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Parts of the world might move slower, but I've already not hired folks because the job can be done easier with ChatGPT. I'm certain I'm not alone, nor am I cert

Parts of the world might move slower, but I've already not hired folks because the job can be done easier with ChatGPT. I'm certain I'm not alone, nor am I certain this is a good thing when broadly applied across every single industry. Both for quality reasons as well as societal. No force besides ChatGPT has existed up until now (other than economic downturns) that has been this disruptive to software engineering in my nearly 20 year career. What happens when this new reality truly hits the non-US consulting/dev shop world in India, Latin America, etc.? No, I think the impact will be like an electric shock to the system once a critical mass of roles are gone, and I think it's going to happen much sooner than people realize. The world will feel like the rug was pulled out from under them, and it's going to happen soon.

WestCoastJustin 4y ago
When I see peoples comments about how this is nothing new or not that useful. I just think to myself, they don't get it. My googling and stackoverflow usage for solving problems has pretty much dropped to zero. I am easily 2x more productive now and have a long tech career too 20+ years worked at lots of startups and google. This is 100% game changing for anything/anyone that is reading/writing text. There was a GS report [1] that suggests this could impact 300 millions jobs and on page 7 lists out the sectors impacted. "The future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson [1] https://www.key4biz.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Global-Economics-Analyst_-The-Potentially-Large-Effects-of-Artificial-Intelligence-on-Economic-Growth-Briggs_Kodnani.pdf https://www.key4biz.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Global-Eco...
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  I sold my google stock after a few weeks of using chatgpt....
  - astrange 4y ago
    You shouldn't have owned single company stock in the first place.
    - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
      Tell that to my bank account.
      - astrange 4y ago
        Sector ETFs are better than unhedged owning random companies. Though if those are RSUs most of the gain was in getting them granted to you.
        danielmarkbruce 4y ago
        Mmm hmm.
- kdkfods 4y ago
  You're right, I don't get it. I eagerly signed up for the Bing waitlist and it was a fun novelty for a few hours, having it write limericks, but when it comes to work the best it can do is paraphrase documentation and insert errors. It doesn't and cannot understand the proprietary and complex problem domain I deal with at work, and while it might be able to generate REST boilerplate for me to fill in.. the filling in is the hard part. Emacs already makes boilerplate generation extremely simple.. simpler than explaining the problem to a bot in English and then checking its work, for sure. It's pretty good at finding examples in documentation and explaining them, I guess, which is helpful for trivial things but my work isn't trivial anymore. Heck, maybe I'm just lost on this because I haven't used SO very much in recent years.. I'm mostly looking at documentation directly, or very often reading internal code that has no documentation How is ChatGPT supposed to help me, especially if I don't send it any sensitive information? So yeah, I guess I don't get it
  - king_magic 4y ago
    Here's the thing though - I don't need you to get it. I just need you to not be as competitive with me because I get it. I'm not saying this maliciously, more just: that's what's going to happen. Across society.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > I just need you to not be as competitive with me because I get it. If these things are as effective as proponents claim, your real competition isn't other people. It's with your tools.
      - king_magic 4y ago
        I do not disagree with you.
  - tjr 4y ago
    Same experience here. Most of my career has been in aerospace simulation. The answers to my nontrivial problems were not in Google or StackOverflow in the first place. GPT can clearly help with the easy stuff, but that's really not very impactful, and honestly, feels more cumbersome to me than using other existing non-AI help.
- js8 4y ago
  If we are being 2x more productive with writing text, who's gonna all read it? Somehow, I fail to see the productivity increase. Now if ChatGPT allowed us to get by with only half amount of text that people have to read, that would be a game changer!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- digging 4y ago
  FWIW, I don't disagree with your assertions. However, I would love to know more details about "My googling and stackoverflow usage for solving problems has pretty much dropped to zero." I have found ChatGPT too unreliable to make a significant impact. I am worried I am bad at prompt engineering, but my excuses so far are: - It doesn't know my codebase and can't answer questions about business logic or context - It is slower for me to correct its mistakes when generating code I already know how to write, than to write it myself - It is often wrong in subtle ways when explaining code, concepts, or anything. Therefore it's unreliable when explaining "why is X happening in my code". At best it's a value add, not a value multiplier, when debugging.
  - gertlex 4y ago
    This isn't the kind of work I do all the time, and is a mix of work + home automation setup; from the past couple weeks: - netboot grub menu syntax: amazing; this stuff is hard to google and chatgpt just knows it (mostly; couldn't get a few things working; not sure heredocs are actually supported) - dockerfile generation - docker-compose generation, from description of the services needed (grafana + prometheus); was easier to iterate on this (I have past experience) than to follow some guide out there that combines 10 related components - python scripts to push to prometheus. slam dunk - google's oauth2 api stuff for Nest device. slam dunk (most of my time went into googling my way through setting up the dashboard to get a refresh token) - I'm not using it with the actual work codebase (so, lately refactoring has felt especially painful) - Copilot did some nice work for me, for stuff I don't do often (sqlite3 migration writing), but probably going to cancel that subscription... Yeah, it can be wrong... I'm not a pure programmer type perhaps, but more of a systems/test integration guy, who troubleshoots the full stack. Troubleshooting chatGPT's goofs is basically equivalent to troubleshooting my coworkers' creations. I'm probably guilty of not pushing chatGPT hard enough. I've done a bunch of small things with it, to date. And it's saved me a bunch of time! When I'm fully awake/in the zone, yeah, coding things myself is faster. But if I'm tired but still want to make progress, chatGPT is more effective than staring at my text editor!
- fomine3 4y ago
  Maybe some people just use free ChatGPT-3.5 and think that not so much useful for now (though it's interesting and will become better). I thought that before using GPT-4. Difference between 3.5 and 4 is big.
piloto_ciego 4y ago
How can you justify that? The technology has been out like 5 months. What kind of job did you replace because I’m highly skeptical, and concerned you may have just burned yourself.
- king_magic 4y ago
  We're not replacing people, to be clear - we are just finding ourselves able to do more with less now. A lot of organizations are going to come to the exact same realization.
  - Joker_vD 4y ago
    Yeah, so if people would please stop smashing the stocking frames, seriously, there is nothing to worry about.
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  He/she justifies it because they use it. Many people who use the tool are finding that it saves enormous amounts of time. Several times I've had ChatGPT do something in 30 seconds which would take me a half day to figure.
hackinthebochs 4y ago
Agreed. What I don't get is why we're all just blindly barreling forward and allowing Trillion dollar companies to engage in an arms race to see how fast they can absorb productive work. This is humanity's new agriculture moment; those that are positioned to become the new ruling class are resisting any ideas of slowing down. Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. Historically, efficiency was driven by innovation that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it an explosion of prosperity. Productivity and wages remained coupled up until recent decades. Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple. Decoupling will only accelerate due to AI. We may already be on the other side of the critical point.
- pascalxus 4y ago
  the problem is not efficiency itself, necessarily. The problem is, what are the side effects, what are the negative impacts? In theory, efficiency in a competitive landscape should bring down production costs which then brings down consumer costs and thus raise material living standards. The problem is, all this efficiency is in bits not atoms. Digital goods are becoming cheaper every year but real products (housing, transportation, utilities, etc) show no improvement over the last 2 to 3 decades), in fact is even getting slightly worse.
  - cnelsenmilt 4y ago
    Well, second problem is that we don't have any rules for access to the raised material standards for anyone who's not providing inputs to the system elsewhere. In plainer words you need to be employed to have money so you can buy things, because buying things with money is the only option. That is one of the chief negative impacts that looms: a large amount of people being left out of the economy because they don't meet the new efficiency bar.
tectec 4y ago
Can you share what kind of role you didn't have to hire for?
rimliu 4y ago
> What happens when this new reality truly hits the non-US consulting/dev > shop world in India, Latin America, etc.? Absolutely nothing. Or maybe even less interest in getting something done there, because fixing things will be to costly.
aldarisbm 4y ago
> for much fewer programmers in the world? I think the world is gonna find out that if you can have ten times as much code at the same price, you can just use even more. - Sam Altman

WestCoastJustin 4y ago

When I see peoples comments about how this is nothing new or not that useful. I just think to myself, they don't get it. My googling and stackoverflow usage for solving problems has pretty much dropped to zero. I am easily 2x more productive now and have a long tech career too 20+ years worked at lots of startups and google. This is 100% game changing for anything/anyone that is reading/writing text. There was a GS report [1] that suggests this could impact 300 millions jobs and on page 7 lists out the sectors impacted. "The future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson [1] https://www.key4biz.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Global-Economics-Analyst_-The-Potentially-Large-Effects-of-Artificial-Intelligence-on-Economic-Growth-Briggs_Kodnani.pdf https://www.key4biz.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Global-Eco...

danielmarkbruce 4y ago
I sold my google stock after a few weeks of using chatgpt....
- astrange 4y ago
  You shouldn't have owned single company stock in the first place.
  - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
    Tell that to my bank account.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Sector ETFs are better than unhedged owning random companies. Though if those are RSUs most of the gain was in getting them granted to you.
      - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
        Mmm hmm.
kdkfods 4y ago
You're right, I don't get it. I eagerly signed up for the Bing waitlist and it was a fun novelty for a few hours, having it write limericks, but when it comes to work the best it can do is paraphrase documentation and insert errors. It doesn't and cannot understand the proprietary and complex problem domain I deal with at work, and while it might be able to generate REST boilerplate for me to fill in.. the filling in is the hard part. Emacs already makes boilerplate generation extremely simple.. simpler than explaining the problem to a bot in English and then checking its work, for sure. It's pretty good at finding examples in documentation and explaining them, I guess, which is helpful for trivial things but my work isn't trivial anymore. Heck, maybe I'm just lost on this because I haven't used SO very much in recent years.. I'm mostly looking at documentation directly, or very often reading internal code that has no documentation How is ChatGPT supposed to help me, especially if I don't send it any sensitive information? So yeah, I guess I don't get it
- king_magic 4y ago
  Here's the thing though - I don't need you to get it. I just need you to not be as competitive with me because I get it. I'm not saying this maliciously, more just: that's what's going to happen. Across society.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > I just need you to not be as competitive with me because I get it. If these things are as effective as proponents claim, your real competition isn't other people. It's with your tools.
    - king_magic 4y ago
      I do not disagree with you.
- tjr 4y ago
  Same experience here. Most of my career has been in aerospace simulation. The answers to my nontrivial problems were not in Google or StackOverflow in the first place. GPT can clearly help with the easy stuff, but that's really not very impactful, and honestly, feels more cumbersome to me than using other existing non-AI help.
js8 4y ago
If we are being 2x more productive with writing text, who's gonna all read it? Somehow, I fail to see the productivity increase. Now if ChatGPT allowed us to get by with only half amount of text that people have to read, that would be a game changer!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
digging 4y ago
FWIW, I don't disagree with your assertions. However, I would love to know more details about "My googling and stackoverflow usage for solving problems has pretty much dropped to zero." I have found ChatGPT too unreliable to make a significant impact. I am worried I am bad at prompt engineering, but my excuses so far are: - It doesn't know my codebase and can't answer questions about business logic or context - It is slower for me to correct its mistakes when generating code I already know how to write, than to write it myself - It is often wrong in subtle ways when explaining code, concepts, or anything. Therefore it's unreliable when explaining "why is X happening in my code". At best it's a value add, not a value multiplier, when debugging.
- gertlex 4y ago
  This isn't the kind of work I do all the time, and is a mix of work + home automation setup; from the past couple weeks: - netboot grub menu syntax: amazing; this stuff is hard to google and chatgpt just knows it (mostly; couldn't get a few things working; not sure heredocs are actually supported) - dockerfile generation - docker-compose generation, from description of the services needed (grafana + prometheus); was easier to iterate on this (I have past experience) than to follow some guide out there that combines 10 related components - python scripts to push to prometheus. slam dunk - google's oauth2 api stuff for Nest device. slam dunk (most of my time went into googling my way through setting up the dashboard to get a refresh token) - I'm not using it with the actual work codebase (so, lately refactoring has felt especially painful) - Copilot did some nice work for me, for stuff I don't do often (sqlite3 migration writing), but probably going to cancel that subscription... Yeah, it can be wrong... I'm not a pure programmer type perhaps, but more of a systems/test integration guy, who troubleshoots the full stack. Troubleshooting chatGPT's goofs is basically equivalent to troubleshooting my coworkers' creations. I'm probably guilty of not pushing chatGPT hard enough. I've done a bunch of small things with it, to date. And it's saved me a bunch of time! When I'm fully awake/in the zone, yeah, coding things myself is faster. But if I'm tired but still want to make progress, chatGPT is more effective than staring at my text editor!
fomine3 4y ago
Maybe some people just use free ChatGPT-3.5 and think that not so much useful for now (though it's interesting and will become better). I thought that before using GPT-4. Difference between 3.5 and 4 is big.

piloto_ciego 4y ago

How can you justify that? The technology has been out like 5 months. What kind of job did you replace because I’m highly skeptical, and concerned you may have just burned yourself.

king_magic 4y ago
We're not replacing people, to be clear - we are just finding ourselves able to do more with less now. A lot of organizations are going to come to the exact same realization.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  Yeah, so if people would please stop smashing the stocking frames, seriously, there is nothing to worry about.
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
He/she justifies it because they use it. Many people who use the tool are finding that it saves enormous amounts of time. Several times I've had ChatGPT do something in 30 seconds which would take me a half day to figure.

hackinthebochs 4y ago

Agreed. What I don't get is why we're all just blindly barreling forward and allowing Trillion dollar companies to engage in an arms race to see how fast they can absorb productive work. This is humanity's new agriculture moment; those that are positioned to become the new ruling class are resisting any ideas of slowing down. Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. Historically, efficiency was driven by innovation that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it an explosion of prosperity. Productivity and wages remained coupled up until recent decades. Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple. Decoupling will only accelerate due to AI. We may already be on the other side of the critical point.

pascalxus 4y ago
the problem is not efficiency itself, necessarily. The problem is, what are the side effects, what are the negative impacts? In theory, efficiency in a competitive landscape should bring down production costs which then brings down consumer costs and thus raise material living standards. The problem is, all this efficiency is in bits not atoms. Digital goods are becoming cheaper every year but real products (housing, transportation, utilities, etc) show no improvement over the last 2 to 3 decades), in fact is even getting slightly worse.
- cnelsenmilt 4y ago
  Well, second problem is that we don't have any rules for access to the raised material standards for anyone who's not providing inputs to the system elsewhere. In plainer words you need to be employed to have money so you can buy things, because buying things with money is the only option. That is one of the chief negative impacts that looms: a large amount of people being left out of the economy because they don't meet the new efficiency bar.

tectec 4y ago

Can you share what kind of role you didn't have to hire for?

rimliu 4y ago

> What happens when this new reality truly hits the non-US consulting/dev > shop world in India, Latin America, etc.? Absolutely nothing. Or maybe even less interest in getting something done there, because fixing things will be to costly.

aldarisbm 4y ago

> for much fewer programmers in the world? I think the world is gonna find out that if you can have ten times as much code at the same price, you can just use even more. - Sam Altman