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I don’t think any of this materially changes job outlook for software development over the next decade. I use ChatGPT daily for school, and used Copilot daily

I don’t think any of this materially changes job outlook for software development over the next decade. I use ChatGPT daily for school, and used Copilot daily for software development; it gets a lot wrong a lot of the time, and can’t retain necessary context that is critical for being useful long term. I can’t even get it to consume an entire chapter at once to generate notes or flashcards yet. It may slightly change some aspects of a software job, but nobody’s at risk.

callwhendone 3y ago
> I can't copy paste an entire book chapter and have flashcards in 30 seconds. If that's your bar for whether or not it changes the job outlook for software development over the next DECADE, I think you need to recalibrate.
- smk_ 3y ago
  If I took 2 weeks off from work I could build this prototype quite easily. We're in an interesting period where the space of possibilities is so large it just takes a while for the "market" to exhaust it.
  - callwhendone 3y ago
    Quizlet has a feature to build flashcards using AI. I'm sure they could write a backend service that just chunked the entire chapter.
    - WendyTheWillow 3y ago
      It doesn't work well enough yet. The flashcards it generates don't actually fit well into its own ecosystem. When you try to build the "quizzes", the wrong answers are trivially spottable. Further, even the generated questions are stilted don't hit parity with manually generated flashcards. My use of ChatGPT for this purpose is so far mostly limited to a sanity check, e.g. "Do these notes cover the major points of this topic?" Usually it'll spit back out "Yep looks good" or some major missed point, like The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 for a topic on the Civil War's economic complexity. I'll also use it to reformat content, "Convert these questions and answers into Anki format."
- WendyTheWillow 3y ago
  Er, why did you rewrite what I wrote but then pretend like it was a quote? That's a really weird way to reply! But to address your point, my "bar" is that OpenAI's ChatGPT fails to solve problems for me on a many-times-a-day basis. It's an immensely helpful tool, but I still need to drive it, so it's not replacing me, it's augmenting me.
jader201 3y ago
This feels fairly naive, ignoring how much progress has happened over the (short) span of one year. This doesn't sound like that tough of a gap to close in another year (again, projecting based off recent progress).
- lukev 3y ago
  The bitter truth though is that the last 20% always takes 99% of the time and effort. LLMs are a huge breakthrough and we are absolutely speedrunning the 80%, but I see no reason to believe the usual pattern won’t hold when the easy wins are exploited.
  - realce 3y ago
    Some insurance against this dam breaking wouldn't be so bad however
- TheRoque 3y ago
  The opposite is fairly naive. Software development is not only dumping tokens into a text file. To have a significant impact on the market, it should do much, much, much more: compile and test code, automatically assess the quality of what its done, be aware of the current design trends (if in UI/UX), ideally innovate, it should also be able to run a debugger, inspect all the variables, and deduce from there how it got something wrong, sometimes with tiny clues that I don't even know how it would get its information (e.g. in graphics programming where you have to actually see at a high frame rate). Oh snap a library is broken ? The AI needs to search online why it's broken, then find a fix (log onto a website to communicate with support, install a missing dep...). It can't be fixed ? Then the AI needs to explain this to the manager, good luck for that. It would need to think and feel like a human, otherwise producing uncanny content that will be either boring, either creepy. You can think about your daily job and break down all the tasks, and you'll quickly realize that replacing all this is just a monstrous task.
  - jader201 3y ago
    Yeah, I definitely am not on team “We’re Doomed”, but I also can’t say definitively that I’m on team “We’re Fine” either. I think there are merits to both arguments, and I think it’s possible that we’ll see things move towards either direction in the next 1/5/10 years. My point is, I don’t think we can rule out the possibility of some jobs being at risk within the next 1/5/10 years.
fzzzy 3y ago
You could easily write a 20 line script to generate notes and flashcards. I know because I have.
- misiti3780 3y ago
  you mean like anki flash cards?
- WendyTheWillow 3y ago
  Yep, and I could have done that 5 years ago. My point is that I run into problems on a daily basis that the current ChatGPT is not capable of handling on its own, without meaningful interaction with me, a software engineer.
pmarreck 3y ago
> I can’t even get it to consume an entire chapter at once to generate notes or flashcards yet. Anthropic’s Claude 100k is your jam, then. And Amazon just invested $1 billion in them.

callwhendone 3y ago

> I can't copy paste an entire book chapter and have flashcards in 30 seconds. If that's your bar for whether or not it changes the job outlook for software development over the next DECADE, I think you need to recalibrate.

smk_ 3y ago
If I took 2 weeks off from work I could build this prototype quite easily. We're in an interesting period where the space of possibilities is so large it just takes a while for the "market" to exhaust it.
- callwhendone 3y ago
  Quizlet has a feature to build flashcards using AI. I'm sure they could write a backend service that just chunked the entire chapter.
  - WendyTheWillow 3y ago
    It doesn't work well enough yet. The flashcards it generates don't actually fit well into its own ecosystem. When you try to build the "quizzes", the wrong answers are trivially spottable. Further, even the generated questions are stilted don't hit parity with manually generated flashcards. My use of ChatGPT for this purpose is so far mostly limited to a sanity check, e.g. "Do these notes cover the major points of this topic?" Usually it'll spit back out "Yep looks good" or some major missed point, like The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 for a topic on the Civil War's economic complexity. I'll also use it to reformat content, "Convert these questions and answers into Anki format."
WendyTheWillow 3y ago
Er, why did you rewrite what I wrote but then pretend like it was a quote? That's a really weird way to reply! But to address your point, my "bar" is that OpenAI's ChatGPT fails to solve problems for me on a many-times-a-day basis. It's an immensely helpful tool, but I still need to drive it, so it's not replacing me, it's augmenting me.

jader201 3y ago

This feels fairly naive, ignoring how much progress has happened over the (short) span of one year. This doesn't sound like that tough of a gap to close in another year (again, projecting based off recent progress).

lukev 3y ago
The bitter truth though is that the last 20% always takes 99% of the time and effort. LLMs are a huge breakthrough and we are absolutely speedrunning the 80%, but I see no reason to believe the usual pattern won’t hold when the easy wins are exploited.
- realce 3y ago
  Some insurance against this dam breaking wouldn't be so bad however
TheRoque 3y ago
The opposite is fairly naive. Software development is not only dumping tokens into a text file. To have a significant impact on the market, it should do much, much, much more: compile and test code, automatically assess the quality of what its done, be aware of the current design trends (if in UI/UX), ideally innovate, it should also be able to run a debugger, inspect all the variables, and deduce from there how it got something wrong, sometimes with tiny clues that I don't even know how it would get its information (e.g. in graphics programming where you have to actually see at a high frame rate). Oh snap a library is broken ? The AI needs to search online why it's broken, then find a fix (log onto a website to communicate with support, install a missing dep...). It can't be fixed ? Then the AI needs to explain this to the manager, good luck for that. It would need to think and feel like a human, otherwise producing uncanny content that will be either boring, either creepy. You can think about your daily job and break down all the tasks, and you'll quickly realize that replacing all this is just a monstrous task.
- jader201 3y ago
  Yeah, I definitely am not on team “We’re Doomed”, but I also can’t say definitively that I’m on team “We’re Fine” either. I think there are merits to both arguments, and I think it’s possible that we’ll see things move towards either direction in the next 1/5/10 years. My point is, I don’t think we can rule out the possibility of some jobs being at risk within the next 1/5/10 years.

fzzzy 3y ago

You could easily write a 20 line script to generate notes and flashcards. I know because I have.

misiti3780 3y ago
you mean like anki flash cards?
WendyTheWillow 3y ago
Yep, and I could have done that 5 years ago. My point is that I run into problems on a daily basis that the current ChatGPT is not capable of handling on its own, without meaningful interaction with me, a software engineer.

pmarreck 3y ago

> I can’t even get it to consume an entire chapter at once to generate notes or flashcards yet. Anthropic’s Claude 100k is your jam, then. And Amazon just invested $1 billion in them.