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I don’t think you’ve tried GPT-4. If you have, I don’t think you are like majority of devs (maybe not on HN, but in real life). You sound lucky to have true,

I don’t think you’ve tried GPT-4. If you have, I don’t think you are like majority of devs (maybe not on HN, but in real life). You sound lucky to have true, novel problems to solve each day. I’m with many here commenting that this is quite powerful stuff, especially when my day-to-day is writing simple CRUD apps, or transforming data from one format to another within an API, or configuring some new bit of infra or CI/CD. I’d love to be challenged in some new way, and have access to truly fascinating problems that require novel solutions. But most enterprises aren’t really like that nor do that need that from majority of engineers.

whateveracct 4y ago
There's not such thing as actually boring CRUD. I've worked at many companies and founded my own. Even when it felt like CRUD, a year+ in it was clear that tasteful decisions pay off and iteration and cost gradients matter. GPT doesn't sniff that. I agree with GP - day 2 dev me outclasses it, which means it isn't replacing anyone.
- anonzzzies 4y ago
  HN echo chamber. Generally the better/best programmers hang around here; your day 2 was probably better than many coders hope to achieve in their whole lives. It is replacing people already; I personally know about 10 people who have been fired or assigned to a completely different position because gpt did a faster and better or equal job. So ‘not anyone’ is simply nonsense; I am only one person, there will be many many more who see the same thing. Of course they are not told they are replaced by ai when fired, but their managers or more skilled colleagues know. I do agree that there is no boring crud; that’s why gpt or no code tools are not good for full solutions (yet), but it’ll get there I am sure.
  - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
    > I personally know about 10 people who have been fired or assigned to a completely different position because gpt did a faster and better or equal job Please elaborate. And, if true, this would be a major news story that Vox or any number of major newspapers would love to write about - so have you approached the media about this? If not, why not?
    - anonzzzies 4y ago
      > Please elaborate. I simply know firsthand (i'm old, i have manager, cto, ceo friends who I go golf and play squash with) that people in data entry and programming have been let go in the past weeks because 1 person could take over their work using the gtp/chatgpt api's and do their work faster with less errors. I am recommending the same in my company as a lot of my colleagues are doing nothing anymore as the skilled seniors are doing it themselves with gpt now as it's faster, less communication etc. We feed jira issues into gpt and it generates code; we review and refine or fix ourselves. It works much much faster and with better results. Most things most of us do all day is integrating ancient API's of partners and so mapping xml/soap/... api's to our json schema's. With chatgpt that's really fast and mostly painless; it even renames the properties that need to be changed to our enums properly. With humans this is a painful and slow process, especially with people who are fast and loose (broken education seems to made many of those graduate just by cheer production speed & volume instead of quality; gpt can do that better too...). > so have you approached the media about this? If not, why not? Why would I do that? Even anonymous, it doesn't seem to make much sense for me to do that. Anyway; that'll come soon enough as it will be common soon.
      - oblio 4y ago
        How does this work from an IP perspective? Aren't you feeding OpenAI and Microsoft with your confidential information? Also, what license is the code under when you get it back?
        anonzzzies 4y ago
        I take care not to feed it secrets ; this is just boring ERP stuff without the magic numbers (they are not needed to create or test; we use test data normally as well, as we cannot give that to outsourcing companies either, so there is no difference in work).
        oblio 4y ago
        And the output? Are you allowed to use their code for your own projects or company?
nitwit005 4y ago
If all you're doing is very simple crud apps and transforming API responses, your coding is already replaceable with "no code" tools.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  I'm still waiting for the no-code tools that can replace me, the API Glue Coder. They've been promising those since the early 2000's, but I'm still employed. Some stuff has been automated by Zapier, IFTTT and the like, but most of the systems I'm integrating with don't have public APIs.
  - joenot443 4y ago
    "I'm still waiting for the automobile that can replace me, the Horse Carriage Driver. They've been promising those since the 1880s, but I've still got passengers in my carriage every day!" Obviously it's a cheeky example, but this would not be the first time in history a previously well-established career was upended in a (relatively) short amount of time. I'm a FAANG dev, I've got skin in the game too and I'm trying to be optimistic, but I can't help but be at least a little worried. From Wikipedia - "In 1890 there were 13,800 companies in the United States in the business of building carriages pulled by horses. By 1920, only 90 such companies remained." I don't think we'll be out of the job entirely, but I can definitely imagine the bar being raised and the compensation stagnating as we now have to justify the time and cost of our work compared to the near-free, near-instantaneous output of an LLM. All that being said, if you've been working since the 2000s, you've got nearly a 20 year head-start on me, so perhaps it makes sense for me to be a bit more worried.
    - theshrike79 4y ago
      > All that being said, if you've been working since the 2000s, you've got nearly a 20 year head-start on me, so perhaps it makes sense for me to be a bit more worried. Yea, that's mostly why I get hired. Experience gives people a certain intuition on what kind of solutions work for which cases. And when you've been working long enough, you don't (hopefully) feel the need to do cool bleeding edge shit at work, you just want the work code to ... work. You pick the simplest and most boring solution possible so you can clock out at 1600 and not think about services crashing because the newfangled thingamageek coded with the latest language du jour failed because of an edge case nobody has seen before.
theK 4y ago
On the flip side, I am having a great time charging enterprises exorbitant hourly rates to come in and help them fix their crappy crud programms. But I still don’t know if I am thrilled by the prospect of being called in to make their monkeypatched, GPT generated project work.
- hnfong 4y ago
  "Hey GPT-X: Can you refactor the codebase in gpt@monkeypatched-crap.git for me? Preferably in the style of gpt@crappycrud.git that I worked on last year."
  - theK 4y ago
    Token cap will probably be the biggest problem here. After validation. After getting the changes to disk, documented, actually compiling, etc… But the biggest problem is that transferring the nuance that is external to the code base is typically really tiresome and lengthy grunt work and again token cap.
    - anonzzzies 4y ago
      They went from 4K to 32k in a few months. Wait a few years.
      - Jensson 4y ago
        GPT-3 is 3 years old, not a few months.
        anonzzzies 4y ago
        Sure but the token jump to 32k is new isn’t it? Even 8k to 32k is significant and that was this year.
        Jensson 4y ago
        Yeah, but the jump to 32k didn't take a few months, it was years in the making. Otherwise you could extrapolate with "yesterday we had 4k, today we have 32k, tomorrow we will have 256k", that isn't how we do it. If we follow the same exponential pace 256k would have to wait 3 years, and even that is unlikely.
shinycode 4y ago
Also if all the company is doing is boring crud app as a service then the whole company is going to disappear once anyone can ask ChatGPT to create a version of the service for themselves
- Maxion 4y ago
  Most CRUD apps in enterprise settings relate to something in the real world. E.g. ordering systems, warehouse management and so on. The hard part here isn’t really the coding - but understanding the business logic and getting it out of the customer what they need. Often the customer hasn’t even got a good enough grasp on their own business to be able to formulate what they need. In the short term this ai tools will make the programming part easier but the planning part is still hard.
  - paganel 4y ago
    Excellent response. I also wanted to add about the myriad of incoming data formats that need to be processed and the myriad of data exports that one has to implement for most of those "boring" CRUD apps. If one hasn't written code that includes comments like "Special case, California does it this way" or "Alberta needs an .xml export, not an .xsl one", with a link to a .pdf spec that points to somewhere on the internet, then he/she hasn't got to know what it really means to write a true and "boring" CRUD app.
    - Maxion 4y ago
      And n+1 things that HAVE to be done against the spec. Or that for some region some field has to be hidden, but only for that region - not any else.
  - spratzt 4y ago
    ‘Understanding the business logic and getting it out of the customer’ is precisely what a lot of programmers are bad at doing. Many would rather talk to a compiler than a human being. For them, ChatGPT is a real existential threat.
  - 4y ago

whateveracct 4y ago

There's not such thing as actually boring CRUD. I've worked at many companies and founded my own. Even when it felt like CRUD, a year+ in it was clear that tasteful decisions pay off and iteration and cost gradients matter. GPT doesn't sniff that. I agree with GP - day 2 dev me outclasses it, which means it isn't replacing anyone.

anonzzzies 4y ago
HN echo chamber. Generally the better/best programmers hang around here; your day 2 was probably better than many coders hope to achieve in their whole lives. It is replacing people already; I personally know about 10 people who have been fired or assigned to a completely different position because gpt did a faster and better or equal job. So ‘not anyone’ is simply nonsense; I am only one person, there will be many many more who see the same thing. Of course they are not told they are replaced by ai when fired, but their managers or more skilled colleagues know. I do agree that there is no boring crud; that’s why gpt or no code tools are not good for full solutions (yet), but it’ll get there I am sure.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  > I personally know about 10 people who have been fired or assigned to a completely different position because gpt did a faster and better or equal job Please elaborate. And, if true, this would be a major news story that Vox or any number of major newspapers would love to write about - so have you approached the media about this? If not, why not?
  - anonzzzies 4y ago
    > Please elaborate. I simply know firsthand (i'm old, i have manager, cto, ceo friends who I go golf and play squash with) that people in data entry and programming have been let go in the past weeks because 1 person could take over their work using the gtp/chatgpt api's and do their work faster with less errors. I am recommending the same in my company as a lot of my colleagues are doing nothing anymore as the skilled seniors are doing it themselves with gpt now as it's faster, less communication etc. We feed jira issues into gpt and it generates code; we review and refine or fix ourselves. It works much much faster and with better results. Most things most of us do all day is integrating ancient API's of partners and so mapping xml/soap/... api's to our json schema's. With chatgpt that's really fast and mostly painless; it even renames the properties that need to be changed to our enums properly. With humans this is a painful and slow process, especially with people who are fast and loose (broken education seems to made many of those graduate just by cheer production speed & volume instead of quality; gpt can do that better too...). > so have you approached the media about this? If not, why not? Why would I do that? Even anonymous, it doesn't seem to make much sense for me to do that. Anyway; that'll come soon enough as it will be common soon.
    - oblio 4y ago
      How does this work from an IP perspective? Aren't you feeding OpenAI and Microsoft with your confidential information? Also, what license is the code under when you get it back?
      - anonzzzies 4y ago
        I take care not to feed it secrets ; this is just boring ERP stuff without the magic numbers (they are not needed to create or test; we use test data normally as well, as we cannot give that to outsourcing companies either, so there is no difference in work).
        oblio 4y ago
        And the output? Are you allowed to use their code for your own projects or company?

nitwit005 4y ago

If all you're doing is very simple crud apps and transforming API responses, your coding is already replaceable with "no code" tools.

theshrike79 4y ago
I'm still waiting for the no-code tools that can replace me, the API Glue Coder. They've been promising those since the early 2000's, but I'm still employed. Some stuff has been automated by Zapier, IFTTT and the like, but most of the systems I'm integrating with don't have public APIs.
- joenot443 4y ago
  "I'm still waiting for the automobile that can replace me, the Horse Carriage Driver. They've been promising those since the 1880s, but I've still got passengers in my carriage every day!" Obviously it's a cheeky example, but this would not be the first time in history a previously well-established career was upended in a (relatively) short amount of time. I'm a FAANG dev, I've got skin in the game too and I'm trying to be optimistic, but I can't help but be at least a little worried. From Wikipedia - "In 1890 there were 13,800 companies in the United States in the business of building carriages pulled by horses. By 1920, only 90 such companies remained." I don't think we'll be out of the job entirely, but I can definitely imagine the bar being raised and the compensation stagnating as we now have to justify the time and cost of our work compared to the near-free, near-instantaneous output of an LLM. All that being said, if you've been working since the 2000s, you've got nearly a 20 year head-start on me, so perhaps it makes sense for me to be a bit more worried.
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    > All that being said, if you've been working since the 2000s, you've got nearly a 20 year head-start on me, so perhaps it makes sense for me to be a bit more worried. Yea, that's mostly why I get hired. Experience gives people a certain intuition on what kind of solutions work for which cases. And when you've been working long enough, you don't (hopefully) feel the need to do cool bleeding edge shit at work, you just want the work code to ... work. You pick the simplest and most boring solution possible so you can clock out at 1600 and not think about services crashing because the newfangled thingamageek coded with the latest language du jour failed because of an edge case nobody has seen before.

theK 4y ago

On the flip side, I am having a great time charging enterprises exorbitant hourly rates to come in and help them fix their crappy crud programms. But I still don’t know if I am thrilled by the prospect of being called in to make their monkeypatched, GPT generated project work.

hnfong 4y ago
"Hey GPT-X: Can you refactor the codebase in gpt@monkeypatched-crap.git for me? Preferably in the style of gpt@crappycrud.git that I worked on last year."
- theK 4y ago
  Token cap will probably be the biggest problem here. After validation. After getting the changes to disk, documented, actually compiling, etc… But the biggest problem is that transferring the nuance that is external to the code base is typically really tiresome and lengthy grunt work and again token cap.
  - anonzzzies 4y ago
    They went from 4K to 32k in a few months. Wait a few years.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      GPT-3 is 3 years old, not a few months.
      - anonzzzies 4y ago
        Sure but the token jump to 32k is new isn’t it? Even 8k to 32k is significant and that was this year.
        Jensson 4y ago
        Yeah, but the jump to 32k didn't take a few months, it was years in the making. Otherwise you could extrapolate with "yesterday we had 4k, today we have 32k, tomorrow we will have 256k", that isn't how we do it. If we follow the same exponential pace 256k would have to wait 3 years, and even that is unlikely.

shinycode 4y ago

Also if all the company is doing is boring crud app as a service then the whole company is going to disappear once anyone can ask ChatGPT to create a version of the service for themselves

Maxion 4y ago
Most CRUD apps in enterprise settings relate to something in the real world. E.g. ordering systems, warehouse management and so on. The hard part here isn’t really the coding - but understanding the business logic and getting it out of the customer what they need. Often the customer hasn’t even got a good enough grasp on their own business to be able to formulate what they need. In the short term this ai tools will make the programming part easier but the planning part is still hard.
- paganel 4y ago
  Excellent response. I also wanted to add about the myriad of incoming data formats that need to be processed and the myriad of data exports that one has to implement for most of those "boring" CRUD apps. If one hasn't written code that includes comments like "Special case, California does it this way" or "Alberta needs an .xml export, not an .xsl one", with a link to a .pdf spec that points to somewhere on the internet, then he/she hasn't got to know what it really means to write a true and "boring" CRUD app.
  - Maxion 4y ago
    And n+1 things that HAVE to be done against the spec. Or that for some region some field has to be hidden, but only for that region - not any else.
- spratzt 4y ago
  ‘Understanding the business logic and getting it out of the customer’ is precisely what a lot of programmers are bad at doing. Many would rather talk to a compiler than a human being. For them, ChatGPT is a real existential threat.
- 4y ago