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Programming takes little effort. It's at most 20% of my effort. Feels like GPT is programming with extra steps. Maybe it's for people who can never think progr

Programming takes little effort. It's at most 20% of my effort. Feels like GPT is programming with extra steps. Maybe it's for people who can never think programming is easy. Clearly there's a lot of such types. Explains a lot.

noitpmeder 4y ago
/r/iamverysmart I'm reminded of the old "Handyman's Invoice" trope. Actually implementing a solution is not the hard part. What _is_ hard is determining what the solution is in the first place. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/ Once you have a rough idea of the solution, sure maybe GPT-4 can barf snippets to get you there. But it's lightyears away from translating business problems into actionable solutions.
- danielbln 4y ago
  > But it's lightyears away from translating business problems into actionable solutions. Is it though? Have you tried feeding it business problems and working through to possible solutions paths? Have you roped in additional external information (via agents, tools, vector search, etc.) during that process? I don't see why the model wouldn't be able to translate a lot of business problems into solutions paths.
sabellito 4y ago
What I've seen in this thread so far is some people saying "this is really useful in these particular cases" and some others, like yourself, saying "I'm too smart for this, maybe it's useful for inexperienced/incompetent people".
- whateveracct 4y ago
  I don't even think it's useful for the incompetent. I do think the incompetent think it's useful tho.
  - stormfather 4y ago
    That's like saying a calculator isn't useful just because you're good at mental math. The ability to adapt and extract value from new tools is a mark of competence.
    - whateveracct 4y ago
      Using natural language to code isn't going to help me. It's less dense informationally already. I don't have a stream of natural language in my head when I program or build software, so it's not free to use GPT. This may be a Haskell thing. But I did try and even for small programs it was cute but not actually an efficiency gain over me just doing it. Not to mention in real life, I have to deal with fallout and bugs and I think GPT deprives me of key processes that allow me to be excellent in that regard. If you aren't a coder and code a backend with GPT, what do you do when the shit hits the fan?
      - ldhough 4y ago
        I mostly work in Clojure and I've noticed this as well, it is usually more efficient to just write it myself if I know what I want to do. However for a language or stack I don't understand well where I just need something quick and dirty it really shines... I had to work with a JS visualization library and got it to write what I needed over 10-15 iterations, much faster than if I actually had to learn the library. General programming knowledge sufficed for noticing things that didn't look right and since the output was visual that helped to sanity check the output as well.
    - krainboltgreene 4y ago
      Imagine a calculator that crowdsources it's answers from the populace, how useful is that tool to the incompetent? How easily would the incompetent be able to tell it's bad? That's what we're talking about: An autocomplete machine that has been trained on a million blog posts that contain some code, that maybe correct, incorrect, secure, insecure, outdated or uptodate and the machine can't tell the difference! It only knows what is and is not likely! So the more popular the wrong answer was replicated on the web, the more likely that's what you'll get!
capableweb 4y ago
I think programming is very easy most of the time, most time I spend is just typing/moving code around, figuring out the solution is the easy part for me, only the computer<>brain coordination is slowing me down most of the time. But there are things that are harder for me, or more complex maybe. I struggle with math, and always had, so anything involving heavy math or algorithms is harder for me (I'm a hacker, not a computer scientist, if you will). For these things, I found GPT4 to be very helpful. I can write what I want, get a WIP version back, work out some kinks with it myself and ask it to rewrite it if it's not perfect, until I have a perfect version. Add some unit tests, find more things that are missing/wrong (sometimes), more back and forward. Before GPT4 I either just tried to work around having to deal with heavy math, or find people IRL that could help me. Now I'm a lot faster even if it involves math, because of GPT4.
- whateveracct 4y ago
  So you write the unit tests yourself to confirm the code you say you can't understand is correct? That's an interesting approach. But you'd probably need more tests than usual to gain confidence, so you are losing efficiency there (although the ceiling-raising nature of it is interesting). What happens in production when there's a bug in the complex code you punted to GPT? How do you debug?
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Basically. I'm not sure I'm losing much efficiency, my previous approach was contacting friends who know how to do math in programming, sometimes it could days before I could move past the issue. And the result is the same, ending up with a piece of code I mostly understand, but struggled to write myself so the knowledge is fleeting at best. Just to be clear, the context here is me writing games for fun, while struggling with the math heavy parts. I would never professionally use GPT4 for anything, and wouldn't push anything to production that I don't 100% understand, that would be failing at my profession and I take bigger pride in my work than that. But for fucking around with games in my free time, it has made me a lot of efficient at the parts I'm struggling with.

noitpmeder 4y ago

/r/iamverysmart I'm reminded of the old "Handyman's Invoice" trope. Actually implementing a solution is not the hard part. What _is_ hard is determining what the solution is in the first place. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/ Once you have a rough idea of the solution, sure maybe GPT-4 can barf snippets to get you there. But it's lightyears away from translating business problems into actionable solutions.

danielbln 4y ago
> But it's lightyears away from translating business problems into actionable solutions. Is it though? Have you tried feeding it business problems and working through to possible solutions paths? Have you roped in additional external information (via agents, tools, vector search, etc.) during that process? I don't see why the model wouldn't be able to translate a lot of business problems into solutions paths.

sabellito 4y ago

What I've seen in this thread so far is some people saying "this is really useful in these particular cases" and some others, like yourself, saying "I'm too smart for this, maybe it's useful for inexperienced/incompetent people".

whateveracct 4y ago
I don't even think it's useful for the incompetent. I do think the incompetent think it's useful tho.
- stormfather 4y ago
  That's like saying a calculator isn't useful just because you're good at mental math. The ability to adapt and extract value from new tools is a mark of competence.
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    Using natural language to code isn't going to help me. It's less dense informationally already. I don't have a stream of natural language in my head when I program or build software, so it's not free to use GPT. This may be a Haskell thing. But I did try and even for small programs it was cute but not actually an efficiency gain over me just doing it. Not to mention in real life, I have to deal with fallout and bugs and I think GPT deprives me of key processes that allow me to be excellent in that regard. If you aren't a coder and code a backend with GPT, what do you do when the shit hits the fan?
    - ldhough 4y ago
      I mostly work in Clojure and I've noticed this as well, it is usually more efficient to just write it myself if I know what I want to do. However for a language or stack I don't understand well where I just need something quick and dirty it really shines... I had to work with a JS visualization library and got it to write what I needed over 10-15 iterations, much faster than if I actually had to learn the library. General programming knowledge sufficed for noticing things that didn't look right and since the output was visual that helped to sanity check the output as well.
  - krainboltgreene 4y ago
    Imagine a calculator that crowdsources it's answers from the populace, how useful is that tool to the incompetent? How easily would the incompetent be able to tell it's bad? That's what we're talking about: An autocomplete machine that has been trained on a million blog posts that contain some code, that maybe correct, incorrect, secure, insecure, outdated or uptodate and the machine can't tell the difference! It only knows what is and is not likely! So the more popular the wrong answer was replicated on the web, the more likely that's what you'll get!

capableweb 4y ago

I think programming is very easy most of the time, most time I spend is just typing/moving code around, figuring out the solution is the easy part for me, only the computer<>brain coordination is slowing me down most of the time. But there are things that are harder for me, or more complex maybe. I struggle with math, and always had, so anything involving heavy math or algorithms is harder for me (I'm a hacker, not a computer scientist, if you will). For these things, I found GPT4 to be very helpful. I can write what I want, get a WIP version back, work out some kinks with it myself and ask it to rewrite it if it's not perfect, until I have a perfect version. Add some unit tests, find more things that are missing/wrong (sometimes), more back and forward. Before GPT4 I either just tried to work around having to deal with heavy math, or find people IRL that could help me. Now I'm a lot faster even if it involves math, because of GPT4.

whateveracct 4y ago
So you write the unit tests yourself to confirm the code you say you can't understand is correct? That's an interesting approach. But you'd probably need more tests than usual to gain confidence, so you are losing efficiency there (although the ceiling-raising nature of it is interesting). What happens in production when there's a bug in the complex code you punted to GPT? How do you debug?
- capableweb 4y ago
  Basically. I'm not sure I'm losing much efficiency, my previous approach was contacting friends who know how to do math in programming, sometimes it could days before I could move past the issue. And the result is the same, ending up with a piece of code I mostly understand, but struggled to write myself so the knowledge is fleeting at best. Just to be clear, the context here is me writing games for fun, while struggling with the math heavy parts. I would never professionally use GPT4 for anything, and wouldn't push anything to production that I don't 100% understand, that would be failing at my profession and I take bigger pride in my work than that. But for fucking around with games in my free time, it has made me a lot of efficient at the parts I'm struggling with.