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There seems like a disconnect between the breathless AI hype and reality. I tend to be on team-LLM (having exposure to it in my daily work), and my stance is th

There seems like a disconnect between the breathless AI hype and reality. I tend to be on team-LLM (having exposure to it in my daily work), and my stance is that it's going to revolutionize some narrow domains and features of products, but the idea that it will replace white collar labor generally seems poorly substantiated by what we know so far. What we see ChatGPT being good at is largely boilerplate. The folks who are like "I am 5x more productive now with ChatGPT" raise alarm bells in my head - it suggests that they were typing the programming equivalent of pablum for most of their day. Yeah, if you ask ChatGPT to author some simple HTML it will do so with a refreshing level of accuracy (though far from being able to do without extensive supervision) - but who is writing plain HTML? Likewise it's cool that it can generate a sort function whole cloth... but who is writing their own sort functions? The trick with boilerplate is that the industry has already spent the past two decades automating large amounts of it away via frameworks and baking much of the functionality into programming languages themselves. If you're writing boilerplate for so much of your day that a boilerplate-spitting AI massively increases your productivity, I'd argue you've got bigger problems! The trend - across both backend and frontend dev - is to make things more declarative and close the gap between what the developer wants and the amount of code needed to implement it. Use these technologies - it has made people dramatically more productive, but didn't require a LLM! If you find yourself spending a significant portion of your day writing boilerplate, stop doing that! There are many options for you that allow you to more directly express what you want!

jonny_eh 4y ago
I find an engineer's value is in creating things have not been created before. As the author of the article says, there's already lots of great tools for making simple sites. So far, I've found that LLMs are not good at making novel software, it's basically a glorified stackoverflow. But that's still quite useful… for a programmer!
- potatolicious 4y ago
  That's exactly it. Ultimately programming is just telling the computer what you want it to do - something that a LLM is unable to do. There may be a future where an AI is smart enough and demonstrates enough analytical, cognition, and deduction ability that it can take over specifying what a computer should do - but it's not today and it's not immediately at-hand. Nor is anything that can do so likely to emerge from LLMs, as opposed to a fundamentally different architecture of AI. For most of our industry's history telling a computer what to do involved a lot of very painful and boring things that aren't really related to what you actually want from the computer. Moving registers around. Assigning variables. Managing memory. But the entire time we've also been converging on doing less and less of this rote busywork. Advances in frameworks and programming languages has, in each iteration, gotten us closer and closer to simply telling the computer what you want, reducing the need for this rote busywork. So now we have an AI that is quite good (though again: far from good enough to be unsupervised) at this busywork. For people whose jobs are largely consisted of this busywork this may be highly impactful - but your job as a programmer is to minimize this busywork to the maximum extent possible anyway.
  - ath92 4y ago
    > There may be a future where an AI is smart enough and demonstrates enough analytical, cognition, and deduction ability that it can take over specifying what a computer should do When we reach that point, anyone's job will be at risk. Give that AI an AWS account and a credit card and it'll take over the world, not build websites when someone asks it to.

jonny_eh 4y ago

I find an engineer's value is in creating things have not been created before. As the author of the article says, there's already lots of great tools for making simple sites. So far, I've found that LLMs are not good at making novel software, it's basically a glorified stackoverflow. But that's still quite useful… for a programmer!

potatolicious 4y ago
That's exactly it. Ultimately programming is just telling the computer what you want it to do - something that a LLM is unable to do. There may be a future where an AI is smart enough and demonstrates enough analytical, cognition, and deduction ability that it can take over specifying what a computer should do - but it's not today and it's not immediately at-hand. Nor is anything that can do so likely to emerge from LLMs, as opposed to a fundamentally different architecture of AI. For most of our industry's history telling a computer what to do involved a lot of very painful and boring things that aren't really related to what you actually want from the computer. Moving registers around. Assigning variables. Managing memory. But the entire time we've also been converging on doing less and less of this rote busywork. Advances in frameworks and programming languages has, in each iteration, gotten us closer and closer to simply telling the computer what you want, reducing the need for this rote busywork. So now we have an AI that is quite good (though again: far from good enough to be unsupervised) at this busywork. For people whose jobs are largely consisted of this busywork this may be highly impactful - but your job as a programmer is to minimize this busywork to the maximum extent possible anyway.
- ath92 4y ago
  > There may be a future where an AI is smart enough and demonstrates enough analytical, cognition, and deduction ability that it can take over specifying what a computer should do When we reach that point, anyone's job will be at risk. Give that AI an AWS account and a credit card and it'll take over the world, not build websites when someone asks it to.