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30 years ago I got tired of writing the same code over and over, so I went looking for something to cut out the repetition. Around a decade later I got tired o

30 years ago I got tired of writing the same code over and over, so I went looking for something to cut out the repetition. Around a decade later I got tired of rewriting libraries or programs to make them exactly fit my needs. I used to really enjoy just coding for the sake of coding. But I started to value my time much more. I called this phase "losing my immortality". Any code that ChatGPT can write, I don't want to write. I'm ok with it taking my job. If I can work in higher level constructs and get more done, I'm all over that. Last week a coworker need some Python code to figure out how far through a day it currently is. I started thinking of the different ways to approach it (strftime, maybe time_t modulo 86400, twiddling datetime objects). Before I got very far I decided to ask chatGPT to write it, eyeballed the response (twiddling datetime objects), ran it and verified the response, and called it good. I should have asked it to write some tests for that code while I was at it. I'm now trying to teach my son, an avid programmer, how to work with chatGPT. He's 13, so he's got a lot of opportunity to really integrate it into his career, but he also has a lot of blind spots where chatGPT can really lead him down some blind alleys and knife him.

carapace 4y ago
This. It's pretty obvious that any software that can be written by machine should be. (It's almost tautological, eh?) Otherwise you're doing what David Graeber famously called "Bullshit Jobs": pointless work that only serves to establish your position in the economic structure. The immediate issues are: who decides the boundaries of (publicly) acceptable thought -and- who profits? I think you touch on the deeper and even more challenging issue: > I'm now trying to teach my son, an avid programmer, how to work with chatGPT. He's 13, so he's got a lot of opportunity to really integrate it into his career, but he also has a lot of blind spots where chatGPT can really lead him down some blind alleys and knife him. When the talking computers can answer any (allowed) question, the educational challenge becomes building human minds that can recognize and select the right options from the unbounded "white hole" of content that the machines can produce. Now, the word "right" in the previous sentence is doing a hellofa lot of work. Deciding the right course of action is an open-ended intelligence test. It's evolution, eh?
- tailspin2019 4y ago
  > It's pretty obvious that any software that can be written by machine should be. This is such a good succinct, and I think objective, statement. It strikes me as a great lense through which to look at recent developments. It does not imply that "all software should be written by a machine". But simply that anything that a machine can do just as well as a human, should probably be done by a machine rather than a human. And all additional value on top of that machine-produced material will continue to come from things that only humans can uniquely do well. And of course, there will continue to be many things in that latter category. For many of us in this field, this means less busywork and more time spent working at higher levels of abstraction. More time curating, crafting, integrating, strategising. Less time working on the nuts and bolts. And for those who love to hand-craft the nuts and bolts... I think that opportunity will still be there too. Because handcrafting will become a rarer skill, and there will still be areas where it is the correct approach. Those of us who used to handcraft nuts and bolts but now delegate this to the machines, will still benefit from our understanding of how the nuts and bolts used to be made. And those who grow up having never made a nut or bolt - perhaps not even knowing what nuts and bolts even are, will benefit from starting their path much earlier on in life working at a higher level of abstraction.
- lumb63 4y ago
  “Can answer” is doing a lot of work, too. I can write you a program that “can answer“ any question you throw at it. I can assure you the answer won’t be correct in most cases. This is a hyperbole for ChatGPT, but my point is that designing a system that can answer correctly, rather than can answer, is a far more worthwhile effort than retooling humans to be lie detectors, IMO. We can see from how hard it is to find consensus on trivial topics (are eggs good for you?) amongst experts who study these matters day after day. And the public, who does not, is left confused. A great deal of the problems we face are too complex for the human mind to be able to decide which of several reasonable-sounding options is correct. This is especially true when there is no rationalization for answers given. Look at our media system. How many people on both sides are stuck in “other side bad” simply because the talking heads on television networks tell them that, or someone on the internet wrote something. A lot of the content that drives them to conclusions isn’t even true. We are very poorly equipped to be vetting answers from a fallible machine. Maybe I’m too old school, but I’d rather we learn how to solve the more complex problems so that we can do it and understand it rather than take guesses at which of a number of generated options is correct.
gavinray 4y ago
You might also consider buying your son a Github Copilot license, it's $10/mo and I would easily pay $50/mo for the value it provides.
- jghn 4y ago
  How does it compare to ChatGPT in terms of code quality?
  - bm-rf 4y ago
    Github Copilot uses a different model than chatgpt, with a tokenizer more fit for code rather than plain english language.
  - rabuse 4y ago
    It's a substantial improvement when actually coding on the fly, since copilot will also analyze code in your codebase. It just makes coding the BS parts less tedious.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    I think you get copilot because you don't end up having to cut and paste stuff into a browser. Have to say I'm very happy with copilot, it's definitely worth the 10 bucks a month.
  - flir 4y ago
    I've got both running, and I find GPT4 more useful. Unless I'm using it wrong, Copilot is "better autocomplete" and saves some typing. GPT4 can help you reason about code, and has helpful suggestions about debugging. I'm probably going to bin Copilot.
weatherlite 4y ago
How many people doing this job do we need compared to the tens of millions of people building programs by hand we have today?
- williamcotton 4y ago
  How much better would software be if a team of five individuals could produce the same output as a team of 500 individuals? How much terrible software is out there? How much terrible FOSS software is out there? How much amazing and humanistic software could be created if the costs for production were drastically reduced and the demands of the market were less of a factor?
- MartijnHols 4y ago
  How many companies will want new or bigger apps that they can finally afford if it requires fewer developers?
  - weatherlite 4y ago
    It's possible everything will speed up, and since the competitors are also speeding up some kinds of arms race on steroids will take place where not only are we all much more productive but we are also not cutting back on workers. I find it hard to believe but I concur it is possible.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  If you had an AI capable of writing the code you mean to without errors, the demand for software developers would be even larger than what it is today. Deciding what problem to solve and how to solve it is hard enough to sustain more than the current population of developers. (But if you had an AI capable of deciding those, then yeah, that would be problem.) Anyway, the current crop of highly hyped AIs are obviously structurally unable to do either. And it's not clear at all how far any AI is from solving any those (what usually means we are many decades away).
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  If we had a specific quantity of software that was needed, that might be a good argument. But to me, it looks like the quantity of software we want is unlimited. (Or at least, the quantity of stuff that we want software to do.) To the degree that GPT enables the same software to be written with fewer programmers, to that degree we'll write more software, not have fewer programmers.
adnmcq999 4y ago
well that’s weirdly graphic
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  A long tradition, see footgun.
- linsomniac 4y ago
  You are referring to "lead him down a blind alley and knife him". ChatGPT has answered some specific code questions with code that is not only wrong, but horribly wrong. Things like presenting anti-patterns as the answer, halucinating APIs that don't exist and suggesting code using them, or code that is subtly wrong. These sorts of things go well beyond leading you down a dark alley, hence my addition.

carapace 4y ago

This. It's pretty obvious that any software that can be written by machine should be. (It's almost tautological, eh?) Otherwise you're doing what David Graeber famously called "Bullshit Jobs": pointless work that only serves to establish your position in the economic structure. The immediate issues are: who decides the boundaries of (publicly) acceptable thought -and- who profits? I think you touch on the deeper and even more challenging issue: > I'm now trying to teach my son, an avid programmer, how to work with chatGPT. He's 13, so he's got a lot of opportunity to really integrate it into his career, but he also has a lot of blind spots where chatGPT can really lead him down some blind alleys and knife him. When the talking computers can answer any (allowed) question, the educational challenge becomes building human minds that can recognize and select the right options from the unbounded "white hole" of content that the machines can produce. Now, the word "right" in the previous sentence is doing a hellofa lot of work. Deciding the right course of action is an open-ended intelligence test. It's evolution, eh?

tailspin2019 4y ago
> It's pretty obvious that any software that can be written by machine should be. This is such a good succinct, and I think objective, statement. It strikes me as a great lense through which to look at recent developments. It does not imply that "all software should be written by a machine". But simply that anything that a machine can do just as well as a human, should probably be done by a machine rather than a human. And all additional value on top of that machine-produced material will continue to come from things that only humans can uniquely do well. And of course, there will continue to be many things in that latter category. For many of us in this field, this means less busywork and more time spent working at higher levels of abstraction. More time curating, crafting, integrating, strategising. Less time working on the nuts and bolts. And for those who love to hand-craft the nuts and bolts... I think that opportunity will still be there too. Because handcrafting will become a rarer skill, and there will still be areas where it is the correct approach. Those of us who used to handcraft nuts and bolts but now delegate this to the machines, will still benefit from our understanding of how the nuts and bolts used to be made. And those who grow up having never made a nut or bolt - perhaps not even knowing what nuts and bolts even are, will benefit from starting their path much earlier on in life working at a higher level of abstraction.
lumb63 4y ago
“Can answer” is doing a lot of work, too. I can write you a program that “can answer“ any question you throw at it. I can assure you the answer won’t be correct in most cases. This is a hyperbole for ChatGPT, but my point is that designing a system that can answer correctly, rather than can answer, is a far more worthwhile effort than retooling humans to be lie detectors, IMO. We can see from how hard it is to find consensus on trivial topics (are eggs good for you?) amongst experts who study these matters day after day. And the public, who does not, is left confused. A great deal of the problems we face are too complex for the human mind to be able to decide which of several reasonable-sounding options is correct. This is especially true when there is no rationalization for answers given. Look at our media system. How many people on both sides are stuck in “other side bad” simply because the talking heads on television networks tell them that, or someone on the internet wrote something. A lot of the content that drives them to conclusions isn’t even true. We are very poorly equipped to be vetting answers from a fallible machine. Maybe I’m too old school, but I’d rather we learn how to solve the more complex problems so that we can do it and understand it rather than take guesses at which of a number of generated options is correct.

gavinray 4y ago

You might also consider buying your son a Github Copilot license, it's $10/mo and I would easily pay $50/mo for the value it provides.

jghn 4y ago
How does it compare to ChatGPT in terms of code quality?
- bm-rf 4y ago
  Github Copilot uses a different model than chatgpt, with a tokenizer more fit for code rather than plain english language.
- rabuse 4y ago
  It's a substantial improvement when actually coding on the fly, since copilot will also analyze code in your codebase. It just makes coding the BS parts less tedious.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  I think you get copilot because you don't end up having to cut and paste stuff into a browser. Have to say I'm very happy with copilot, it's definitely worth the 10 bucks a month.
- flir 4y ago
  I've got both running, and I find GPT4 more useful. Unless I'm using it wrong, Copilot is "better autocomplete" and saves some typing. GPT4 can help you reason about code, and has helpful suggestions about debugging. I'm probably going to bin Copilot.

weatherlite 4y ago

How many people doing this job do we need compared to the tens of millions of people building programs by hand we have today?

williamcotton 4y ago
How much better would software be if a team of five individuals could produce the same output as a team of 500 individuals? How much terrible software is out there? How much terrible FOSS software is out there? How much amazing and humanistic software could be created if the costs for production were drastically reduced and the demands of the market were less of a factor?
MartijnHols 4y ago
How many companies will want new or bigger apps that they can finally afford if it requires fewer developers?
- weatherlite 4y ago
  It's possible everything will speed up, and since the competitors are also speeding up some kinds of arms race on steroids will take place where not only are we all much more productive but we are also not cutting back on workers. I find it hard to believe but I concur it is possible.
marcosdumay 4y ago
If you had an AI capable of writing the code you mean to without errors, the demand for software developers would be even larger than what it is today. Deciding what problem to solve and how to solve it is hard enough to sustain more than the current population of developers. (But if you had an AI capable of deciding those, then yeah, that would be problem.) Anyway, the current crop of highly hyped AIs are obviously structurally unable to do either. And it's not clear at all how far any AI is from solving any those (what usually means we are many decades away).
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
If we had a specific quantity of software that was needed, that might be a good argument. But to me, it looks like the quantity of software we want is unlimited. (Or at least, the quantity of stuff that we want software to do.) To the degree that GPT enables the same software to be written with fewer programmers, to that degree we'll write more software, not have fewer programmers.

adnmcq999 4y ago

well that’s weirdly graphic

throwaway4aday 4y ago
A long tradition, see footgun.
linsomniac 4y ago
You are referring to "lead him down a blind alley and knife him". ChatGPT has answered some specific code questions with code that is not only wrong, but horribly wrong. Things like presenting anti-patterns as the answer, halucinating APIs that don't exist and suggesting code using them, or code that is subtly wrong. These sorts of things go well beyond leading you down a dark alley, hence my addition.