14 ms·

@Simon, I love this. And one day, in the not too distant future, a few old wizened graybeards, like you and I and the other folks on this site who have been wri

• asabla 4y ago
  In some way it's kind of poetic. The mental overhead of producing softwares shrinks more and more. It will sure be at the cost of understanding and/or see errors as you say. I already looking forward of being that graybeard. And show off to my neighbors or grandchildren
  • anon7725 4y ago
    GPT doesn’t change some fundamental things that we know about the theory of computation as well as complexity. It’s a wonderful tool that we’re just beginning to learn about, but it’s not a get out of jail free card for the halting problem or a million line codebase that models 50 years of business evolution.
    • 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
      I don't know.. I'm looking. forward to a LoRA or whatever they call it trained on my codebase that can answer questions across the whole thing
      • swader999 4y ago
        Me too! Still have to ask the right questions and know what problems you are trying to solve with that code base.
• shostack 4y ago
  And then we'll have people praying to the Omnissiah with their prompts.
  • ornornor 4y ago
    > Omnissiah I like that.
  • King-Aaron 4y ago
    From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me.
  • Technotroll 4y ago
    I wonder what implications this has for the reports claiming that general IQ is going down in most countries. Obviously, there are people out there who do not suffer from this trend. And perhaps they are the ones making the systems that help those less endowed? Anyway, the road to the tech religions Warhammer 40,000 seems set!
• belugacat 4y ago
  I had a former coworker who bought a Tesla very shortly after getting her license, and relied almost exclusively on autopilot. I rode with her a few times when she offered to drive me home, it was legit terrifying when she had to drive in manual mode to eg get out of a parking garage. Years later, I don’t think her driving has meaningfully improved.
  • blueorange8 4y ago
    Unfortunately this seems to be true of a lot of people that don't have tesla's as well ;)
    • consp 4y ago
      Even if you have proper training to get your license (most people here didn't even get that) you only learn to drive while actually doing it.
      • throwaway049 4y ago
        The issue seems to be many people don't learn even then.
        • Technotroll 4y ago
          And that is why we need AI assist in cars. With that said, where I'm from (Europe) most people drive "stick". That is, until recently. Now most new drivers are learning on auto or AI assisted vehicles. Is it better or worse? It'll definitively lead to fewer accidents. But driving stick is kinda cool tho, imho xD And I'm sure it also give you a better intuition about how a gear box actually works.
          • dandellion 4y ago
            Where I'm from most cars are also stick, but I got my license years ago but since then I've only driven twice: once with stick and once automatic, and I have to say, automatic is so much easier to learn that I don't know why we're all still getting licenses or buying manual cars. It must be stubbornness and the slight price difference because in reality automatic is just much more practical.
• ummonk 4y ago
  Our experience coding from scratch will have about as much validity as the experience of people who coded in assembly has today. It'll be a specialized skill with its own niche but without much value in the broader tech industry.
  • vasco 4y ago
    Exactly, this sounds like people that think knowing assembly or managing memory manually with C gives them an advantage. I learned those things too and am not a single bit ahead of a developer that learns newer languages and never does a malloc in their lives.
  • geraneum 4y ago
    > but without much value in the broader tech industry. Not talking about AI; but if you want to work on compilers, linux kernel, game engine optimization, GPU optimized code and many many other things than web development you need to be more than familiar with how to work with machine instructions, albeit not working with it every single day. These are significant parts of the industry which make the rest possible.
    • crabmusket 4y ago
      I describe it as the difference between "software development" and "software engineering". Or between "business" and "infrastructure". Both are valuable, but have different demands on understanding, rigor etc.
    • braveyellowtoad 4y ago
      I agree with you. However, it’s worthwhile also noting these represent a very small proportion of all jobs in software development.
      • krmboya 4y ago
        Did the number of jobs of people coding in assembly go down, or is it that the number of jobs of people not coding in assembly go up? (I truly don't know. Just curious)
• withinboredom 4y ago
  It’s crazy to think about. We are nearing the end of the age where people who have been programming for “20 years this year” and self-taught probably learned to program from books. In the next few years, people who have been “programming for 20 years” might start to include YouTube learners and boot campers. As someone who learned to program from two gigantic tomes of C/C+ with a Borland Compiler, there was no copy/paste. You had to type every listing in to get it running, as well as find that semi-colon you forgot on line 16,46,102 of 200. Then you had to remember everything, take notes, and literally research answers. You couldn’t just ask a random person on the internet, at least for a few years after I learned how to program when online forums became a thing. One big difference I can think of between my younger peers and myself: When I see an error message, I take it as a “hint that something is wrong” where my younger peers tend to take error messages literally. Probably because I “grew up” with terrible error messages that hardly ever pointed to the actual file/line the error was on.
  • ant6n 4y ago
    I learned coding in a classroom.
    • withinboredom 4y ago
      I’m talking about self-taught. I also took comp-sci after learning to program and I learned a lot I didn’t know. So I don’t want to sound like I’m dismissing that education.
    • anon7725 4y ago
      I’ve sat in classrooms where coding was discussed but that wasn’t where I learned how to do it.
  • nicky0 4y ago
    Don't forget the ones who learned to program from colorful 1980s Usborne BASIC books. (Also with no copy/paste, and having to use a tape cassette to save the listing.)
    • 4y ago
• JimmyRuska 4y ago
  Having spent a lot of time with GPT-4 recently, it's possible the new generation will not have the same issues we did. For example they can write some code and say, "adjust for best practice". Then "explain why <my code> needs to be <new code>" Oh this is called <new concept>, give me an example of it. Give me another example. Give me another example. Give me use cases where this would be better. Give me a short story where it was done my way but it lead to a mishap in production and the protagonist learned <new concept>. Explain it like I'm 5. etc Basically the new generation is the training neural network, and they can keep flashing context until they absorb the material. Sure, some people are lazy and will go as far as getting something barely working. But superpowers are available for those who fight for their place in the world
  • precompute 4y ago
    Sure, you can "flash context", but being able to write code to make the infrastructure that makes LLMs possible is required to sustain this new "ecosystem". I don't think every dev will be equally hit by this new paradigm, it's basically a two-tier system now, the LLM babysitters and the actual competent human coders (whose input probably gets fed into a LLM).
    • marginalia_nu 4y ago
      s/LLM/StackOverflow/g and squint, and you're basically describing the preceding decade.
      • precompute 4y ago
        Well, stackoverflow required competent users to participate. There's no need for that any longer. The "gap" will probably be addressed by LLM-designed tools that are only usable via LLMs and bigtech will be more than happy to put their own LLM-designed tools at work for their products, which means there'll be vendor lock at scale, so in the vein of the "digital realm emulating the analog realm" there'll be companies you'd have to specifically train for and none of it would carry over... but this is assuming this current level of progress stagnates for at least the next five years. Sigh...
• ano88888 4y ago
  so is anyone proficient in programming in machine code these days?
  • benjaminwootton 4y ago
    Not many people, but the ones who work at the bottom of the stack on compilers, OS design, embedded etc won’t be going hungry any time soon. I think using AI to build a React app from Figma is closer than building a low level piece of infrastructure. Hence, the grey beards operating at the lower levels are slightly less vulnerable.
• qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  I think AI generated glue code is actually a massive win for linux as a desktop operating system. Suddenly everyone and his grandma can form programming pipes with just a few prompts in a gui program. We are going to be vringes softwarearechologists and programmers at arms.
• braindead_in 4y ago
  Not to forget the time spent agonizing over naming variables.
• alecco 4y ago
  I bet programming languages will evolve to compensate for this. Something like Constraint Programming crossed with Prompt Engineering.
• BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  That would be nice for us, but it's unlikely. Knowing the subtlelties of memory management in the 80' didn't help the Ruby coders to create RoR and run Basecamp, or the Python coders to create Django and run the Washington Post. People jumped at ORM, CSS frameworks and JS wrappers, and won the day because they traded memory and CPU for what the user wanted. The new generation will do the same. They will figure out how to be super productive with AI, way more than what we are. And our superpower will be useful in specialized cases, but mostly, their impacts will be small compared to the order of magnitude of speed they'll gain by using the new paradigm. People said interpreted languages were a waste, that you had to learn SQL, that Electron was an abomination. But the people building stuff always win, not what we think is the right way. That's why PHP won at some point. JS won at some point. And something super practical (but that will make us say uhh...) made by AI will win at some point. That's also why all the open letters and ethics committees will have no impact: the short term advantage given to AI users will be such that they will take everything over by storm. It's already happening in porn: we just gave millions of teenage boys a shiny new toy, and they are spending days and nights on it. New incredible models come out every day. Some hyper specialized. Last week, I saw a publication of a new model specially trained on only vagina called "bettervulva" and one for boobs called "breastinclass". Somebody spent hundreds of hours on those, collecting the data, annotating it, and training. I guarantee each niche of the world is doing exactly the same. Not to mention each new model is coded with somebody who has the previous models to help with the new one, code included. This is snowball from now on.
  • mcgannon2007 4y ago
    Sort of off topic - but Django was actually created by the author of this post! But in Lawrence, KS to run a small little newspaper's site (Lawrence Journal-World). WaPo then adopted it, which was obviously a huge boon to the growth of the framework.
  • groestl 4y ago
    > New incredible models come out every day The double meaning at play here...
  • ak_111 4y ago
• column 4y ago
  Do you think people that read and write assembly feel this way?
• latexr 4y ago
  You seem to be saying that as if it’s a good thing, but that’s terrifying. The article says they “get the right answer 80% of the time”. That’s abysmal when you don’t know what you’re doing. Software which is 20% bugs is software you can’t rely on. Depending on what it does, it can be actively harmful. Being a “magician (…) among mere mortals” is not a positive. We live in an interconnected society where the actions of others affect us. It would be nice if you can trust what other people are doing when they’re dealing with your water supply, electricity, food production, hospitals…
  • swader999 4y ago
    Yes, good productivity will be amplified and so will bad. There's people on my team that are super productive but cut corners, don't code in as a maintainable way etc. I usually get a slow senior dude to gate their PR until it passes. But it might just be less hassle to let the senior dudette to get more productive with an AI. We'll see...
  • Yoric 4y ago
    It's possible that all this research in programming language safety, specification, static analysis that most of us have been safely ignoring for the past... well, forever... will finally become a staple requirement, instead of programming itself.
  • simonw 4y ago
    That's why I included that 80% accuracy estimate: to hint that these tools are massively less useful if you don't know what you're doing with them. If you have years of expertise already they give you wings.
  • MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
    > Software which is 20% bugs is software you can’t rely on. No one is saying to take the output and immediately ship it. It still needs to be finished and tested. What's important is what is ultimately delivered; less important is what steps brought you to that point. That said I suspect good testing will become more highly-valued as AI use increases. Maybe there's a form of TDD that can develop, with the human mostly writing tests and AI prompts?
• opportune 4y ago
  I’m thinking of things like the invention of the automobile, typewriters, calculators, even writing. Before those were invented people did things very differently - they walked or rode a horse, wrote manually, used slide rules or basic arithmetic algorithms like long division, memorized things and persisted them through story telling rather than persisting them in writing. People are still actively acquiring the knowledge to do things the old fashioned way in those areas, a hundred or even thousands (for writing) of years later. But typically they only do it if they need to or find it interesting. It’s hard for me to think of any technological advance (outside entertainment) that actually caused a mean regression in peoples’ effectiveness, or for people as a whole to completely stop acquiring the skills of doing something the old way to deleterious effects. Like, has there been any invention that was so easy to use that people got worse at the task the tool was invented for? In aggregate it may happen if the tool greatly reduces barriers (like training, experience, or study) to entry, but I kind of doubt it happens for specialists. Note by effectiveness I mean the general task, not the specific skill that may have become obsolete. I’m not effective at all with a slide rule but I have a Python shell, the internet, and hardware capable of floating point operations.
  • pineaux 4y ago
    Socrates: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. This time its different... The written word might be able to write back. As a matter of fact, I already use chatgpt to learn new skills. Its a better way of acquiring knowledge. The job of teachers will change within 5 years.
    • chatmasta 4y ago
      When I read Harry Potter as a child, I would feel a sort of melancholy when I finished the book and had to go back to a reality without magic. But as the years went by, I started to realize how much our world was starting to look like the magical world... it really is true that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Moving pictures in the newspaper? We have iPhones and tablets and tiny screens with interactive video... Talking to people through the fireplace? We have video calls on our phones. Writing words into a diary and having it write back to you? Well now we've got that too. Now I'm just waiting for the flying broomsticks. Maybe we can do something with magnets inside an electrified metal Quidditch arena...
• xbmcuser 4y ago
  Ah but your ability will be as useless as punch card programming is today.
• mdiesel 4y ago
  Just like how the real programmers of yesteryear tower above us quiche eaters of today.
• mrleinad 4y ago
  "I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see a code generator until I was already a man."
• sarojmoh1 4y ago
  Thank you for this. The last month has been scary as a dev. Not necessarily bc of employment outcome, but just philosophy of why we do what we do
• usgroup 4y ago
  I do mathsy stuff and I feel this is the case with older mathematicians who did things before computers were so powerful. Those in my sample have a sharper intuition and a mechanical sympathy for maths which I admire and lack in comparison.
• imhoguy 4y ago
  They will call us back in 2038 when shit will hit the fan.
  • chewbacha 4y ago
    Same year as Unix datetime underflow. Nice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
• karmicthreat 4y ago
  Strong disagree. Look at the crunchiest of people who are doing very low level work. I wouldn't say they are really making more than anyone else. In a lot of ways they are at a disadvantage because their skills are very niche and very specific. If they find work it can be good. But it can be a frustrating exercise to find that work. People pay for productivity, making a product of some sort that has value. These AI tools will increase productivity. And they will only get better with time. That translates into the productivity of people who have mastered these tools as more valuable. They just get more done. Will syntax issues and other problems be an issue with early AI? Sure, but it will get better. The AI will start to catch more issues and move farther up the stack. We still need to know enough to guide it, but the details required will be fewer.
• Mezzie 4y ago
  Highly unlikely. If every single person with that coding experience only coded, that's likely, but not every person who got their start that way focused on coding to the exclusion of everything else. There are at least a couple of us who are more oriented towards teaching, archiving, and knowledge preservation. Right now, people like us but don't tend to prioritize giving us their resources. Once those greybeards are in their 60s/70s/80s and looking at their work being lost forever, I imagine that will change. (Much in the same way that there's way more discussion now in tech spaces about raising kids now that more programmers are old enough to confront that issue). That knowledge will likely be preserved by another greybeard cohort and it'll be specialized knowledge that only some people know, but it will be known. Some stuff will be lost because we'll prioritize money and copyright up until there's a crisis, but there are people prepping for this time period. It's not like trade knowledge loss is a new problem. It's just not a sexy one right now.