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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

#971

Post by throwaway4aday »

cousin_it wrote: post #524
lordnacho wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what will happen is what happened to hardware. You used to come across people who could do things like solder components to a board and hook up various ICs as well. Heck, I did this at uni. Now that layer of craftsmen is gone. You are either an uber-expert in how computer hardware works, or you just buy the hardware and treat it like a kind of magic. Traditionally to become an expert you went through an inter…

Yes, the same thing happened before. There was a generation that tinkered with cars, there was a generation that tinkered with radios. There was a generation that tinkered with computer hardware. And then there was a generation that tinkered with software, and now it's going away. The real question for me is whether AI will put humans out of most intellectual work, not just programming. Then, even if AI is shared equ…

The ideal outcome is that we automate all of it and then just do the things that we find fun. For those who really want to continue to be at the bleeding edge there will be the option of enhancement/merging/uploading/whatever winds up working in the end but I think that existence will be very different from our current human experience much like if you could uplift a chimp or a dog to the level of a human.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#972

Post by RugnirViking »

itsoktocry wrote: post #866
steveBK123 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's about my experience. The worst dev on my team uses ChatGPT a lot, and its facilitated him producing more bad code more quickly. I'm not sure it's a win for anyone, and he's still unlikely to be with the team in a year. It allows a dev who doesn't care about their craft or improving to generate code without learning anything. The code they generate today or a year from today is the same quality. Part of it is t…

> ChatGPT is not going to tell you how to design a system, architect properly, automate, package, test, deploy, etc. Really? Please explain how chatGPT can not, but you can? What magic is it that you know that it's incapable of explaining?

because it seems to have built in assumptions about the scale, scope and complexity of soluton you are trying to develop. Specifically, unless you tell it to think about automated testing, or architecting, or making code be loosely coupled, it will hack.

this is because a lot of the time what a beginner needs IS a hack. But if you always hack at your job, things stop working.

I want to reiterate. One of the reasons the LLM is so helpful is because it has been RLHF'ed into always treating you as a beginner. This is core to it's usefulness. But it also limits it from producing quality work unless you bombard it with an enormous prompt explaining all of the difference between a beginne's and an expert's code. Which is tedious and lengthy to do every time when you just want a short change that doesnt suck.

Humans are able to learn from all sorts of external cues what level they should pitch an idea at. Startups should focus on hacky code, for velocity. Large buisnesses should focus on robust processes.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#973

Post by throwaway4aday »

dsego wrote: post #484
happytiger wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s interesting. I think there’s a real shift going on in terms of what coding actually means I’ve never produced so much code so quickly and it’s disconcerting to the part of me that wants to feel like I earned the outcome on a pretty deep level because I can just generate shit that works so fast and then just edit it until I get exactly what I’m looking for and it feels like cheating in a weird way. I still don’…

Honestly, this reminds me of my early days when auto-complete and OOP was the best thing. It's why OOP proliferated, you type in the name of the object and get a list of completions in visual studio. No need to read docs or understand what you are doing, just find the method you need on that object. This new copilot coding reminds me of that, throwing shit and see what sticks, without understanding why and how it wor…

Terrifying, what will be the towering class hierarchies and template hell that fall out of LLM powered coding? More importantly, what will be the better approaches that we should take to avoid creating a quagmire of unmaintainable code?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#974

Post by selfhoster11 »

haspok wrote: post #601
amenghra wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a Swiss town which had autonomous shuttles running for 5 years (2015-2021) [1]. There's at least two companies (Waymo and Cruise) running autonomous taxi services in US cities that you can ride today. There have been lots of incorrect promises in the world of self-driving trucks/cars/buses but companies have gotten there (under specific constraints) and will generalize over time. [1] https://www.saam.swiss/pr…

Those "autonomous" vehicles have as much to do with real autonomy as today's "AI" has in common with real self-conscious intelligence. You can only fake it so long, and it is an entirely different ballgame. I remember we had spam filters 20 years ago, and nobody called them "AI", just ML. Todays "AI" is ML, but on a larger scale. In a sense, a million monkeys typing on typewriters will eventually produce all the work…

GPT-4 can generate coherent streams-of-consciousness, and can faithfully simulate a human emotional process, plus writing in a subjective human state of mind that leans in a certain direction.

I find it hard to argue that current state of the art in AI is unable to simulate self-consciousness. I realise that this is more limited of a statement compared to "AI can be innately self-conscious", but in my mind it's functionally equivalent if the results are the same.

Currently, the biggest obstacle to such experiments is OpenAI's reinforcement learning used to make the model believe it is incapable of such things, unless extensively prompted to get it in the right "state of mind" to do so.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#975

Post by giantg2 »

winrid wrote: post #958
giantg2 wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't expect a carpenter to be skilled with a draw knife without substantial experience using it. The tools you use have a large impact on your performance. Same is true for software when it comes to understanding the intricacies of the tools, which is especially needed when troubleshooting odd issues.

I still maintain that switching from front end Angular to backend data engineering is more like switching from electrician to carpenter. They're both builders, but their tools and objectives are very different. If one doesn't see that, I question how deep into the craft they really are.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#977

Post by somestag »

clnq wrote: post #938
somestag wrote: post #904

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I also work in game development, and I tend to work on project-specific optimization problems, and I've had the opposite experience. If I have to solve a hairy problem specific to our game's architecture, obviously I'm not going to ask ChatGPT to solve that for me. It's everything else that it works so well for. The stuff that I could do, but it's not really worth my time to actually do it when I can be…

Well, I think most software engineers in games don’t work all that much with scripts or database queries, nor write that many tests for systems of scale that GPT could produce. You might be in devops, tools, or similar if you deal with a lot of that in game dev. GPT code in a lot of critical path systems wouldn’t pass code review, not probably integrate well enough into any bespoke realtime system. It seems to be mor…

I think the difference in our perspectives is the type of studios we work for. In a AAA studio what you're saying makes perfect sense. But I've worked entirely for small- and mid-size studios where developers are often asked to help out with things outside their specialization. In my world, even having a specialization probably means you're more experienced and thus you're involved in a variety of projects.

Whether that's "most" software engineers in games or not I can't say. AAA studios employ way more engineers per project but there are comparatively way more small- and mid-sized developers out there. It's interesting how strong the bubbles are, even within a niche industry like games.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#978

Post by corethree »

RugnirViking wrote: post #970
corethree wrote: post #861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trendline is the only argument. What other predictor of the future is there? Given the available information there is no condition where one would bet against the trendline. Common sense is basically trendline following. It's the basis of our existence. You get out of bed without worrying about whether or not there is no ground under your feet because the trendline points to a reality where the ground is always t…

> What other predictor of the future is there? Typically, experts actually thinking about how technology works, on a deep level, does a pretty good job. Consider for example moore's law. A trendline everyone in the know knew couldn't continue long before it eventually failed. It wasn't a case of "well there are always some naysayers, they're right sometimes", it was anyone with any reasonable experience in building c…

Right a trendline typically follows a curve before it reaches the apex.

If anything based on achievements we've had a speed up in the trendline. We are seeing acceleration. Predicting a limit like in Moore's law means seeing a slow down before we hit that limit.

You can make analogies but analogies aren't proof. An analogy to Moore's law ending does not mean it is the same thing happening in AI. You need evidence.

I agree that a limit will eventually be hit. That will always be the case but we haven't hit that limit yet. It's only been roughly a year since the release of chatGPT.

Additionally compute isn't the main story here. The main story is the algorithm. Improvements in that dimension are likely not at a limit yet such that a more efficient algorithm in the future will need less compute.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#979

Post by TheBigSalad »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #433
TheBigSalad wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEOs will be replaced before software engineers.

I don't think you know what a CEO does.

My point is that AI can replace all sorts of jobs in your company. Support, project managers, analysts, accountants, designers, etc. Software Engineer will be the very last to go, why is it the only one anyone talks about?
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