6 ms·

As a developer with that I still laughingly refer to as a "career", ChatGPT/Copilot /etc is starting to feel very much like "we're going to need to let you go,

As a developer with that I still laughingly refer to as a "career", ChatGPT/Copilot /etc is starting to feel very much like "we're going to need to let you go, but we'd like you to stay on for a while to train your replacement." Maybe its all unavoidable, but I don't want it.

willsmith72 3y ago
Really? I just see it as a huge productivity booster, especially for small teams where you can't have experts in every area. I don't foresee an AI being able to replace an engineer for real production-grade custom software for a long time
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  For how long a time? At the beginning of the devlopment of computer chess, people said it would NEVER beat a reasonable player. Then it did. Then they said it would NEVER beat a seasoned tournament player, and it did. They said it would NEVER beat an international master or grandmaster...but it did. People keep saying never. Our society can never fall...but societies have fallen since the dawn of time. You might be safe in your job, but what about your children or grandchildren?
  - webdood90 3y ago
    I don't see value in worrying about it. We definitely can't stop it from happening. Yeah, it's gonna suck for us, but it's gonna suck more for a lot of other jobs a lot sooner.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    > Our society can never fall...but societies have fallen since the dawn of time I guess the modern answer from a globalist is that back in the day, societies weren't as entangled as they are today, so they could go into freefall relatively easily with little impact by other societies, so they let them fall, especially if it was beneficial for them. But today everything is so interconnected that if one fall, it would heavily impact a large part of the rest of the societies, that we cannot let it happen. Just look at how unimportant most people would consider Ukraine to be, before the invasion. But it has a huge impact on large sectors, and most countries would have this impact. Some areas of the world, like the Eurozone, even purposefully lock themselves in with their partners so if Greece gets impacted by something, member states have to help them as it'll impact them greatly if they don't. So I guess my end argument is that there isn't really "societies" anymore, we're just part of a global one where the decentralized nature is so strong that we cannot really fail (globally) anymore unless there is something really big impacting all of us (like COVID).
    - vouaobrasil 3y ago
      Well, as technology progresses, we will become even more tightly coupled than before. Not sure if we could measure that, but if there is a coupling factor F, then it's proportional to the level of advancement of our technology, and the square F^2 is proportional to the level of hurt that will ensue if it breaks down.
  - xk_id 3y ago
    I’m not sure how to put this gently, but if you think computer chess is the same thing as LLMs, you’re not qualified to have an opinion on the future of technology.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Chess was clearly just an analogy, and of a specific (old fashioned) AI doing what was widely believed (before we solved it) to be a uniquely human indicator of intelligence; it's not like anyone can accurately list the things that we will actually invent over the next 5-50 years. Worse: thanks to psychology, even if a time traveller came back to now with such a list (and proof of being a time traveler), their examples would not feel real to most until they could be experienced directly — I knew that GPT-3 could code simple web pages just over two years[0] before ChatGPT came out, but it still didn't hit me emotionally until we were all able to play with it ourselves. [0] August 8, 2020: https://youtu.be/_x9AwxfjxvE https://youtu.be/_x9AwxfjxvE
      - xk_id 3y ago
        An analogy is only useful if it is meaningful. IBM's Deep Blue had a fundamentally different design than LLMs. "AI" is just a broad, abstract category that they both happen to share. The other day I heard someone argue that being skeptical about the inevitable "blockchain rennaissence" is like being skeptical about smart phones, back in the day (in this case, the category was just "technology", which is even more vague). Statements like this are not grounded in reality, they are just abuses of logic, useful to influencers in fabricating trends.
        ben_w 3y ago
        > IBM's Deep Blue had a fundamentally different design than LLMs. Yes, and? I mean, you clearly get what you put in the next sentence: > "AI" is just a broad, abstract category that they both happen to share. But, there's also no requirement for future chat bots to be Transformer models like GPT. All we know for sure is that this blob of weights seems to be pretty good at a lot of different things that used to be things that only humans could do. Thus, I think as another demonstration of "we used to use this as a proxy for intelligence and now we can't" it's fine to use chess as an analogy because it demonstrates exactly that thing. No idea what comes next, nor when — it's still possible that "solving" general intelligence is beyond human capacity.
Etheryte 3y ago
This is a pretty common take but I don't think it holds up to scrutiny. Generating new code is such a minuscule part of what I actually do as a developer that I only ever mention it in passing, if at all, when talking about my job. Defining requirements that somehow manage to make a compromise between what every different department wants, communicating our advantages and difficulties to relevant parties, customer meetings, figuring out what legal requirement this 10-year-old server's cron job fulfils, etc. These are all things I don't see any of these systems figuring out anytime soon and that's where the real value add is. Writing up a class that can be described in a few simple sentences is not where the money is made.
- pocketarc 3y ago
  This is where you separate the two classes of developers, I think. The ones that think their job is writing code, and the ones that see their job as coming up with solutions to problems. If you think your job is just writing code, then yeah, you're about to get replaced. But if that was the case, then you would already have been replaced by an outsourced team of developers that can get things done cheaper than you. We as developers are the conduit between what the business needs and what computers can do. We're translators, and not in the "we write code" sense. A non-developer won't be able to use GPT to write any non-trivial system because they won't have a clue what to ask for. And if someone thinks "oh but they will one day be able to list their requirements exactly and GPT will just do it", I will ask: Well, why hasn't that taken off with offshore teams, then? The answer to that is exactly the answer to why GPT poses no risk to anyone's career: Stakeholders don't know what they need, and it's up to developers to figure it out.
  - TillE 3y ago
    > If you think your job is just writing code, then yeah, you're about to get replaced. Honestly, even that would require major advancements, which is speculative at best. The last time I used Copilot to generate a few lines of code, there were three different mistakes. I spent much more time debugging than it would have taken me to just write the code myself. It can do some things very well, but it fails all the time. For the foreseeable future, I think we're firmly in the "this is just a tool" territory.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
In almost all the discussions I've ever had about AI, I've only ever heard comments about the next immediate effects of AI: it can improve this thing or that, while humans do the rest. Almost no one considers the effects decades down the line: complete replacement. There's another effect, especially with regard to information synthesis via AI: previously the vast majority of information was obtained with people's names attached to them. All Stackoverflow answers have names attached to them, and articles on the internet too. Now, AI bypasses that, making information gathering more anonymous and less human. I already remarked in comments that information sharing has always had two functions in human history: bonding humans together and trading useful information. AI removes the bonding aspect and creates a pathological environment where information sharing is too anonymous. Your comment is one of the first I've seen that actually talks about a longer-term effect of AI, but AI programmers and companies are too bedazzled by the promise of short-term financial gain to give one care about ethics, except for mouth-service.
- armchairhacker 3y ago
  Decades is a long time, by then the world will be much different. You could extend this argument to any advancement: "people only talk about the benefits of agriculture. Nobody talks about how once we go from hunter-gatherers to large groups, we'll discover industrialization and cause large-scale climate change." Though we do need to prepare for AI replacement, I think we'll be much more successful pushing for things like UBI than pushing against things like AI assistants. > Previously the vast majority of information was obtained with people's names attached to them. All Stackoverflow answers have names attached to them, and articles on the internet too. > Information sharing has always had two functions in human history: bonding humans together and trading useful information I'm sorry but I disagree. When I see StackOverflow answers or random articles I rarely remember the associated name, unless they're especially notable (e.g. Eric Lippert). And I'm not sure about the vast majority, lots of Stack Overflow and Reddit answers are under pseudonyms. I'm in academia. I believe that when people contribute to the pool of knowledge, the knowledge comes first and their credit comes second; not to be forgotten, but not something most people need to know. When applying for jobs and bragging to people I can show off that I discovered or invented X, but people learning or using X don't need to know my name. I don't think most people asking technical questions are looking for "bonding", they're just looking for an answer to the question. I talk with colleagues about things like opinions and the latest hot topic, but AI isn't going to replace these discussions.
skepticATX 3y ago
If anything the last few months have made me more confident that at the end of the day, we’re going nowhere fast. With all of the money and effort put into GPT-4, and now all of the attention from 3rd party devs, we have very little to show for it? At best we have something that improves productivity by a few percent. It’s..ok. The more you use it the more you realize it’s very flawed. I will never completely discount that future models will be fundamentally different, but I’d put the chances of that happening in the next 5 years very low, despite what we’re hearing from certain industry folks.
- falcor84 3y ago
  I'll take you up on that - what are the odds you'd put on AI-integrated tooling making the typical developer in 2027 twice as productive as in 2022? As for me, I'd put that at more likely than not.
  - skepticATX 3y ago
    If we are using “twice as productive” to mean that a typical developer can complete twice as much work (not just writing code, but overall work) in a fixed amount of time, I’d put that at ~5%. If we are talking about specific workflows, I would agree with you that this is quite likely to occur.
- ben_w 3y ago
  I'm not exactly sure how one might properly define developer productivity: LOC being famously terrible precisely because it's easy to game; plus we keep saying "I know I should write documentation and tests…" and often still don't, but LLMs can at least help with both; and how much of the problem is a game-of-telephone communication failure somewhere between the user and the coder, which is (IMO) one of the strengths of these language models? Given all the people worried about AI safety issues[1], I agree it's likely we might not see any substantial quality[2] improvements for five years. Even without that, there's no way to tell how close we are to a "solution" to the question of intelligence; it may well be that LLMs are to AGI what all the self-driving car startups you've never heard of are to SAE's Level 5. [1] alignment: this entire area is described as "pre-paradigmatic" by the actual researchers 6 months ago privacy preservation: anything that might come under GDPR audience suitability: e.g. no adult content for minors [2] speed/efficiency yes, but scoring similarly on the tests.

willsmith72 3y ago

Really? I just see it as a huge productivity booster, especially for small teams where you can't have experts in every area. I don't foresee an AI being able to replace an engineer for real production-grade custom software for a long time

vouaobrasil 3y ago
For how long a time? At the beginning of the devlopment of computer chess, people said it would NEVER beat a reasonable player. Then it did. Then they said it would NEVER beat a seasoned tournament player, and it did. They said it would NEVER beat an international master or grandmaster...but it did. People keep saying never. Our society can never fall...but societies have fallen since the dawn of time. You might be safe in your job, but what about your children or grandchildren?
- webdood90 3y ago
  I don't see value in worrying about it. We definitely can't stop it from happening. Yeah, it's gonna suck for us, but it's gonna suck more for a lot of other jobs a lot sooner.
- capableweb 3y ago
  > Our society can never fall...but societies have fallen since the dawn of time I guess the modern answer from a globalist is that back in the day, societies weren't as entangled as they are today, so they could go into freefall relatively easily with little impact by other societies, so they let them fall, especially if it was beneficial for them. But today everything is so interconnected that if one fall, it would heavily impact a large part of the rest of the societies, that we cannot let it happen. Just look at how unimportant most people would consider Ukraine to be, before the invasion. But it has a huge impact on large sectors, and most countries would have this impact. Some areas of the world, like the Eurozone, even purposefully lock themselves in with their partners so if Greece gets impacted by something, member states have to help them as it'll impact them greatly if they don't. So I guess my end argument is that there isn't really "societies" anymore, we're just part of a global one where the decentralized nature is so strong that we cannot really fail (globally) anymore unless there is something really big impacting all of us (like COVID).
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Well, as technology progresses, we will become even more tightly coupled than before. Not sure if we could measure that, but if there is a coupling factor F, then it's proportional to the level of advancement of our technology, and the square F^2 is proportional to the level of hurt that will ensue if it breaks down.
- xk_id 3y ago
  I’m not sure how to put this gently, but if you think computer chess is the same thing as LLMs, you’re not qualified to have an opinion on the future of technology.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Chess was clearly just an analogy, and of a specific (old fashioned) AI doing what was widely believed (before we solved it) to be a uniquely human indicator of intelligence; it's not like anyone can accurately list the things that we will actually invent over the next 5-50 years. Worse: thanks to psychology, even if a time traveller came back to now with such a list (and proof of being a time traveler), their examples would not feel real to most until they could be experienced directly — I knew that GPT-3 could code simple web pages just over two years[0] before ChatGPT came out, but it still didn't hit me emotionally until we were all able to play with it ourselves. [0] August 8, 2020: https://youtu.be/_x9AwxfjxvE https://youtu.be/_x9AwxfjxvE
    - xk_id 3y ago
      An analogy is only useful if it is meaningful. IBM's Deep Blue had a fundamentally different design than LLMs. "AI" is just a broad, abstract category that they both happen to share. The other day I heard someone argue that being skeptical about the inevitable "blockchain rennaissence" is like being skeptical about smart phones, back in the day (in this case, the category was just "technology", which is even more vague). Statements like this are not grounded in reality, they are just abuses of logic, useful to influencers in fabricating trends.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        > IBM's Deep Blue had a fundamentally different design than LLMs. Yes, and? I mean, you clearly get what you put in the next sentence: > "AI" is just a broad, abstract category that they both happen to share. But, there's also no requirement for future chat bots to be Transformer models like GPT. All we know for sure is that this blob of weights seems to be pretty good at a lot of different things that used to be things that only humans could do. Thus, I think as another demonstration of "we used to use this as a proxy for intelligence and now we can't" it's fine to use chess as an analogy because it demonstrates exactly that thing. No idea what comes next, nor when — it's still possible that "solving" general intelligence is beyond human capacity.

Etheryte 3y ago

This is a pretty common take but I don't think it holds up to scrutiny. Generating new code is such a minuscule part of what I actually do as a developer that I only ever mention it in passing, if at all, when talking about my job. Defining requirements that somehow manage to make a compromise between what every different department wants, communicating our advantages and difficulties to relevant parties, customer meetings, figuring out what legal requirement this 10-year-old server's cron job fulfils, etc. These are all things I don't see any of these systems figuring out anytime soon and that's where the real value add is. Writing up a class that can be described in a few simple sentences is not where the money is made.

pocketarc 3y ago
This is where you separate the two classes of developers, I think. The ones that think their job is writing code, and the ones that see their job as coming up with solutions to problems. If you think your job is just writing code, then yeah, you're about to get replaced. But if that was the case, then you would already have been replaced by an outsourced team of developers that can get things done cheaper than you. We as developers are the conduit between what the business needs and what computers can do. We're translators, and not in the "we write code" sense. A non-developer won't be able to use GPT to write any non-trivial system because they won't have a clue what to ask for. And if someone thinks "oh but they will one day be able to list their requirements exactly and GPT will just do it", I will ask: Well, why hasn't that taken off with offshore teams, then? The answer to that is exactly the answer to why GPT poses no risk to anyone's career: Stakeholders don't know what they need, and it's up to developers to figure it out.
- TillE 3y ago
  > If you think your job is just writing code, then yeah, you're about to get replaced. Honestly, even that would require major advancements, which is speculative at best. The last time I used Copilot to generate a few lines of code, there were three different mistakes. I spent much more time debugging than it would have taken me to just write the code myself. It can do some things very well, but it fails all the time. For the foreseeable future, I think we're firmly in the "this is just a tool" territory.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

In almost all the discussions I've ever had about AI, I've only ever heard comments about the next immediate effects of AI: it can improve this thing or that, while humans do the rest. Almost no one considers the effects decades down the line: complete replacement. There's another effect, especially with regard to information synthesis via AI: previously the vast majority of information was obtained with people's names attached to them. All Stackoverflow answers have names attached to them, and articles on the internet too. Now, AI bypasses that, making information gathering more anonymous and less human. I already remarked in comments that information sharing has always had two functions in human history: bonding humans together and trading useful information. AI removes the bonding aspect and creates a pathological environment where information sharing is too anonymous. Your comment is one of the first I've seen that actually talks about a longer-term effect of AI, but AI programmers and companies are too bedazzled by the promise of short-term financial gain to give one care about ethics, except for mouth-service.

armchairhacker 3y ago
Decades is a long time, by then the world will be much different. You could extend this argument to any advancement: "people only talk about the benefits of agriculture. Nobody talks about how once we go from hunter-gatherers to large groups, we'll discover industrialization and cause large-scale climate change." Though we do need to prepare for AI replacement, I think we'll be much more successful pushing for things like UBI than pushing against things like AI assistants. > Previously the vast majority of information was obtained with people's names attached to them. All Stackoverflow answers have names attached to them, and articles on the internet too. > Information sharing has always had two functions in human history: bonding humans together and trading useful information I'm sorry but I disagree. When I see StackOverflow answers or random articles I rarely remember the associated name, unless they're especially notable (e.g. Eric Lippert). And I'm not sure about the vast majority, lots of Stack Overflow and Reddit answers are under pseudonyms. I'm in academia. I believe that when people contribute to the pool of knowledge, the knowledge comes first and their credit comes second; not to be forgotten, but not something most people need to know. When applying for jobs and bragging to people I can show off that I discovered or invented X, but people learning or using X don't need to know my name. I don't think most people asking technical questions are looking for "bonding", they're just looking for an answer to the question. I talk with colleagues about things like opinions and the latest hot topic, but AI isn't going to replace these discussions.

skepticATX 3y ago

If anything the last few months have made me more confident that at the end of the day, we’re going nowhere fast. With all of the money and effort put into GPT-4, and now all of the attention from 3rd party devs, we have very little to show for it? At best we have something that improves productivity by a few percent. It’s..ok. The more you use it the more you realize it’s very flawed. I will never completely discount that future models will be fundamentally different, but I’d put the chances of that happening in the next 5 years very low, despite what we’re hearing from certain industry folks.

falcor84 3y ago
I'll take you up on that - what are the odds you'd put on AI-integrated tooling making the typical developer in 2027 twice as productive as in 2022? As for me, I'd put that at more likely than not.
- skepticATX 3y ago
  If we are using “twice as productive” to mean that a typical developer can complete twice as much work (not just writing code, but overall work) in a fixed amount of time, I’d put that at ~5%. If we are talking about specific workflows, I would agree with you that this is quite likely to occur.
ben_w 3y ago
I'm not exactly sure how one might properly define developer productivity: LOC being famously terrible precisely because it's easy to game; plus we keep saying "I know I should write documentation and tests…" and often still don't, but LLMs can at least help with both; and how much of the problem is a game-of-telephone communication failure somewhere between the user and the coder, which is (IMO) one of the strengths of these language models? Given all the people worried about AI safety issues[1], I agree it's likely we might not see any substantial quality[2] improvements for five years. Even without that, there's no way to tell how close we are to a "solution" to the question of intelligence; it may well be that LLMs are to AGI what all the self-driving car startups you've never heard of are to SAE's Level 5. [1] alignment: this entire area is described as "pre-paradigmatic" by the actual researchers 6 months ago privacy preservation: anything that might come under GDPR audience suitability: e.g. no adult content for minors [2] speed/efficiency yes, but scoring similarly on the tests.