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> Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don't seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you be

> Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don't seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you believe this skill set is going to go away? Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? You’re kind of assuming that systems will be generated from a one-shot prompt, but it seems more likely that an interactive AI will identify the gaps in requirements and ask for clarification. Alternatively, if the prompt-generate-evaluate loop is short enough the user can simply play with the running system and provide feedback to alter it. This is essentially what developers do when they present a “weekly build” or whatever in an agile environment. The process of solidifying requirements, stating them clearly and translating them into machine-executable formats are all language tasks and these models are really fucking good at those. I’ve noticed in discussions like this that many software folks are assuming that AI capabilities will plateau soon, or will merely be extensions of what we already have (a better autocomplete, etc). I submit that we may reach a point where the AI is so compelling that we’ll reorganize teams/systems/businesses around it.

chii 4y ago
Currently, we don't even trust the car's automatic driving capability to let it be on the roads without a human. Until that day happens, i highly doubt that a business owner would just blindly trust an AI to generate their business code/software, without hiring someone to at least look after it. Therefore, software jobs could evolve, but not disappear.
- execveat 4y ago
  Yeah all this talk about complex systems being written by a language model which has no concept of files, code paths and import systems sounds like a job security to me. I'm a pentester though.
- visarga 4y ago
  The project will be more consistent and resilient to issues but it probably take about half the time it used to take without AI, not 1% of the time. Reading AI code is damn hard, it is code review, requires exam level concentration.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  I'm ... less optimistic about how well people can place their trust. Cars, at least, have concrete failure criteria and consequences for them.
qsort 4y ago
> Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? This is the doomsday argument. What would I do if there's a nuclear apocalypse before lunch? I guess I'll die like everyone else. An AI sufficiently advanced to do that is also sufficiently advanced to run the entire business in the first place, and also argue cases in court, do my taxes, run for president and so on. You either believe that transformers models are "it", or you haven't actually removed the problem of specifying requirements formally. Which, you know, is actually much harder to do in English than it is to do in C++.
- carlmr 4y ago
  >You either believe that transformers models are "it", or you haven't actually removed the problem of specifying requirements formally. Which, you know, is actually much harder to do in English than it is to do in C++ This is actually something that makes me happy about the new AI revolution. When my professor said that I thought he was an idiot, because no-code tools always make it harder to specify what you want when you have specific wants the developer didn't think about. We give kids books with pictures because pictures are easier, but when we want to teach about more complex topics we usually use language, formulas, and maybe a few illustrations. I still think no-code was always doomed due to the fact that any attempt at it lacked the interface to describe anything you want, like language does. AI is finally putting an end to this notion that no-code should be clicky high-maintenance GUIs. Instead it's doing what Google did for search. Instead of searching by rigid categories we can use language to interact with the internet. Now the language interaction is getting better. We haven't regressed to McDonald's menus for coding.
  - coffeebeqn 4y ago
    I’ve used no code tools since the 90s and it just has a fatal flaw. For simple demo use cases it looks simple and cool. Then when you go to the real world and start getting pivots and edge cases you have to fix in the interface then it becomes a 4D nightmare and essentially a very bad programming language
    - 4y ago
visarga 4y ago
> I submit that we may reach a point where the AI is so compelling that we’ll reorganize teams/systems/businesses around it. For starters I'd like Codex to be more than next word predictor, it should also "feel" the error messages, data types and shapes, file formats, so I don't have to explain the context. It should be part of the system, not just part of the text editor.
cowl 4y ago
Yes but even in that case The role will be of a "AI Prompter", it will not be done by the managers because of the time factor. Even though AI can give you the result much faster, building upon it and testing/verifying, then coming up with the refined prompt is a time consuming thing. Only the Write part of the write/eval loop will be faster but not neccesarily easier. Especially the "debuging" part will be much harder. Noone can look under the hood to understand what is wrong and all you can do is shoot random prompts in the dark hoping it will create the right result. It is scary right now how confidently and spectacularly wrong the chatGPT is and it will create disasters.
- oh_sigh 4y ago
  Why would sufficiently advanced AI even need a prompter? The AI could play the role of the greatest prompter in the world, and ask the same questions to the end user that the human prompter would.
  - cowl 4y ago
    This is a misconception of how our industry works. Yes there are market resesearches with users but often those come after the problem space has been defined. Most of you see in the tech sector today are "Created Needs" by imagining a solution that the users didn't even know they needed. To ask a question you first need to define a problem that is defined by that/those questions. This is the difficult part and the main reason why People still believe "the Idea is the most important factor". Ofcourse this is not true, there are hundreds of factors that come into play. Imagine an AI asking circa 2000 to the users what kind of virtual social space did they need. The answer would not have been Facebook. (There were other social networks before Facebook but the time was not right for the "Social" explosion). By learning on existing solutions, The AI would have learned it's lesson that global virtual Social networking is not something that the users want. And part of this problem was as much sociological/psychological and outside of the realm of what the AI could consider that we would not have what we have today. Not that we would have missed much from missing the particular implementation of this idea that Facebook gave us but the idea and what it unleashed is much more than that particular implementation.
rocho 4y ago
In that case, how is the AI going to keep tens or hundreds of thousand of lines in memory to produce cohesive code that works with the rest of the codebase? It seems prohibitely expensive to build and run transformer models with that much capacity.
- anon7725 4y ago
  GPT 4 already has 32k tokens of context for prompts. Once we’re making arguments about scale only a few orders of magnitude larger than the current state of the art, it seems similar to arguments 10-15 years ago that real-time ray tracing is not feasible.
ilaksh 4y ago
You can do that prompt / play with it / feedback thing right now with my GPT+Stable-Diffusion powered website. https://aidev.codes https://aidev.codes I am in the process of adding VMs which the AI will be able to write software and fix compilation and other problems automatically.
weatherlite 4y ago
> I submit that we may reach a point where the AI is so compelling that we’ll reorganize teams/systems/businesses around it. Sounds like me get reorganized out of a job though...what does it mean to reorganize everyone around the A.I if it does everything better than us?

chii 4y ago

Currently, we don't even trust the car's automatic driving capability to let it be on the roads without a human. Until that day happens, i highly doubt that a business owner would just blindly trust an AI to generate their business code/software, without hiring someone to at least look after it. Therefore, software jobs could evolve, but not disappear.

execveat 4y ago
Yeah all this talk about complex systems being written by a language model which has no concept of files, code paths and import systems sounds like a job security to me. I'm a pentester though.
visarga 4y ago
The project will be more consistent and resilient to issues but it probably take about half the time it used to take without AI, not 1% of the time. Reading AI code is damn hard, it is code review, requires exam level concentration.
naniwaduni 4y ago
I'm ... less optimistic about how well people can place their trust. Cars, at least, have concrete failure criteria and consequences for them.

qsort 4y ago

> Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? This is the doomsday argument. What would I do if there's a nuclear apocalypse before lunch? I guess I'll die like everyone else. An AI sufficiently advanced to do that is also sufficiently advanced to run the entire business in the first place, and also argue cases in court, do my taxes, run for president and so on. You either believe that transformers models are "it", or you haven't actually removed the problem of specifying requirements formally. Which, you know, is actually much harder to do in English than it is to do in C++.

carlmr 4y ago
>You either believe that transformers models are "it", or you haven't actually removed the problem of specifying requirements formally. Which, you know, is actually much harder to do in English than it is to do in C++ This is actually something that makes me happy about the new AI revolution. When my professor said that I thought he was an idiot, because no-code tools always make it harder to specify what you want when you have specific wants the developer didn't think about. We give kids books with pictures because pictures are easier, but when we want to teach about more complex topics we usually use language, formulas, and maybe a few illustrations. I still think no-code was always doomed due to the fact that any attempt at it lacked the interface to describe anything you want, like language does. AI is finally putting an end to this notion that no-code should be clicky high-maintenance GUIs. Instead it's doing what Google did for search. Instead of searching by rigid categories we can use language to interact with the internet. Now the language interaction is getting better. We haven't regressed to McDonald's menus for coding.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  I’ve used no code tools since the 90s and it just has a fatal flaw. For simple demo use cases it looks simple and cool. Then when you go to the real world and start getting pivots and edge cases you have to fix in the interface then it becomes a 4D nightmare and essentially a very bad programming language
  - 4y ago

visarga 4y ago

> I submit that we may reach a point where the AI is so compelling that we’ll reorganize teams/systems/businesses around it. For starters I'd like Codex to be more than next word predictor, it should also "feel" the error messages, data types and shapes, file formats, so I don't have to explain the context. It should be part of the system, not just part of the text editor.

cowl 4y ago

Yes but even in that case The role will be of a "AI Prompter", it will not be done by the managers because of the time factor. Even though AI can give you the result much faster, building upon it and testing/verifying, then coming up with the refined prompt is a time consuming thing. Only the Write part of the write/eval loop will be faster but not neccesarily easier. Especially the "debuging" part will be much harder. Noone can look under the hood to understand what is wrong and all you can do is shoot random prompts in the dark hoping it will create the right result. It is scary right now how confidently and spectacularly wrong the chatGPT is and it will create disasters.

oh_sigh 4y ago
Why would sufficiently advanced AI even need a prompter? The AI could play the role of the greatest prompter in the world, and ask the same questions to the end user that the human prompter would.
- cowl 4y ago
  This is a misconception of how our industry works. Yes there are market resesearches with users but often those come after the problem space has been defined. Most of you see in the tech sector today are "Created Needs" by imagining a solution that the users didn't even know they needed. To ask a question you first need to define a problem that is defined by that/those questions. This is the difficult part and the main reason why People still believe "the Idea is the most important factor". Ofcourse this is not true, there are hundreds of factors that come into play. Imagine an AI asking circa 2000 to the users what kind of virtual social space did they need. The answer would not have been Facebook. (There were other social networks before Facebook but the time was not right for the "Social" explosion). By learning on existing solutions, The AI would have learned it's lesson that global virtual Social networking is not something that the users want. And part of this problem was as much sociological/psychological and outside of the realm of what the AI could consider that we would not have what we have today. Not that we would have missed much from missing the particular implementation of this idea that Facebook gave us but the idea and what it unleashed is much more than that particular implementation.

rocho 4y ago

In that case, how is the AI going to keep tens or hundreds of thousand of lines in memory to produce cohesive code that works with the rest of the codebase? It seems prohibitely expensive to build and run transformer models with that much capacity.

anon7725 4y ago
GPT 4 already has 32k tokens of context for prompts. Once we’re making arguments about scale only a few orders of magnitude larger than the current state of the art, it seems similar to arguments 10-15 years ago that real-time ray tracing is not feasible.

ilaksh 4y ago

You can do that prompt / play with it / feedback thing right now with my GPT+Stable-Diffusion powered website. https://aidev.codes https://aidev.codes I am in the process of adding VMs which the AI will be able to write software and fix compilation and other problems automatically.

weatherlite 4y ago

> I submit that we may reach a point where the AI is so compelling that we’ll reorganize teams/systems/businesses around it. Sounds like me get reorganized out of a job though...what does it mean to reorganize everyone around the A.I if it does everything better than us?