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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

#981

Post by miiiiiike »

rewmie wrote: post #767
miiiiiike wrote: post #409

I have a simple front-end test that I give to junior devs. Every few months I see if ChatGPT can pass it. It hasn’t. It can’t. It isn’t even close. It answers questions confidently but with subtle inaccuracies. The code that it produces is the same kind of non-sense that you get from recent bootcamp devs who’ve “mastered” the 50 technologies on their eight page résumé. If it’s gotten better, I haven’t noticed. Self-d…

> Self-driving trucks were going to upend the trucking industry in ten years, ten years ago. At the risk of going off on a tangent, we already have the technology to allow self-driving trucks for a few decades now. The technology is so good that it can even be used to transport multiple containers in one go. The trick is to use dedicated tracks to run these autonomous vehicles, and have a central authority monitoring…

Literally on rails. :D

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#982

Post by rglover »

Puts hands behind head

I'm just going to wait while the bootcamp set phases themselves out of the market and then wait for the "it doesn't work any more, please fix it" emails.

Assuming they price their skills at a premium, cleaning up the messes that AI will create in the process of it being treated as The Holy Grail are going to make some people absurdly wealthy.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#983

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #971
cousin_it wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#984

Post by asdff »

simonw wrote: post #780
asdff wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think its a step back. This is like saying google translate has made everyone fluent in Spanish. At the end of the day you still need to do some vetting and understanding how code works to effectively use chatgpt. the actual writing of the code was never the hard part of software development. If this thing is only speeding up developers by six months time, then thats kind of a waste of compute compared to…

> At the end of the day you still need to do some vetting and understanding how code works to effectively use chatgpt. the actual writing of the code was never the hard part of software development I completely agree with you on that. Most of being a good software engineer is skills that ChatGPT won't help you with. But you can't even start to learn those skills if you quit in the first six months because of the vert…

At the same time, you can't build those skills without spending time understanding how the syntax works. Its much easier to plan projects when you know how they might actually be built. Otherwise you are faffing in the dark and will probably need someone who actually knows these things to hold your hand through the project.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#985

Post by Anamon »

Another writer mistaking LLMs for AI.

As a programmer, I'm paid to solve novel problems, things that can't be solved by just glueing existing things together. But that's all LLM-generated code can do. And it's a qualitative problem, not a quantitative one. By its very nature, an LLM cannot come up with something novel. Which is why all of the examples in this article are highly formulaic and derivative ideas based on existing stuff, interesting as they may be to the people asking for them.

I can get quite well-running scripts from GPT for well-defined, menial tasks that I know would be easy to do, but just can't be bothered to fight with the mechanics and syntax in order to get it right. But for solving new and specific problems, that doesn't work.

Plus, technologies and languages evolve. If LLMs displaced programming, it would mean that progress has stopped. No LLM is going to come up with a nifty new technique or feature. It can only regurgitate what many ceative people first had to come up with.

You can have LLMs do your boilerplate, your helper scripts or your clearly defined, self-sufficient algorithms for you. But a real-world application is already impossible because an LLM will always be incapable of covering the big picture, of assembling parts into a whole that doesn't only work and make sense, but is also performant, secure, maintainable and extensible. LLMs won't kill the craft of programming, it will just lead those who fall for that to producing loads of crap that doesn't fulfill any of the above requirements, and then end up having to be trashed and redone from scratch by "real programmers".

The Go analogy doesn't work for the same reason. Go has well-defined rules everybody has to follow, and clear goals. Attacking this algorithmically is the extreme opposite of the idea of general artificial intelligence. That doesn't mean it's easy, but it's not even remotely a related problem.

There's a reason why the people swooning over GPT-based coding are always script kiddies, not professional developers.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#986

Post by roguas »

Anamon wrote: post #985

Another writer mistaking LLMs for AI. As a programmer, I'm paid to solve novel problems, things that can't be solved by just glueing existing things together. But that's all LLM-generated code can do. And it's a qualitative problem, not a quantitative one. By its very nature, an LLM cannot come up with something novel. Which is why all of the examples in this article are highly formulaic and derivative ideas based on…

Im swooning over gpt-based solutions most of my day (coding included). I consider myself professional, hope that other professionals are also swooning, cause it truly impacts at many levels.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#987

Post by roguas »

bdw5204 wrote: post #266
aabhay wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spreadsheets actually did put many accountants and “computers” (the term for people that tallied and computed numbers, ironically a fairly menial job) out of business. And it’s usually the case that disruptive technology’s benefits are not evenly distributed. In any case, the unfortunate truth is that AI as it exists today is EXPLICITLY designed to replace people. That’s a far cry from technologies such as the teleph…

It is especially sad that VC money is currently being spent on developing AI to eliminate good jobs rather than on developing robots to eliminate bad jobs.

I think AI, particularly text based, seems like a cleaner problem. Robots are derivative of AI, robotics, batteries, hardware, compute, societal shifts. It appears our tech tree needs stable AI first, then can tackle the rest of problems which are either physical or infrastructure.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#990

Post by johnfn »

gumballindie wrote: post #636
mrtksn wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, you are still responsible for the quality control. You are supposed to notice that everyone is named Dave and tell ChatGPT to fix it. Write tests, read code, run & observe for odd behaviours. It's not an autonomous agent just yet.

But why should i waste time using a broken product when i can do it properly myself? To me a lot of this debate sounds like people obsessively promoting a product for some odd reason, as if they were the happy owners of a hammer in search of a nail.

It's funny you say that. Reading over a lot of the comments here sound like a lot of people obsessively dismissing a swiss army knife because it doesn't have their random favorite tool of choice.
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