12 ms·

GPT-4 is phenomenal at Code

141 points by sualehasif 4y ago

amelius 4y ago
My Ubuntu system is in an unworkable state. Snap is broken, Apt is stuck. Can GPT-4 fix it?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sualehasif 4y ago
GPT-4 is just really good at code. We documented some of the examples that we found were crazy amazing and worth hackernews. Including GPT-4's ability to handle bazel, kube, terraform and rust. A summary can be found on this thread: https://twitter.com/sualehasif996/status/1635755267739598848 https://twitter.com/sualehasif996/status/1635755267739598848
- sualehasif 4y ago
  If you know of any other cool examples or would like us to try something out and add to the repo, please let us know. If you have access, the repo should be fairly replicable.
  - Iamnotthatbad 4y ago
    Your example of the commenting doesn't seem like "well-commented code" to me. Just re-stating what is in code in plain language isn't helpful and is kind of annoying to read. Can you explain why you think it is helpful?
    - sualehasif 4y ago
      The commenting was for the model to learn what the types were so it could translate it to gather. Doing that one shot is surprising to me because it is somewhat hard to get pytorch tensors to work out to the correct shapes.
flatiron 4y ago
Any concerns about sending code directly to a third party? I’m very hesitant to use any tool that is sending my assets to the cloud to be used who knows how.
- sualehasif 4y ago
  And they delete completions within 30 days.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  Not sure about they're policy but OpenAI is addressing the concern. https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/01/addressing-criticism-openai-will-no-longer-use-customer-data-to-train-its-models-by-default/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/01/addressing-criticism-opena...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Yes. The privacy concerns are huge. With that said, id use the shit out of this for open source development where privacy is not a concern.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Instead you have legal concerns when you are re-licensing code you don't know where it comes from. Someone could have published a snippet of code with retained copyright (not FOSS) and GPT-4 slurped it up, splitting it back to you and somehow the law firm representing the author comes across it.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - galleywest200 4y ago
      This sounds like plausible deniability, and not legal problems, at the hobbiest level. Not something I am going to worry about.
    - drusepth 4y ago
carapace 4y ago
Well, I think I just retired. Even knowing this was coming, it's still a bit unnerving. Sad too, but it's for the best. Let the machines program the machines. Schmidhuber's Gödelmachine. The automatic scientist.
- techwiz137 4y ago
  I expected this to be at least 20 years away.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Yes, the kinds of people who would write a python program in C++ are in trouble.
  - alchemist1e9 4y ago
    Maybe it can translate python code to C++. That is interesting. I need to try that.
    - sualehasif 4y ago
      It definitely should be able to. Any example you would like me to try. Put in an issue and we will do it.
      - carapace 4y ago
        I was about to write an old-fashioned Wu anti-aliased circle-drawing routine for a simple C-like language (it has no structs nor unions yet, for instance), is that something that might be an interesting test case? Worth opening an issue? Great work BTW. :)
- sublinear 4y ago
  Ugh not this again. Who the hell is running a business where the developers are mere struggling code monkeys who have no other value to the company, would never code review the AI output, and would find it faster to repl a bunch of imprecise prompts instead of just writing the damn code in the first place?
LightMachine 4y ago
It managed to write, in one shot, a working λ-calculus parser, using a very specific programming style I asked it in JavaScript, and then translated it all to Python, including sarcastic, rhyming GLaDOS comments. https://twitter.com/VictorTaelin/status/1635726202231988225 https://twitter.com/VictorTaelin/status/1635726202231988225 It also seems to be extremely competent at writing Agda types and proofs. We need some tool that highly integrates it with entire codebases, allowing for major refactors to be requested as a prompt. That would be groundbreaking (understatement of the year), specially if coupled with a strongly typed language that prevents it from accidentally breaking things up.
- sualehasif 4y ago
  Yeah, its really cool how good it is. I personally am addicted to it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- amelius 4y ago
  I don't think this is a good test. Every CS graduate student has to write a lambda-calculus parser. There must be thousands of implementations on the web. It really is not strange that GPT-4 can reproduce this.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Let's invent a better test then. What could be an example task that isn't widely available on the internet already? I'm having a hard time coming up with anything that isn't reproduced in many places.
    - palijer 4y ago
      Take something from advent of code and change it up a bit seems like a good test
      - 4y ago
stuff20230314 4y ago
That's cool and all, but can it do "in this existing code, please amend this feature"? Also useful, "please cover this code with meaningful unit tests"?
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  > Also useful, "please cover this code with meaningful unit tests"? GPT-3.5 is already really good at that. If you aren't using ChatGPT for your unit tests I'd suspect you're on a Performance Improvement Plan by now
  - xur17 4y ago
    What portion of the code do you feed it as an input?
    - CapstanRoller 4y ago
      You feed it design specifications as input, the same way that a human SDET would do it. The challenge, as always, is to have well-written specification docs.
  - stuff20230314 4y ago
    Yeah, I am sure the FAANG devs are all copy-pasting things into ChatGPT or requesting Copilot. Sure.
- sualehasif 4y ago
  Definitely. For e.g. you cannot say go to VSCode and add this feature. But, If we point it to the piece of code and ask it to append it and write tests, it does really well. (We want engineers to have control haha.)
  - stuff20230314 4y ago
    ...it does really well... As in "ready to commit" or leaving the hard part (review of correctness) to developer?
recuter 4y ago
Remember the comments about artists and creatives when DALL-E came out? I remember.
- smcl 4y ago
  I remember it came out at the same time as GitHub copilot and a lot of people here said we might need to confront the idea that some development roles may not be long for this earth.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  I think my barber and my plumber have safer jobs from automation than average coders.
  - recuter 4y ago
    Sigh. Time to bust out my old will code for food cardboard sign.
  - swader999 4y ago
    I think we'll all get more productive is all. There's a lot of projects that just weren't economical but now may become so. The bigger disruption will occur when Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc become useless from all the AI spam that's sure to overwhelm it all.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      But here's the question. If these tools make existing devs 10x more productive, why bother hiring new people in the field?
      - swader999 4y ago
        The new people will still work for a little less.
      - rootusrootus 4y ago
ozten 4y ago
I don't know TLA+ and haven't had time to learn it. Could GPT-4 be a boon for esoteric PL that have had trouble gaining mass adoption? Clearly, one needs to learn and understand TLA+ before one can trust generated proofs, but maybe GPT-4 could be the mentor or gentle on-ramp I was missing.
- hwayne 4y ago
  I hope so! So far I've been unimpressed with ChatGPT and Copilot for generating TLA+. It mixes in idioms from other programming languages, like RETURN, which make no sense in TLA+. What I'm hoping is that it'll be helpful for writing J. That'd be a feat.
nottathrowaway3 4y ago
> is phenomenal at Code Can it - attend bullshit meetings - lick my manager's boot - tell them that their ideas are good but in the masochistic, self-deprecating way they like to hear it from me in Not yet? Darn it, guess my job is safe for now.
- wskinner 4y ago
  It can. The only difficult part of all that is wiring up the integrations and I/O.
- tangjurine 4y ago
  I don't see why it couldn't.
- primax 4y ago
  No but it can free you up to do all that valuable busy work
- 1attice 4y ago
  Yes, it can. - Automated relations, whether with your employer or a customer, are trivial - These relations can be fine-tuned for exactly the level of syncophancy your boss prefers - So yes, it can tell your boss their ideas are good in precisely the masochistic, self-deprecating way, etc. Your post is not longer than a system prompt. Think it through.
  - prcrstntr 4y ago
    But it will have zero credibility, so no.
    - 1attice 4y ago
      It will absolutely have great credibility. Did you read any of the code samples in the GH repo linked by OP? Here's the algorithm to get you appropriately scared. - Measure the amount of time it took to go from GPT 2 to GPT 3 - Measure the amount of time it took to go from GPT 3 to GPT 4 - Measure the code quality improvement for the same spans. Go ahead. Pick a metric. You'll notice that, not only is GPT-4 really fscking good, it represents a year-over-year improvement that is accelerating. What you are likely looking at is a classic hockey-stick exponential graph. And there is no ceiling yet in sight.
greenthrow 4y ago
This is cool to see. I'd love to try it out and see how useful it is for me to do my job but I don't think it's likely that I'll be able to do that soon. I think eventually I will be using this every day just like I use lots of other tools.
- sualehasif 4y ago
  email us at sualeh@anysphere.co :) We would love for you try it out.
  - greenthrow 4y ago
    Thanks! Appreciate it. I will reach out to try it for fun, but don't think my employer will be down with using it on our actual code.
    - sualehasif 4y ago
      We are designing the IDE for enterprise users actually. I.e. we can do an on prem deployment.
hot_gril 4y ago
I tried having it write some HTML and JS code for a chat app UI. It works amazingly well. I'm legitimately going to have ChatGPT help me write this side project website I've been working on.
- sualehasif 4y ago
  We are trying to build this right in to the editor. The UI is in the tweet thread. Feel free to sign up at control.dev
moonchrome 4y ago
I'm waiting for copilot that has access to something like language server and instead of just suggesting immediate completions and using open tabs for context it can use LS to pull references for context, suggest file creation, adding code in non trivial places. Then add a chat interface on top. Suddenly I'm really 10x - I would pay hundreds of dollars per month for this if it worked well - it would let me handle at least two or three IC jobs. Next level after that would be getting access to tasks/development board and automatically having that as context. Copilot and chatgpt are so clunky to work with - they help but it's not groundbreaking - once the workflow gets streamlined there will be a time window where you can leverage your experience to do 10x productivity.
- ArVID220u 4y ago
  that's exactly what we're building with Control! https://twitter.com/sualehasif996/status/1635757961984221185 https://twitter.com/sualehasif996/status/1635757961984221185
  - Krutonium 4y ago
    Any chance me, a lowly OSS Developer and Twitch Streamer of the Small Variety, could acquire access early? I would love to try using it for things like writing Mods for Games and such.
    - sualehasif 4y ago
      Feel free to email us, and we can make something work!
- CapstanRoller 4y ago
  >it would let me handle at least two or three IC jobs At that point you'll need to have at least two or three IC jobs just to survive, because wages will plummet.
  - moonchrome 4y ago
    I think experience is going to become a multiplier of value here, there will be a first adopter advantage and lower cost is going to create demand.
xwdv 4y ago
Could it write an ORM library?
- sualehasif 4y ago
  Definitely! Happy to try it if you have a prompt.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    The prompt is simply to write an ORM library.
- 1attice 4y ago
  Yes?
- CapstanRoller 4y ago
  Yes. It will also create the DB schema based on a description, output the SQL needed to set everything up, and even populate it with test data if you ask.
LeftHandPath 4y ago
Are software engineers going to go the way of human “computers”? I know GPT-4 won’t put us all out of work, but I worry that something could in a number of decades I can count on one hand. Of course, it would be gradual. I am excited, disappointed, and as a young person who hopes to be a SWE for a long time, somewhat afraid. Then again, it could be argued that this merely means GPT4 is a compiler…
- kypro 4y ago
  > Are software engineers going to go the way of human “computers”? Anything with digital IO will.
- awb 4y ago
  It’s got to be one of the first areas to lose significant jobs. Products are more about audience and experience rather than amazing technology. If GPT4+ can spit out an API and an unstyled front end that a designer can beautify, that’s a massive productivity boost. It’s not there yet, but it’s improvements are amazing. I find myself acting more as a software architect with GPT, using it to spit out functions. But there’s a cultural shift that happens when your non-technical friend starts using technology. Like when non-tech folks started embracing the internet or using smart phones or creating social media accounts. When everyone you know can use GPT to build software, that’s when you’ll be out of a job. Until then it’ll probably just become increasingly more competitive.
  - oytis 4y ago
    > Until then it’ll probably just become increasingly more competitive. Will you? If your competition is becoming more competitive too, no one is becoming more competitive. Just the number of engineers required to cover the market needs shrinks significantly.
    - awb 4y ago
      That's what I mean: fewer jobs for the same number of engineers would mean greater competition for each job. And given how much of an accelerant GPT is, I think learning how to prompt and validate responses will be increasingly important. For example, if you compare an average CS grad with a 4y career to an average CS grad with a 6 year career, the more experienced developer might be 5-20% more efficient. But with GPT, an engineer who writes amazing prompts versus might be 2-4x more efficient than an engineer that writes average prompts and has to spend time fixing code, debugging or re-prompting.
beepbooptheory 4y ago
Honestly at this point I am just looking forward to us taking this stuff for granted. Its all very nice and useful, but I think my threshold for guffawing at it is smaller than most. I know we still got some time left in the cycle, but I just want people to calm down and just start using it. Yes, cool, you did xyz all at once, but what did you make with it? It's kinda akin to the whole "using rust" phenomenon. I only marginally care that you made it in rust, I care more about the thing itself you made! I don't wanna come off sounding prescriptive, certainly stay in the hype world as long as you want, and I know there was a new bigger and better model that came out less than 12hrs ago. But just personally I am looking forward to the inevitable future where how you made the thing stops being as or more important as the what. Just miss the sense of inspiration you can gleam from someone else's work. Don't think AI will obsolete that ever, however much it can obsolete boilerplate code and even tricky discrete problems.
- tracerbulletx 4y ago
  The model IS the thing that has been made, it is the impressive accomplishment. People are awed by that. The examples are just people testing the limits of its capabilities. It's like being present at the splitting of the atom and asking ya but what have you actually powered with it.
  - beepbooptheory 4y ago
    Yes, I get it! Its amazing, impressive, all those things. Its just been like six months of this kind of discourse if you count DALLE and stable diffusion, I'm personally just tired of the orbit around it. I want to see the amazing future it can make is all. The future that doesnt just contain itself! I'm not saying this is normal for me to feel, maybe I'm wrong to not stop and smell the flowers more.. Insofar as this is a tool, I want to see the houses not a continuing parade of hammers. I want to see a nuclear reactor!
- sublinear 4y ago
  > personally I am looking forward to the inevitable future where how you made the thing stops being as or more important as the what Believe it or not, there's plenty of software out there written towards well-defined specifications that are non-negotiable and beyond the mere impression of some result. Implementation details absolutely matter. These specifications are of course subject to change, but not arbitrary. Due to this inflexibility and continuous review of best practices done by experienced humans who are consciously and deliberately creating these standards, I doubt the "how" will ever take a back seat to the "what". Pretty much all modern industry apart from gimmicky consumer gizmos are existentially about the "how". Taking humans out of the equation doesn't even make sense and any attempt to do so would be objectively worse in every way.
hammock 4y ago
What is the cost per day to use GPT-4 to code vs paying a developer?
zamnos 4y ago
Is it? According to OpenAI's paper GPT-4 GPT-4 (no vision) GPT-3.5 Leetcode (easy) 31 / 41 31 / 41 12 / 41 Leetcode (medium) 21 / 80 21 / 80 8 / 80 Leetcode (hard) 3 / 45 3 / 45 0 / 45 https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf Table 1; page 5. So it's better than GPT-3.5, but still pretty pathetic at hard Leetcode problems. If your programming job is closer to leetcode easy problems you might be in trouble, but for the real problems that aren't just gluing some libraries together your job is safe.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  people are impressed because you never need to do leetcode hard problems in any business anywhere in your career to make a few billion dollars. I would fire anybody using company time trying to reinvent some academic search thing instead of just using the hashmap.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    Reimplementing quicksort in a language the rest of the company doesn't use in a part of the software that no one ever touches is fireable, sure, but I suspect that on the way to ChatGPT there were more than a couple "Leedcode hard"-grade problems that OpenAI engineers and PhDs solved because the library for that didn't exist before.
  - gptgpp 4y ago
    [dead]
- dougmwne 4y ago
  That’s better than a lot of professional engineers can do, but I agree that it is unlikely to get hired in a senior FAANG role.
- capableweb 4y ago
  What is "Leetcode (hard)" specifically? Searching for it brought me to a website (https://leetcode.com/ https://leetcode.com/) but I'm assuming that is referring to some special list of problems that are meant to be harder than others, but I cannot find that.
primax 4y ago
I'd like to start writing something based on GPT to build web scrapers, probably on top of Colly and Gorm. Is there a good resource for learning how to feed external data into GPT?
amelius 4y ago
Since GPT is good at language, perhaps we can use it to generate documentation for software systems.
willcodeforfoo 4y ago
I wonder if this could be used to port entire projects/libraries to different languages almost completely automatically? ElasticSearch in Rust? Wondering about the legal/license ramifications of doing so...
awb 4y ago
I had endless trouble trying to get GPT 3 and now 4 to reverse engineer a generic function: result1 = Func1(input1) result2 = Func2(result1) I want to give it result2 and have it tell me what input1 should be. It’s attempts to implement a binary search have all failed. Other programs have been largely positive though.
bob1029 4y ago
My current take is that it's actually kind of bad at code in a lot of very important ways, but it is so good at getting to ~95% that you don't even feel the missing pieces once you are in flow. Having skills in the target area are important, but some quick runtime testing usually closes the gap. The added confidence from being able to scream a horrible demand into the void and get back something nearly complete is beyond unbelievable to me. I'm making attempts at projects that I would never have considered otherwise, and I am becoming increasingly emboldened by the capability - "Without using 3rd party dependencies" is probably my #1 prompt nudge right now.
- mock-possum 4y ago
  yeah that's where I'm at too - it's great that it gets you 95% there, genuinely, but unless you know how to recognize the missing 5%, it's not going to mean much. Broken code is broken code - a single wrong character can render the entire thing unusable. What's fun is asking it for code solutions, and then asking it to debug its own functions - if it's 95% effective at debugging code that is 95% correct, where does that leave you?
cozzyd 4y ago
I wonder how well it compares to a compiler at converting C++ or rust to assembly. (C is too easy, almost anyone can do that by hand...)
- mr_toad 4y ago
  I’d guess it would do badly. There isn’t much assembly code on the web for it to be trained on.
sualehasif 4y ago
OP here. We're hiring! We're an early-stage startup, with funding from OpenAI, building the next-generation AI code editor. If you're the best hacker or designer ever, reach out to me at sualeh@anysphere.co. The problems we work on are really fun (extremely fast context retrieval from across big codebases, connecting language servers to language models, instruction-tuned embedddings) and we think the potential of what we're building is enormous (make all software engineers literally 10x more productive).
impulser_ 4y ago
Unless these models are updated frequently it not going to be better than a human. ChatGPT doesn't even know Go has generics yet. Now imagine is suggesting you a inferior way of doing something because it doesn't know that a bug as been fixed or a better feature/version has been implemented. It often recommends made up libraries, or libraries that don't exists anymore. It even recommended using a Go wiki page as an import for an experimental Go library because it doesn't know the the experimental library has been merged into Go std lib. Another big problem I had was with algorithms. It would suggestion working code for an algorithm but would contain bugs that would completely defeat using the algorithm in the first place. So if you don't know what your doing you would think it was giving you working code because it compiles, but it in fact it gave you bad code. Yeah, it might be good at doing very basic and boring things, but I would never trust it for anything complex. You won't know you shot yourself in the foot until later on when you have to spend hours debugging a bug because you C+P code from ChatGPT.
- sualehasif 4y ago
  GPT-4 certainly is aware of go generics. Do you have an example you would like to test?
  - impulser_ 4y ago
    It does know that Go has generics if you ask it because 1.17 had experimental generics. But it doesn't know about 1.18 which is the official release of generics. For example it doesn't know that Go has the any type that can be used in place for interface{}.
TrackerFF 4y ago
In a couple of years the mythical 10x engineers will probably be 100x engineers, depending on how well they've managed to integrate this tech into their tooling.
jabloczko 4y ago
What I've noted is that GPT is really good at things that have really good documentation. The example of kube-tf in this repo is a perfect example. The Kubernetes documentation and all of Hashicorp's documentation is excellent. GPT will have infinite examples of good code to stitch together code for the task in this example. Now I've been running a private cloud at work on the OpenNebula platform, which has documentation that is definitely lacking. I tried to ask GPT to write some basic code in Python such as "Give me a list of VMs from the OpenNebula API in a powered off state that have a start time older than 30 days." What I noted was that it would spit out code that looked correct on the surface, but would not run. It would take a decent amount of me modifying the code until I got my desired result. Since there was no documentation, I was just reading through the OpenNebula packages themselves to understand what to do. The nice thing, though, is that it was a great starting point. Much in the same way I might take a code snippet from StackOverflow and modify it to suit my own needs. I listened to a great podcast titled "The Trouble with AI" on Making Sense with Sam Harris. One of the key takeaways I grabbed from it was that GPT is an LLM not an AI. What it is very good at is predicting the next correct character or word in a sequence based off of other examples. But it does not actually fundamentally understand what it is outputting. In order to demonstrate, open up a session with ChatGPT really quickly and ask it a single digit multiplication question. Such as "What is 3 multiplied by 4?" and you will see a correct answer. Next, ask it something a bit larger, like "What is 12366 multiplied by 981632?" and you will get an incorrect answer but one that looks pretty close to correct. Validate with a calculator yourself. The reason being, as an LLM it doesn't actually understand multiplication. Instead it has just seen 3 multiplied by 4 countless times in the data it ingested when it was being "trained", but never has seen larger number examples of multiplication. Not that it knows multiplication in the first place. GPT is fantastic, but as of right now it needs to be used as a starting point towards knowledge or something concrete. I wouldn't trust it as an authoritative source on anything quite yet. It is fantastic for generating a bit of code and then allowing the developer to tweak that code until it actually works.
- euroderf 4y ago
  > What I've noted is that GPT is really good at things that have really good documentation. As a technical communicator, I interpret this to mean that yes, we are all going to die at the hands of GPT-13.
lisasays 4y ago
I'm the "really good", but definitely not "phenomenal" camp. That is, it works - but what is with the repeated class declaration for every h3 element? <h3 class="text-xl font-bold mb-2">1. Pruning</h3> The whole point of CSS is to have to declare properties like this once, and only once, for a group of functionally similar elements. Also note that switchTab has to be told the position of the tab it's switching to (it should be able to infer that the element's id, or its position in the list). Also note that the function has a hard-coded tab count baked in - a stealth bug waiting to be tripped on. And why do we need to explicitly toggle the border-b-2 and border-yellow-400 properties? Shouldn't these be tucked away under some kind of class declaration (the same way the hidden property works)? This may sound like nitpicking, but it's not - code like this becomes really hard to maintain at scale. And just imagine someone asking this thing to generate an algorithm to say, determine whether someone's medical procedure should be covered under insurance or not.
- tuvan 4y ago
  Tailwind CSS is very popular and uses this kind of classes. They might be using that CSS framework in the code base.
- drusepth 4y ago
  They're using TailwindCSS for this, which is full of one-liner utility classes that effectively "replace" CSS classes by moving the equivalent CSS into your HTML. However, what they're not using is Tailwind's `@apply` directive [1] which basically encapsulates these repeated declarations with a repeatable, named CSS class. Doing so would replace their h3 tags with something like <h3 class="header">1. Pruning</h3> and CSS of h3.header { @apply text-xl font-bold mb-2; } It's not the biggest change and it's debatable how much cleaner the code ends up being. In my experience with TailwindCSS, I don't see a lot of companies using @apply until late in the code lifecycle, if at all. It's often way faster to just use the utility classes directly, and then you find yourself with a site that's already built and looks great -- and very little reason to allocate dev time to go back and abstract away repeated CSS. Tailwind also has this to say WRT using it: > Whatever you do, don’t use @apply just to make things look “cleaner”. Yes, HTML templates littered with Tailwind classes are kind of ugly. Making changes in a project that has tons of custom CSS is worse. If you start using @apply for everything, you are basically just writing CSS again and throwing away all of the workflow and maintainability advantages Tailwind gives you. [1] https://tailwindcss.com/docs/reusing-styles#extracting-classes-with-apply https://tailwindcss.com/docs/reusing-styles#extracting-class...
softwaredoug 4y ago
We're in a situation where junior side of the software job market has really dried up. My question is whether the junior side will ever come back? Will we ever have tech companies like we've had, with massive intern -> junior pipelines, gradually developing senior devs? Or will there by a narrower pipeline, with fewer senior devs working with AI tools? An optimistic take is that by automating a lot of mundane work, our level of craftsmanship and creativity can increase. That we can have a much higher bar for quality and professionalism. Unfortunately it will also mean a lot of junior folks may never get back into software jobs.
- nottathrowaway3 4y ago
  > Unfortunately it will also mean a lot of junior folks may never get back into software jobs. Why do you suppose this age-based partitioning is going to happen? There are a lot of senior people who are less effective than bright juniors. Being a good software engineer can always be learned. I think what's more likely is that the quality bar in general will be raised across all age bands.
  - softwaredoug 4y ago
    I don't at all mean "junior" or "senior" as "age" but capabilities. I know lots of young senior/staff :) And plenty of new developers in their 40s plus.
    - claritise 4y ago
      At this point these titles really have become pretty meaningless... A good developer will build and use the tools they have access to, a bad developer will fall behind.
j3s 4y ago
writing code is like 10% of what most people in tech do. this will impact startups the most. but GPT-N can't have a conversation for you.
baerrie 4y ago
Until GPT becomes more trustworthy and fun to work with than the average person, my job is safe :)
amanzi 4y ago
I just asked GPT-4 to "generate an ansible playbook that will install oh-my-zsh on a linux computer?" It did a much better job of the playbook than the one I created last week. GPT-4 did it in a few seconds, and mine took about an hour of Googling.
johnrushx 4y ago
The future of programming is in AI - tools like replit, marsx.dev, and github copilot are bound to impress us soon.

141 points by sualehasif 4y ago

amelius 4y ago

My Ubuntu system is in an unworkable state. Snap is broken, Apt is stuck. Can GPT-4 fix it?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sualehasif 4y ago

GPT-4 is just really good at code. We documented some of the examples that we found were crazy amazing and worth hackernews. Including GPT-4's ability to handle bazel, kube, terraform and rust. A summary can be found on this thread: https://twitter.com/sualehasif996/status/1635755267739598848 https://twitter.com/sualehasif996/status/1635755267739598848

sualehasif 4y ago
If you know of any other cool examples or would like us to try something out and add to the repo, please let us know. If you have access, the repo should be fairly replicable.
- Iamnotthatbad 4y ago
  Your example of the commenting doesn't seem like "well-commented code" to me. Just re-stating what is in code in plain language isn't helpful and is kind of annoying to read. Can you explain why you think it is helpful?
  - sualehasif 4y ago
    The commenting was for the model to learn what the types were so it could translate it to gather. Doing that one shot is surprising to me because it is somewhat hard to get pytorch tensors to work out to the correct shapes.

flatiron 4y ago

Any concerns about sending code directly to a third party? I’m very hesitant to use any tool that is sending my assets to the cloud to be used who knows how.

sualehasif 4y ago
And they delete completions within 30 days.
sharemywin 4y ago
Not sure about they're policy but OpenAI is addressing the concern. https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/01/addressing-criticism-openai-will-no-longer-use-customer-data-to-train-its-models-by-default/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/01/addressing-criticism-opena...
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Yes. The privacy concerns are huge. With that said, id use the shit out of this for open source development where privacy is not a concern.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Instead you have legal concerns when you are re-licensing code you don't know where it comes from. Someone could have published a snippet of code with retained copyright (not FOSS) and GPT-4 slurped it up, splitting it back to you and somehow the law firm representing the author comes across it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - galleywest200 4y ago
    This sounds like plausible deniability, and not legal problems, at the hobbiest level. Not something I am going to worry about.
  - drusepth 4y ago

carapace 4y ago

Well, I think I just retired. Even knowing this was coming, it's still a bit unnerving. Sad too, but it's for the best. Let the machines program the machines. Schmidhuber's Gödelmachine. The automatic scientist.

techwiz137 4y ago
I expected this to be at least 20 years away.
jeffbee 4y ago
Yes, the kinds of people who would write a python program in C++ are in trouble.
- alchemist1e9 4y ago
  Maybe it can translate python code to C++. That is interesting. I need to try that.
  - sualehasif 4y ago
    It definitely should be able to. Any example you would like me to try. Put in an issue and we will do it.
    - carapace 4y ago
      I was about to write an old-fashioned Wu anti-aliased circle-drawing routine for a simple C-like language (it has no structs nor unions yet, for instance), is that something that might be an interesting test case? Worth opening an issue? Great work BTW. :)
sublinear 4y ago
Ugh not this again. Who the hell is running a business where the developers are mere struggling code monkeys who have no other value to the company, would never code review the AI output, and would find it faster to repl a bunch of imprecise prompts instead of just writing the damn code in the first place?

LightMachine 4y ago

It managed to write, in one shot, a working λ-calculus parser, using a very specific programming style I asked it in JavaScript, and then translated it all to Python, including sarcastic, rhyming GLaDOS comments. https://twitter.com/VictorTaelin/status/1635726202231988225 https://twitter.com/VictorTaelin/status/1635726202231988225 It also seems to be extremely competent at writing Agda types and proofs. We need some tool that highly integrates it with entire codebases, allowing for major refactors to be requested as a prompt. That would be groundbreaking (understatement of the year), specially if coupled with a strongly typed language that prevents it from accidentally breaking things up.

sualehasif 4y ago
Yeah, its really cool how good it is. I personally am addicted to it.
deleted 4y ago
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amelius 4y ago
I don't think this is a good test. Every CS graduate student has to write a lambda-calculus parser. There must be thousands of implementations on the web. It really is not strange that GPT-4 can reproduce this.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Let's invent a better test then. What could be an example task that isn't widely available on the internet already? I'm having a hard time coming up with anything that isn't reproduced in many places.
  - palijer 4y ago
    Take something from advent of code and change it up a bit seems like a good test
    - 4y ago

stuff20230314 4y ago

That's cool and all, but can it do "in this existing code, please amend this feature"? Also useful, "please cover this code with meaningful unit tests"?

yieldcrv 4y ago
> Also useful, "please cover this code with meaningful unit tests"? GPT-3.5 is already really good at that. If you aren't using ChatGPT for your unit tests I'd suspect you're on a Performance Improvement Plan by now
- xur17 4y ago
  What portion of the code do you feed it as an input?
  - CapstanRoller 4y ago
    You feed it design specifications as input, the same way that a human SDET would do it. The challenge, as always, is to have well-written specification docs.
- stuff20230314 4y ago
  Yeah, I am sure the FAANG devs are all copy-pasting things into ChatGPT or requesting Copilot. Sure.
sualehasif 4y ago
Definitely. For e.g. you cannot say go to VSCode and add this feature. But, If we point it to the piece of code and ask it to append it and write tests, it does really well. (We want engineers to have control haha.)
- stuff20230314 4y ago
  ...it does really well... As in "ready to commit" or leaving the hard part (review of correctness) to developer?

recuter 4y ago

Remember the comments about artists and creatives when DALL-E came out? I remember.

smcl 4y ago
I remember it came out at the same time as GitHub copilot and a lot of people here said we might need to confront the idea that some development roles may not be long for this earth.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
I think my barber and my plumber have safer jobs from automation than average coders.
- recuter 4y ago
  Sigh. Time to bust out my old will code for food cardboard sign.
- swader999 4y ago
  I think we'll all get more productive is all. There's a lot of projects that just weren't economical but now may become so. The bigger disruption will occur when Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc become useless from all the AI spam that's sure to overwhelm it all.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    But here's the question. If these tools make existing devs 10x more productive, why bother hiring new people in the field?
    - swader999 4y ago
      The new people will still work for a little less.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago

ozten 4y ago

I don't know TLA+ and haven't had time to learn it. Could GPT-4 be a boon for esoteric PL that have had trouble gaining mass adoption? Clearly, one needs to learn and understand TLA+ before one can trust generated proofs, but maybe GPT-4 could be the mentor or gentle on-ramp I was missing.

hwayne 4y ago
I hope so! So far I've been unimpressed with ChatGPT and Copilot for generating TLA+. It mixes in idioms from other programming languages, like RETURN, which make no sense in TLA+. What I'm hoping is that it'll be helpful for writing J. That'd be a feat.

nottathrowaway3 4y ago

> is phenomenal at Code Can it - attend bullshit meetings - lick my manager's boot - tell them that their ideas are good but in the masochistic, self-deprecating way they like to hear it from me in Not yet? Darn it, guess my job is safe for now.

wskinner 4y ago
It can. The only difficult part of all that is wiring up the integrations and I/O.
tangjurine 4y ago
I don't see why it couldn't.
primax 4y ago
No but it can free you up to do all that valuable busy work
1attice 4y ago
Yes, it can. - Automated relations, whether with your employer or a customer, are trivial - These relations can be fine-tuned for exactly the level of syncophancy your boss prefers - So yes, it can tell your boss their ideas are good in precisely the masochistic, self-deprecating way, etc. Your post is not longer than a system prompt. Think it through.
- prcrstntr 4y ago
  But it will have zero credibility, so no.
  - 1attice 4y ago
    It will absolutely have great credibility. Did you read any of the code samples in the GH repo linked by OP? Here's the algorithm to get you appropriately scared. - Measure the amount of time it took to go from GPT 2 to GPT 3 - Measure the amount of time it took to go from GPT 3 to GPT 4 - Measure the code quality improvement for the same spans. Go ahead. Pick a metric. You'll notice that, not only is GPT-4 really fscking good, it represents a year-over-year improvement that is accelerating. What you are likely looking at is a classic hockey-stick exponential graph. And there is no ceiling yet in sight.

greenthrow 4y ago

This is cool to see. I'd love to try it out and see how useful it is for me to do my job but I don't think it's likely that I'll be able to do that soon. I think eventually I will be using this every day just like I use lots of other tools.

sualehasif 4y ago
email us at sualeh@anysphere.co :) We would love for you try it out.
- greenthrow 4y ago
  Thanks! Appreciate it. I will reach out to try it for fun, but don't think my employer will be down with using it on our actual code.
  - sualehasif 4y ago
    We are designing the IDE for enterprise users actually. I.e. we can do an on prem deployment.

hot_gril 4y ago

I tried having it write some HTML and JS code for a chat app UI. It works amazingly well. I'm legitimately going to have ChatGPT help me write this side project website I've been working on.

sualehasif 4y ago
We are trying to build this right in to the editor. The UI is in the tweet thread. Feel free to sign up at control.dev

moonchrome 4y ago

I'm waiting for copilot that has access to something like language server and instead of just suggesting immediate completions and using open tabs for context it can use LS to pull references for context, suggest file creation, adding code in non trivial places. Then add a chat interface on top. Suddenly I'm really 10x - I would pay hundreds of dollars per month for this if it worked well - it would let me handle at least two or three IC jobs. Next level after that would be getting access to tasks/development board and automatically having that as context. Copilot and chatgpt are so clunky to work with - they help but it's not groundbreaking - once the workflow gets streamlined there will be a time window where you can leverage your experience to do 10x productivity.

ArVID220u 4y ago
that's exactly what we're building with Control! https://twitter.com/sualehasif996/status/1635757961984221185 https://twitter.com/sualehasif996/status/1635757961984221185
- Krutonium 4y ago
  Any chance me, a lowly OSS Developer and Twitch Streamer of the Small Variety, could acquire access early? I would love to try using it for things like writing Mods for Games and such.
  - sualehasif 4y ago
    Feel free to email us, and we can make something work!
CapstanRoller 4y ago
>it would let me handle at least two or three IC jobs At that point you'll need to have at least two or three IC jobs just to survive, because wages will plummet.
- moonchrome 4y ago
  I think experience is going to become a multiplier of value here, there will be a first adopter advantage and lower cost is going to create demand.

xwdv 4y ago

Could it write an ORM library?

sualehasif 4y ago
Definitely! Happy to try it if you have a prompt.
- xwdv 4y ago
  The prompt is simply to write an ORM library.
1attice 4y ago
Yes?
CapstanRoller 4y ago
Yes. It will also create the DB schema based on a description, output the SQL needed to set everything up, and even populate it with test data if you ask.

LeftHandPath 4y ago

Are software engineers going to go the way of human “computers”? I know GPT-4 won’t put us all out of work, but I worry that something could in a number of decades I can count on one hand. Of course, it would be gradual. I am excited, disappointed, and as a young person who hopes to be a SWE for a long time, somewhat afraid. Then again, it could be argued that this merely means GPT4 is a compiler…

kypro 4y ago
> Are software engineers going to go the way of human “computers”? Anything with digital IO will.
awb 4y ago
It’s got to be one of the first areas to lose significant jobs. Products are more about audience and experience rather than amazing technology. If GPT4+ can spit out an API and an unstyled front end that a designer can beautify, that’s a massive productivity boost. It’s not there yet, but it’s improvements are amazing. I find myself acting more as a software architect with GPT, using it to spit out functions. But there’s a cultural shift that happens when your non-technical friend starts using technology. Like when non-tech folks started embracing the internet or using smart phones or creating social media accounts. When everyone you know can use GPT to build software, that’s when you’ll be out of a job. Until then it’ll probably just become increasingly more competitive.
- oytis 4y ago
  > Until then it’ll probably just become increasingly more competitive. Will you? If your competition is becoming more competitive too, no one is becoming more competitive. Just the number of engineers required to cover the market needs shrinks significantly.
  - awb 4y ago
    That's what I mean: fewer jobs for the same number of engineers would mean greater competition for each job. And given how much of an accelerant GPT is, I think learning how to prompt and validate responses will be increasingly important. For example, if you compare an average CS grad with a 4y career to an average CS grad with a 6 year career, the more experienced developer might be 5-20% more efficient. But with GPT, an engineer who writes amazing prompts versus might be 2-4x more efficient than an engineer that writes average prompts and has to spend time fixing code, debugging or re-prompting.

beepbooptheory 4y ago

Honestly at this point I am just looking forward to us taking this stuff for granted. Its all very nice and useful, but I think my threshold for guffawing at it is smaller than most. I know we still got some time left in the cycle, but I just want people to calm down and just start using it. Yes, cool, you did xyz all at once, but what did you make with it? It's kinda akin to the whole "using rust" phenomenon. I only marginally care that you made it in rust, I care more about the thing itself you made! I don't wanna come off sounding prescriptive, certainly stay in the hype world as long as you want, and I know there was a new bigger and better model that came out less than 12hrs ago. But just personally I am looking forward to the inevitable future where how you made the thing stops being as or more important as the what. Just miss the sense of inspiration you can gleam from someone else's work. Don't think AI will obsolete that ever, however much it can obsolete boilerplate code and even tricky discrete problems.

tracerbulletx 4y ago
The model IS the thing that has been made, it is the impressive accomplishment. People are awed by that. The examples are just people testing the limits of its capabilities. It's like being present at the splitting of the atom and asking ya but what have you actually powered with it.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  Yes, I get it! Its amazing, impressive, all those things. Its just been like six months of this kind of discourse if you count DALLE and stable diffusion, I'm personally just tired of the orbit around it. I want to see the amazing future it can make is all. The future that doesnt just contain itself! I'm not saying this is normal for me to feel, maybe I'm wrong to not stop and smell the flowers more.. Insofar as this is a tool, I want to see the houses not a continuing parade of hammers. I want to see a nuclear reactor!
sublinear 4y ago
> personally I am looking forward to the inevitable future where how you made the thing stops being as or more important as the what Believe it or not, there's plenty of software out there written towards well-defined specifications that are non-negotiable and beyond the mere impression of some result. Implementation details absolutely matter. These specifications are of course subject to change, but not arbitrary. Due to this inflexibility and continuous review of best practices done by experienced humans who are consciously and deliberately creating these standards, I doubt the "how" will ever take a back seat to the "what". Pretty much all modern industry apart from gimmicky consumer gizmos are existentially about the "how". Taking humans out of the equation doesn't even make sense and any attempt to do so would be objectively worse in every way.

hammock 4y ago

What is the cost per day to use GPT-4 to code vs paying a developer?

zamnos 4y ago

Is it? According to OpenAI's paper GPT-4 GPT-4 (no vision) GPT-3.5 Leetcode (easy) 31 / 41 31 / 41 12 / 41 Leetcode (medium) 21 / 80 21 / 80 8 / 80 Leetcode (hard) 3 / 45 3 / 45 0 / 45 https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf Table 1; page 5. So it's better than GPT-3.5, but still pretty pathetic at hard Leetcode problems. If your programming job is closer to leetcode easy problems you might be in trouble, but for the real problems that aren't just gluing some libraries together your job is safe.

yieldcrv 4y ago
people are impressed because you never need to do leetcode hard problems in any business anywhere in your career to make a few billion dollars. I would fire anybody using company time trying to reinvent some academic search thing instead of just using the hashmap.
- zamnos 4y ago
  Reimplementing quicksort in a language the rest of the company doesn't use in a part of the software that no one ever touches is fireable, sure, but I suspect that on the way to ChatGPT there were more than a couple "Leedcode hard"-grade problems that OpenAI engineers and PhDs solved because the library for that didn't exist before.
- gptgpp 4y ago
  [dead]
dougmwne 4y ago
That’s better than a lot of professional engineers can do, but I agree that it is unlikely to get hired in a senior FAANG role.
capableweb 4y ago
What is "Leetcode (hard)" specifically? Searching for it brought me to a website (https://leetcode.com/ https://leetcode.com/) but I'm assuming that is referring to some special list of problems that are meant to be harder than others, but I cannot find that.

primax 4y ago

I'd like to start writing something based on GPT to build web scrapers, probably on top of Colly and Gorm. Is there a good resource for learning how to feed external data into GPT?

amelius 4y ago

Since GPT is good at language, perhaps we can use it to generate documentation for software systems.

willcodeforfoo 4y ago

I wonder if this could be used to port entire projects/libraries to different languages almost completely automatically? ElasticSearch in Rust? Wondering about the legal/license ramifications of doing so...

awb 4y ago

I had endless trouble trying to get GPT 3 and now 4 to reverse engineer a generic function: result1 = Func1(input1) result2 = Func2(result1) I want to give it result2 and have it tell me what input1 should be. It’s attempts to implement a binary search have all failed. Other programs have been largely positive though.

bob1029 4y ago

My current take is that it's actually kind of bad at code in a lot of very important ways, but it is so good at getting to ~95% that you don't even feel the missing pieces once you are in flow. Having skills in the target area are important, but some quick runtime testing usually closes the gap. The added confidence from being able to scream a horrible demand into the void and get back something nearly complete is beyond unbelievable to me. I'm making attempts at projects that I would never have considered otherwise, and I am becoming increasingly emboldened by the capability - "Without using 3rd party dependencies" is probably my #1 prompt nudge right now.

mock-possum 4y ago
yeah that's where I'm at too - it's great that it gets you 95% there, genuinely, but unless you know how to recognize the missing 5%, it's not going to mean much. Broken code is broken code - a single wrong character can render the entire thing unusable. What's fun is asking it for code solutions, and then asking it to debug its own functions - if it's 95% effective at debugging code that is 95% correct, where does that leave you?

cozzyd 4y ago

I wonder how well it compares to a compiler at converting C++ or rust to assembly. (C is too easy, almost anyone can do that by hand...)

mr_toad 4y ago
I’d guess it would do badly. There isn’t much assembly code on the web for it to be trained on.

sualehasif 4y ago

OP here. We're hiring! We're an early-stage startup, with funding from OpenAI, building the next-generation AI code editor. If you're the best hacker or designer ever, reach out to me at sualeh@anysphere.co. The problems we work on are really fun (extremely fast context retrieval from across big codebases, connecting language servers to language models, instruction-tuned embedddings) and we think the potential of what we're building is enormous (make all software engineers literally 10x more productive).

impulser_ 4y ago

Unless these models are updated frequently it not going to be better than a human. ChatGPT doesn't even know Go has generics yet. Now imagine is suggesting you a inferior way of doing something because it doesn't know that a bug as been fixed or a better feature/version has been implemented. It often recommends made up libraries, or libraries that don't exists anymore. It even recommended using a Go wiki page as an import for an experimental Go library because it doesn't know the the experimental library has been merged into Go std lib. Another big problem I had was with algorithms. It would suggestion working code for an algorithm but would contain bugs that would completely defeat using the algorithm in the first place. So if you don't know what your doing you would think it was giving you working code because it compiles, but it in fact it gave you bad code. Yeah, it might be good at doing very basic and boring things, but I would never trust it for anything complex. You won't know you shot yourself in the foot until later on when you have to spend hours debugging a bug because you C+P code from ChatGPT.

sualehasif 4y ago
GPT-4 certainly is aware of go generics. Do you have an example you would like to test?
- impulser_ 4y ago
  It does know that Go has generics if you ask it because 1.17 had experimental generics. But it doesn't know about 1.18 which is the official release of generics. For example it doesn't know that Go has the any type that can be used in place for interface{}.

TrackerFF 4y ago

In a couple of years the mythical 10x engineers will probably be 100x engineers, depending on how well they've managed to integrate this tech into their tooling.

jabloczko 4y ago

What I've noted is that GPT is really good at things that have really good documentation. The example of kube-tf in this repo is a perfect example. The Kubernetes documentation and all of Hashicorp's documentation is excellent. GPT will have infinite examples of good code to stitch together code for the task in this example. Now I've been running a private cloud at work on the OpenNebula platform, which has documentation that is definitely lacking. I tried to ask GPT to write some basic code in Python such as "Give me a list of VMs from the OpenNebula API in a powered off state that have a start time older than 30 days." What I noted was that it would spit out code that looked correct on the surface, but would not run. It would take a decent amount of me modifying the code until I got my desired result. Since there was no documentation, I was just reading through the OpenNebula packages themselves to understand what to do. The nice thing, though, is that it was a great starting point. Much in the same way I might take a code snippet from StackOverflow and modify it to suit my own needs. I listened to a great podcast titled "The Trouble with AI" on Making Sense with Sam Harris. One of the key takeaways I grabbed from it was that GPT is an LLM not an AI. What it is very good at is predicting the next correct character or word in a sequence based off of other examples. But it does not actually fundamentally understand what it is outputting. In order to demonstrate, open up a session with ChatGPT really quickly and ask it a single digit multiplication question. Such as "What is 3 multiplied by 4?" and you will see a correct answer. Next, ask it something a bit larger, like "What is 12366 multiplied by 981632?" and you will get an incorrect answer but one that looks pretty close to correct. Validate with a calculator yourself. The reason being, as an LLM it doesn't actually understand multiplication. Instead it has just seen 3 multiplied by 4 countless times in the data it ingested when it was being "trained", but never has seen larger number examples of multiplication. Not that it knows multiplication in the first place. GPT is fantastic, but as of right now it needs to be used as a starting point towards knowledge or something concrete. I wouldn't trust it as an authoritative source on anything quite yet. It is fantastic for generating a bit of code and then allowing the developer to tweak that code until it actually works.

euroderf 4y ago
> What I've noted is that GPT is really good at things that have really good documentation. As a technical communicator, I interpret this to mean that yes, we are all going to die at the hands of GPT-13.

lisasays 4y ago

I'm the "really good", but definitely not "phenomenal" camp. That is, it works - but what is with the repeated class declaration for every h3 element? <h3 class="text-xl font-bold mb-2">1. Pruning</h3> The whole point of CSS is to have to declare properties like this once, and only once, for a group of functionally similar elements. Also note that switchTab has to be told the position of the tab it's switching to (it should be able to infer that the element's id, or its position in the list). Also note that the function has a hard-coded tab count baked in - a stealth bug waiting to be tripped on. And why do we need to explicitly toggle the border-b-2 and border-yellow-400 properties? Shouldn't these be tucked away under some kind of class declaration (the same way the hidden property works)? This may sound like nitpicking, but it's not - code like this becomes really hard to maintain at scale. And just imagine someone asking this thing to generate an algorithm to say, determine whether someone's medical procedure should be covered under insurance or not.

tuvan 4y ago
Tailwind CSS is very popular and uses this kind of classes. They might be using that CSS framework in the code base.
drusepth 4y ago
They're using TailwindCSS for this, which is full of one-liner utility classes that effectively "replace" CSS classes by moving the equivalent CSS into your HTML. However, what they're not using is Tailwind's `@apply` directive [1] which basically encapsulates these repeated declarations with a repeatable, named CSS class. Doing so would replace their h3 tags with something like <h3 class="header">1. Pruning</h3> and CSS of h3.header { @apply text-xl font-bold mb-2; } It's not the biggest change and it's debatable how much cleaner the code ends up being. In my experience with TailwindCSS, I don't see a lot of companies using @apply until late in the code lifecycle, if at all. It's often way faster to just use the utility classes directly, and then you find yourself with a site that's already built and looks great -- and very little reason to allocate dev time to go back and abstract away repeated CSS. Tailwind also has this to say WRT using it: > Whatever you do, don’t use @apply just to make things look “cleaner”. Yes, HTML templates littered with Tailwind classes are kind of ugly. Making changes in a project that has tons of custom CSS is worse. If you start using @apply for everything, you are basically just writing CSS again and throwing away all of the workflow and maintainability advantages Tailwind gives you. [1] https://tailwindcss.com/docs/reusing-styles#extracting-classes-with-apply https://tailwindcss.com/docs/reusing-styles#extracting-class...

softwaredoug 4y ago

We're in a situation where junior side of the software job market has really dried up. My question is whether the junior side will ever come back? Will we ever have tech companies like we've had, with massive intern -> junior pipelines, gradually developing senior devs? Or will there by a narrower pipeline, with fewer senior devs working with AI tools? An optimistic take is that by automating a lot of mundane work, our level of craftsmanship and creativity can increase. That we can have a much higher bar for quality and professionalism. Unfortunately it will also mean a lot of junior folks may never get back into software jobs.

nottathrowaway3 4y ago
> Unfortunately it will also mean a lot of junior folks may never get back into software jobs. Why do you suppose this age-based partitioning is going to happen? There are a lot of senior people who are less effective than bright juniors. Being a good software engineer can always be learned. I think what's more likely is that the quality bar in general will be raised across all age bands.
- softwaredoug 4y ago
  I don't at all mean "junior" or "senior" as "age" but capabilities. I know lots of young senior/staff :) And plenty of new developers in their 40s plus.
  - claritise 4y ago
    At this point these titles really have become pretty meaningless... A good developer will build and use the tools they have access to, a bad developer will fall behind.

j3s 4y ago

writing code is like 10% of what most people in tech do. this will impact startups the most. but GPT-N can't have a conversation for you.

baerrie 4y ago

Until GPT becomes more trustworthy and fun to work with than the average person, my job is safe :)

amanzi 4y ago

I just asked GPT-4 to "generate an ansible playbook that will install oh-my-zsh on a linux computer?" It did a much better job of the playbook than the one I created last week. GPT-4 did it in a few seconds, and mine took about an hour of Googling.

johnrushx 4y ago

The future of programming is in AI - tools like replit, marsx.dev, and github copilot are bound to impress us soon.