4 ms·
The beauty of abstraction, though, is that it liberates a person from needing to worry about lower-level complexities. The same should be true for LLMs. It shou
by pohl 3y ago
The beauty of abstraction, though, is that it liberates a person from needing to worry about lower-level complexities. The same should be true for LLMs. It shouldn’t need to know your entire system. Start a new thread with judiciously restricted context when you move on to the next task.
- btbuildem 3y agoYup. We're back to the real problems that matter in sdev -- thinking about the problem, breaking it down, scoping things. Let an LLM do the grunt-work of writing the code, sure.
- SuoDuanDao 3y agoI agree, but I'm worried about where that leaves junior devs - what are the entry level jobs for coders in a post-LLM future?
- ghaff 3y agoAssuming it actually happens, how different is it from a ton of other things? Hpw many rote sysadmin or paralegal tasks of 20 years ago still need basically a warm body to do them?
- SuoDuanDao 3y agoFewer, I'd assume? What I'm curious about is whether anyone has advice for people getting into programming now.
- ghaff 3y agoI doubt anyone has a clear enough crystal ball to give confident, actionable advice. Obviously AI, among many other things, erodes the value of most easy to acquire knowledge skills at the low end. But that kind of thing is constantly being eroded all the time and while uplevel/upskill is generally good advise, it's hardly unique to AI. Nor is there evidence yet that computer programming/software engineering is going to be uniquely impacted by these new technologies. Content farms and other low-end writing almost certainly will be impacted significantly. But that was mostly not a good place to be anyway. Writing generally isn't a good bet unless it's effectively in support of something else that pays the bills or you get very lucky.
- SuoDuanDao 3y agoreasonable statement. I think of programming as a discipline with three core skills, those being choosing what problem to solve, writing a solution, and debugging the solution. I suppose it's the writing that's gotten a lot easier with the addition of GPT, debugging has gotten slightly easier, and choosing what to work on has gotten a lot more competition. From that framework, debugging is the new code monkeying... anyone have thoughts on that analysis?
- TeMPOraL 3y agoThey'll be the ones begging and cajoling LLMs to write the code. Notice that even these days, senior devs aren't supposed to code much - they're supposed to train up junior devs, up to the point said juniors become competent, at which point the juniors join the rank of seniors and begin to teach fresh junior hires. I.e. increasingly, juniors are the only people actually coding anything, and LLMs will only reinforce this trend.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bcrosby95 3y ago> they're supposed to train up junior devs, up to the point said juniors become competent, at which point the juniors join the rank of seniors and begin to teach fresh junior hires. Some of the shittiest code comes out of developers with this level of experience, but they're senior now and teach fresh junior hires?
- JohnFen 3y agoIf the future proponents envision actually comes to pass, there won't be much need for new coders anyway.
- chaxor 3y agoThis is dangerous! How do you know it's correct!? What if you need different memory management!? What if it writes the wrong thing?! Program only in Assembly, because otherwise you risk some real dangers of not knowing what's going on with the code!
- bostonsre 3y agoI'm sure you could get code that would work going this route, but I'm worried about the code base growing to have lots of duplication and it generally just growing into a mess without any standard patterns and it would become a nightmare to maintain if that's the case.
- pohl 3y agoThat will always be an issue and, moreover, always has been an issue — not only with code one obtains from other humans through forums, stack overflow, and blog posts — but also with code written entirely by oneself. Code we get from an LLM, or someone else's fallible wetware, or our own fallible wetware, all need thoughtful consideration prior to committing.