up meaningful abstractions to make development easier and ensure that low level code was written right? Basically react and other similar abstractions for other languages did more to take "coding" out of creating applications than gpt ever will IMO.

I had wondered, perhaps there will be an LLM specific framework that works idiomatic to how the LLM operates. I wonder if an LLM optimal framework would be human readable, or would it work differently. The downside obviously, LLMs work by processing existing solutions. Producing a novel framework for LLMs would require humans to make it, defeating the point a bit.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#958

Post by winrid »

giantg2 wrote: post #634
winrid wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, in that regard you're a fancy carpenter assembling IKEA dressers. Carpentry is still a craft.... most people just need IKEA. :)

Not really. My skills have drastically declined over the years because I rarely get a chance to exercise them. On top of that, it seems I'm switching languages/stacks frequently. So it's more like I'm a carpenter for a little while, then a plumber, then an electrician.

Languages and stacks are tools, not crafts.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#959

Post by jamaicahest »

fisherjeff wrote: post #41
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…

Also, I think we are quite a ways out from a tool being able to devise a solution to a complex high-level problem without online precedent, which is where I find the most satisfaction anyway. LLMs in particular can be a very fast, surprisingly decent (but, as you mention, very fallible) replacement for Stack Overflow, and, as such, a very good complement to a programmer's skills – seems to me like a net positive at l…

> LLMs in particular can be a very fast, surprisingly decent (but, as you mention, very fallible) replacement for Stack Overflow

I think that sentence nails it. For the people who consider "searching stackoverflow and copy/pasting" as programming, LLMs will replace your job, sure. But software development is so much more, critical thinking, analysing, gathering requirements, testing ideas and figuring out which to reject, and more.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#960

Post by kilmanio »

jelsisi wrote: post #87
decasia wrote: post #52

I have been having the following debate with my friend who does AI and neural network stuff: Him: Coding will soon be obsolete, it will all be replaced by chatgpt-type code gen. Me: OK but the overwhelming majority of my job as a "senior engineer" is about communication, organizational leadership, and actually understanding all the product requirements and how they will interface with our systems. Yes, I write code,…

> communication, organizational leadership, and actually understanding all the product requirements These problems sound like a result of working with people. Smaller but more capable teams because of AI will need less leaders and less meetings. Everything will become much more efficient. Say goodbye to all the time spent mentoring junior engineers, soon you won't have any

>Say goodbye to all the time spent mentoring junior engineers, soon you won't have any

and then slowly we run out of seniors with nobody to replace them

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