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I think the people who can code well and write good technical documentation are going to transition well into the fully AI-assisted world. So much of what I'm s
by japhyr 4y ago
I think the people who can code well and write good technical documentation are going to transition well into the fully AI-assisted world. So much of what I'm seeing involves not so much the ability to code well, but the ability to write clearly about what you want your code to do. I think the people who can write decent code but struggle to write good documentation (comments and formal docs) are going to struggle to make the transition.
The tools are going to write more and more of the code for us. We're going to be spending more time writing about the code and less time writing code.
(I posted this as a comment on the article, but there's more active conversation here so I pasted it here as well. I'm curious if anyone else has thoughts along these lines.)
- abathur 4y agoA guy at a bar spotted me programming last night and forced a conversation on me about an email-processing script ChatGPT helped him write, and showed me the conversation on his phone. It struck me, as a programmer with a creative writing background, that he was basically writing microfiction with a character (himself) that needed help, and a character (ChatGPT) to help him out.
- japhyr 4y agoHow did it work out for him?
- abathur 4y agoHe, uh, made the following claims: 1. he's been using it for 9 days 2. he has subscribed for gpt4 3. it took 3 rounds of refining to get it running 4. it did what he wanted 5. it took about 15 minutes to do something that would have taken him "3 months" I believe the first 3 but am skeptical of the last 2. He was, in any case, effusive about its capabilities. For context, I should note: - he was obviously inebriated, high, and the sort of person who trusted a stranger (me) with his unlocked phone while he went to the bathroom. (I think this actually has a little to say about how quickly he's picking up good prompting?) - This was at a dive bar in Houston's east end--not really a tech hub. Edit: he was persuasive enough that I intend to try to shift more of my habitual queries from Google to chat gpt until I at least have a deeper grok of effective prompting than I have picked up so far.
- zabzonk 4y agoas someone that has accidentaly destroyed two laptops with liquid spillages, i have never understood the programming in a coffee shop thing, but doing it in a bar???
- abathur 4y agoI am quite the clutz, and do spill a lot, but I have yet to ruin any device in the process. A few close calls, but none fatal. I try to mitigate theft/loss/disaster anxiety by keeping a backup/recovery hygiene that enables me to be productive in <2 hours of obtaining a replacement (but I'll sheepishly admit a tool update has the backup script failing atm and I haven't found time to debug). IME I'm more likely to spill beer on one at home than out and about. Something subtle about space or psychology? (Spaces at home are more likely to be cluttered enough to nudge me towards a risky drink placement? Not habituated to expecting spillables near the computer at home? Idk.) I did have some jackass having a whiny argument with someone else spill my beer on my laptop this past summer. Close call, but luckily it was almost empty. This was, to some degree, my mistake for going against my gut and humoring his curiosity about what I was doing long enough for him to decide he was welcome to sit across from me.
- Shaggy2000 4y ago[dead]
- qsort 4y agoI don't see a future where we replace code with natural language -- and I'm not only skeptical about it, I know for a fact it will never happen: it's an idea that has been tried and did not work. Formal language is easier, for the same reason that nobody in their right mind would rather write "one less than the square of the variable" than "x^2 - 1". I do agree that writing badly is a reliably correlated with being a bad developer. Not writing well denotes lack of clarity, inattention to detail and self-indulgence, all damning attributes for a serious professional.