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An average programmer's main job is to track down and fix bugs that shouldn't exist inside software that shouldn't exist build on frameworks that shouldn't exis

An average programmer's main job is to track down and fix bugs that shouldn't exist inside software that shouldn't exist build on frameworks that shouldn't exist for companies that shouldn't exist solving problems that shouldn't exist in industry niches that shouldn't exist. I'm 100% convinced that, if someone comes along and creates something that actually obsoletes 95% of programming jobs, everyone would very quickly come to the conclusion that they don't need it and it doesn't work anyway.

ChatGTP 4y ago
It’s pretty true, someone today on here wrote, “teach it to understand swagger”, I actually laughed, like I’ve used swagger and it often turns into a Frankenstein, and sometimes for good reason. I completely understand the sentiment and I like swagger. I believe the world is wiggly, not geometrically perfect, intellectuals struggle with that because square problems are easier to solve. Ideal scenarios are predictable and it’s what we like to think about. Have you ever had to use a sleep() intentionally just to get something shipped ? That’s a wiggle. We’re going to try square out the world so we can use ChatGPT to solve wiggly problems. It’s going to be interesting. Yesterday I tried to use a SaaS product and due to some obscurity my account has issues and the API wouldn’t work, they have a well specified API but it still didn’t work out, I’ve been working with the support team to resolve it, but this is what I call a wiggle, they seem to exist everywhere. Ask a construction worker about them.
- matwood 4y ago
  > Ask a construction worker about them. Hah. So true. The more I work on renovating parts of my house the more I see where a workers experience kicked in the finagle something. Very analogous to programming. All the parts that fit together perfectly are already easy today. It’s those bits that aren’t square, but also need to fit where the ‘art’ comes in. Can AI also do that part? IDK, currently I believe it will simply help us do the art part much like the computer in Star Trek.
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    I’m positive about it, there is a lot of repetition in coding and it’s rare we get to spend the time on the good bits because of it. If we need a semi-intelligent system to help us with the copy pasta, so be it.
- kybernetikos 4y ago
  Actually chat gpt is quite good at understanding some kinds of wiggliness. I built a restful api and documented it in a readme.md file in the wiggliest of ways. I then asked chatgpt to turn the readme into a swagger spec and then give me a page that read the spec and gave me a nice doc page with api exercise tool. Both tasks it performed really well and saved me a whole bunch of time.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    I have some meticulous API docs I've written, which I tried to get ChatGPT to convert into swagger It failed spectacularly I wonder if it's because the API is quite large, and I had to paste in ~10 messages worth of API docs before I was finished. It kept repeating segments of the same routes/paths and wasn't able to provide anything cohesive or useful to me. Was your API pretty small? Or were your docs pretty concise?
    - kybernetikos 4y ago
      Chatgpt has a token limit. If you exceeded it then it would have no way of delivering a good result because it would simply have dirtied what you said at first. My api was not huge, about 8 endpoints.
    - ilaksh 4y ago
      It can accept about 4k tokens, maybe 3000 words or 3500. GPT-4 can now accept 8k or 32k. The 32k version is 8 times larger than the one you tried. And these advances have come in a matter of a few months. Over the next several years we should expect at least one, quite easily two or more orders of magnitude improvements. I don't believe that this stuff can necessarily get a million times smarter. But 10 times? 100? In a few months the memory increased by a factor of 8. Pretty quickly we are going to get to the point where we have to question the wisdom of every advanced primate having a platoon of supergeniuses at their disposal. Probably as soon as the hardware scales out, or we get large scale memristor systems or whatever the next thing is which will be 1000 times more performant and efficient. Without exaggeration. Within about 10 years.
- asddubs 4y ago
  >Have you ever had to use a sleep() intentionally just to get something shipped ? no, I'm not that deep in hell
TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
I am actually finding amusing that managers will generate 100k lines project with AI and then will start figuring out that it does not work as they want to. Then they figured out actual developers are needed to fix it, either in a very strict way telling AI what should happen (i.e. higher level programming) or directly fixing code generated by AI.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  You're assuming that the AI is even generating anything that will make sense to a human. It seems inevitable we'll reach the point that for SaaS the AI will do everything directly based some internal model it has of what it believes the requirements are (e.g. it will be capable of acting just like a live web server), whereas for desktop and mobile apps, while that paradigm still remains relevant, it will generate the compiled package for distribution. And I imagine it would be unrealistic to attempt reverse engineering it. Fixing bugs will be done by telling the AI to refine its model.
  - raincole 4y ago
    > It seems inevitable we'll reach the point that... It's inevitable that we'll reach AGI. It's inevitable that humans will extinct. Everything you described is not how today's AI works. It's not even a stretch, it's just pure sci-fi.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      I'll be genuinely surprised if we don't have tools with that sort of capability within 10 years, quite possibly much sooner.
    - camdenreslink 4y ago
      I don’t think it is inevitable we’ll reach AGI. I think that question is very much up in the air at the moment.
      - raincole 4y ago
edanm 4y ago
I highly disagree. That might (might!) be true of some segments of the tech industry, like SV-based startups, creating products no one wants. But it's definitely not true of the average piece of software. So much of the world around us runs on software and hardware that somebody had to build. From your computer itself, to most software that people use on a day-to-day basis to do their jobs, to the cars we drive, to the control software on the elevators we ride, software is everywhere. There is a lot of waste in software, to be sure, but I really don't think the average SE works for a company that shouldn't exist.
lr4444lr 4y ago
Exactly this. Everyone thinks only in terms of current needs and state of affairs of people when analyzing a future technology. No one thinks about the insatiable human desire for more and the higher expectations for that new normal that always meets the increased productivity available. Anything that automatically solves much of our wants is doomed to be static and limited.
bjornsing 4y ago
I’m leaning in this direction too. I saw someone on Twitter phrase it quite well: “You can believe that most jobs are bullshit [jobs]. And you can believe that GPT-4 will completely disrupt the job market. But you can’t believe both.”
- mrob 4y ago
  Bullshit jobs exist because upper management can't know exactly what everybody in the company is doing, which leaves opportunities for middle management to advance their own interests at the expense of the company as a whole. Upper management might suspect jobs are bullshit, but it's risky for them to fire people because the job might actually be important. But upper management can know exactly what LLMs are capable of, because they are products with fixed capabilities. ChatGPT is the same ChatGPT for everybody. This makes firing obsolete workers much safer.
  - mrcartmeneses 4y ago
    Hate to break it to you but upper management is usually the main driver of bullshit jobs. They know what’s going on
- spunker540 4y ago
  Won’t it find traction in bullshit jobs pretty easily?
- yobbo 4y ago
  It's rather that the jobs (not the workers) are replaced in the way saddle makers were replaced by mechanics.
mclightning 4y ago
Existential crisis averted by another existential crisis... :D

ChatGTP 4y ago

It’s pretty true, someone today on here wrote, “teach it to understand swagger”, I actually laughed, like I’ve used swagger and it often turns into a Frankenstein, and sometimes for good reason. I completely understand the sentiment and I like swagger. I believe the world is wiggly, not geometrically perfect, intellectuals struggle with that because square problems are easier to solve. Ideal scenarios are predictable and it’s what we like to think about. Have you ever had to use a sleep() intentionally just to get something shipped ? That’s a wiggle. We’re going to try square out the world so we can use ChatGPT to solve wiggly problems. It’s going to be interesting. Yesterday I tried to use a SaaS product and due to some obscurity my account has issues and the API wouldn’t work, they have a well specified API but it still didn’t work out, I’ve been working with the support team to resolve it, but this is what I call a wiggle, they seem to exist everywhere. Ask a construction worker about them.

matwood 4y ago
> Ask a construction worker about them. Hah. So true. The more I work on renovating parts of my house the more I see where a workers experience kicked in the finagle something. Very analogous to programming. All the parts that fit together perfectly are already easy today. It’s those bits that aren’t square, but also need to fit where the ‘art’ comes in. Can AI also do that part? IDK, currently I believe it will simply help us do the art part much like the computer in Star Trek.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  I’m positive about it, there is a lot of repetition in coding and it’s rare we get to spend the time on the good bits because of it. If we need a semi-intelligent system to help us with the copy pasta, so be it.
kybernetikos 4y ago
Actually chat gpt is quite good at understanding some kinds of wiggliness. I built a restful api and documented it in a readme.md file in the wiggliest of ways. I then asked chatgpt to turn the readme into a swagger spec and then give me a page that read the spec and gave me a nice doc page with api exercise tool. Both tasks it performed really well and saved me a whole bunch of time.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  I have some meticulous API docs I've written, which I tried to get ChatGPT to convert into swagger It failed spectacularly I wonder if it's because the API is quite large, and I had to paste in ~10 messages worth of API docs before I was finished. It kept repeating segments of the same routes/paths and wasn't able to provide anything cohesive or useful to me. Was your API pretty small? Or were your docs pretty concise?
  - kybernetikos 4y ago
    Chatgpt has a token limit. If you exceeded it then it would have no way of delivering a good result because it would simply have dirtied what you said at first. My api was not huge, about 8 endpoints.
  - ilaksh 4y ago
    It can accept about 4k tokens, maybe 3000 words or 3500. GPT-4 can now accept 8k or 32k. The 32k version is 8 times larger than the one you tried. And these advances have come in a matter of a few months. Over the next several years we should expect at least one, quite easily two or more orders of magnitude improvements. I don't believe that this stuff can necessarily get a million times smarter. But 10 times? 100? In a few months the memory increased by a factor of 8. Pretty quickly we are going to get to the point where we have to question the wisdom of every advanced primate having a platoon of supergeniuses at their disposal. Probably as soon as the hardware scales out, or we get large scale memristor systems or whatever the next thing is which will be 1000 times more performant and efficient. Without exaggeration. Within about 10 years.
asddubs 4y ago
>Have you ever had to use a sleep() intentionally just to get something shipped ? no, I'm not that deep in hell

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago

I am actually finding amusing that managers will generate 100k lines project with AI and then will start figuring out that it does not work as they want to. Then they figured out actual developers are needed to fix it, either in a very strict way telling AI what should happen (i.e. higher level programming) or directly fixing code generated by AI.

wizofaus 4y ago
You're assuming that the AI is even generating anything that will make sense to a human. It seems inevitable we'll reach the point that for SaaS the AI will do everything directly based some internal model it has of what it believes the requirements are (e.g. it will be capable of acting just like a live web server), whereas for desktop and mobile apps, while that paradigm still remains relevant, it will generate the compiled package for distribution. And I imagine it would be unrealistic to attempt reverse engineering it. Fixing bugs will be done by telling the AI to refine its model.
- raincole 4y ago
  > It seems inevitable we'll reach the point that... It's inevitable that we'll reach AGI. It's inevitable that humans will extinct. Everything you described is not how today's AI works. It's not even a stretch, it's just pure sci-fi.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    I'll be genuinely surprised if we don't have tools with that sort of capability within 10 years, quite possibly much sooner.
  - camdenreslink 4y ago
    I don’t think it is inevitable we’ll reach AGI. I think that question is very much up in the air at the moment.
    - raincole 4y ago

edanm 4y ago

I highly disagree. That might (might!) be true of some segments of the tech industry, like SV-based startups, creating products no one wants. But it's definitely not true of the average piece of software. So much of the world around us runs on software and hardware that somebody had to build. From your computer itself, to most software that people use on a day-to-day basis to do their jobs, to the cars we drive, to the control software on the elevators we ride, software is everywhere. There is a lot of waste in software, to be sure, but I really don't think the average SE works for a company that shouldn't exist.

lr4444lr 4y ago

Exactly this. Everyone thinks only in terms of current needs and state of affairs of people when analyzing a future technology. No one thinks about the insatiable human desire for more and the higher expectations for that new normal that always meets the increased productivity available. Anything that automatically solves much of our wants is doomed to be static and limited.

bjornsing 4y ago

I’m leaning in this direction too. I saw someone on Twitter phrase it quite well: “You can believe that most jobs are bullshit [jobs]. And you can believe that GPT-4 will completely disrupt the job market. But you can’t believe both.”

mrob 4y ago
Bullshit jobs exist because upper management can't know exactly what everybody in the company is doing, which leaves opportunities for middle management to advance their own interests at the expense of the company as a whole. Upper management might suspect jobs are bullshit, but it's risky for them to fire people because the job might actually be important. But upper management can know exactly what LLMs are capable of, because they are products with fixed capabilities. ChatGPT is the same ChatGPT for everybody. This makes firing obsolete workers much safer.
- mrcartmeneses 4y ago
  Hate to break it to you but upper management is usually the main driver of bullshit jobs. They know what’s going on
spunker540 4y ago
Won’t it find traction in bullshit jobs pretty easily?
yobbo 4y ago
It's rather that the jobs (not the workers) are replaced in the way saddle makers were replaced by mechanics.

mclightning 4y ago

Existential crisis averted by another existential crisis... :D