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You are now! It's the act of solving the problem not the code itself that entirely matters. Code is simply an unfortunate vehicle to do so. I've been programmin

• eviks 3y ago
  He was before "now" and this replit promo > I attempted to learn Python to automate some basic data manipulation and scraping tasks we did.
• asddubs 3y ago
  i don't think you're a programmer if you do not at least understand code. it's not elitism, it's just a definition. you don't have to be an expert or even understand it well, but if you're just interacting with a chatbot and copying and pasting without knowing anything about it, you are not a programmer. what's next, if i execute a program on my computer I'm a developer because it solves my problem?
  • croes 3y ago
    Am I an artist if I let Midjourney create an image for me
    • tacheiordache 3y ago
      >Am I an artist if I let Midjourney create an image for me There are two answers: a) No, that only proves you can type. b) Yes, you are an artist just like everybody else.
    • chank 3y ago
      No, you're an art "producer" in the same fashion of music producers who are not musicians, but still create music.
      • diggan 3y ago
        Honest question: Where is the line drawn between music producers and musicians? Playing instruments? Using samples?
        • chank 3y ago
          Areas of responsibility. The producer is the person ultimately responsible for the output. You can be a producer and not know a lick about good musicianship or play an instrument, but you have good taste and can use tools (samples, software, etc) to take what others have done to make something others will like/use/pay for/etc.
          • 0fox 3y ago
            You can be a software engineer and not know a lick about syntax or write algorithms, but you have good intuition and can use tools (LLMs, autocomplete, etc) to take what others have done to make something others will like/use/pay for/etc.
            • skydhash 3y ago
• qsort 3y ago
  > People just convince themselves they won't be able to. As they say, there are two kinds of people: those who think they can program and those who think they cannot, and they are both right. I'm not on the LLM hype train either, but if they can get more people involved with programming that's genuinely awesome! Everyone has to start somewhere, is typing random stuff into Turbo C or whatever else was the "first contact" point of your generation really any better?
  • ianbutler 3y ago
    Right exactly, for me It was https://www.byond.com/ https://www.byond.com/ with their C like language Dream. Had their manual open on the left and their game editor on the right and when I made the low quality fireball move for the first time, the rest, as they say, is history. If, for this next generation, it's an LLM on Replit, that's genuinely awesome.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• _ea1k 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm noticing the same thing. I have a lot of questions that could be Stackoverflow questions. But to do that, I'd have to make sure there are no duplicates and frame the question with every appropriate detail. Or, I could just have a quick conv with the AI. Sure, it'll get some things wrong, but so will SO answers. :) And it is amazing at how clarifying it can be. Even the wrong answers are sometimes a clue that the questions themselves are a little off.
  • menacingly 3y ago
    I'm trying to think of a worse outcome for a QA site than the anxiety a lot of people need to overcome to post to SO. I'd like numbers on what % of questions are scolded for having been asked
    • KMag 3y ago
      I'd also love to see the % of scoldings that miss an important subtle difference in the questions being asked.
    • sensanaty 3y ago
      I've literally never had a SO question deleted/downvoted/any of the other stuff. Just think of a genuinely good question and show you've done a modicum of research and people will happily reply to it
      • seanthemon 3y ago
        Marked as duplicate, use the search next time won't you??
      • bobsmooth 3y ago
        How can you do research if you don't know what you don't know?
        • sensanaty 3y ago
          How do you expect anyone to help you if you don't know what to ask? You have to at least have a starting point, and that's usually more than enough on SO. stackoverflow.com/users/8610114/sensanaty Seriously just check out questions I've asked on SO. They're nothing groundbreaking, a lot of them are pretty beginner/basic questions, yet I've never really had adverse reactions to any one of my questions. Some go unanswered sure, and I might have one or two marked as dupes (they are more or less) but if you've ever browser the "new" portion of the site it's inundated with hudreds of shitty, low effort questions, so it's understandable. SO is also an excellent jumping off point for figuring it out yourself. I've had dozens of times where I figured out a solution midway through typing a question, since you have to make good quality questions there in the first place.
• redlohr 3y ago
  I've taken to using both vim and nvim, with nvim having copilot. There are times when I'm going in, knowing that I'm re-inventing the wheel, or that I'm refactoring. For those times when I feel like copilot would just get in the way there's vim. Both copilot and GPT4 have been wonderful 80/20 tools in different ways, and give a remarkable new way to learn.
• TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  > but rubber ducking I rather my rubber duck didn't tell me lies though. I really hate it when I'm given incorrect information - a waste of my time.
  • aantix 3y ago
    Does it bother you when your colleagues are wrong as well?
    • TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
      I hate it when I'm wrong as well. Doesn't matter the source. Bad information is worse than no information.
    • cbm-vic-20 3y ago
      My colleagues usually let me know when they're not sure about something, and that they might be wrong.
  • ianbutler 3y ago
    GPT4 has been outright wrong for me only a handful of times. I know this because I typically have an academic paper for the topic I'm working through next to me and knowledgable friends who I discuss things with as well. I'm rarely using GPT4 for things like syntax or APIs which can be easily looked up elsewhere. I also rarely ask it to write code. I know mileage may vary, but I just haven't had this often quoted (but I suspect actually less first hand experienced) situation when it comes to development.
• 4ndrewl 3y ago
  Just came here it say this!
• fhd2 3y ago
  Absolutely agree. Those tools you use don't happen to work for me, but that's entirely beside the point. We shouldn't look down on people based on what tools do or do not work for them. What matters is whether they solve the problem and if they can maintain and expand the systems they build. If they can't, they can always get help. If they can, that's cool too, the amount of problems that need solving in the world seem about infinite from a practical perspective. I see "no code" tools the same way: It _is_ code, visual programming is programming too. If that works for you, that's cool. One of the main things I do in my CTO/consulting work is ironically to reduce the fear "non-programmers" often have of software. If they can program to some degree, my experience is that they'll respect the "real" programmers more - and collaborate better.
• slingnow 3y ago
  stranger: Hey guys, my car was making a weird squealing sound the other day. Not knowing anything about cars, I went in there with a hammer and methodically hit everything I saw that was moving. Eventually the squealing stopped. ianbutler: Congratulations! You're a car mechanic! And to be blunt, fuck anyone who disagrees with me!
  • beepbooptheory 3y ago
    Its ok to feel anxiety around something that seemingly challenges your identity, but you don't have to fight so hard to hold on to such an unimportant part of your identity. Nobody is a programmer, really. We live in particular moment of the world where this new idea of professionalization tricks you into thinking sometimes what you are is first and foremost defined by what you trade on the labor market. And this is an especially potent spell for those, like us, who for right now particularly well compensated in this market. But either way you must try not to forget that this is just a kind of illusion. That we are more united by shared capacity than discriminated by "skill". Why not take joy in the idea that what you have devoted yourself to, presumably, can be a more shared and understood thing for the world at large than that of a doctor or college professor?
    • AlmostGreyBeard 3y ago
      Nobody is real, everything is an illusion defined by your interpretation. Please. There is a standard definition of what a programmer is. Dood that had an llm create his code is not a programmer. You have to actually write code to program..
    • mistrial9 3y ago
      engineer: do you need bonded insurance on this project? architect: do you want common design themes in the parts of this project? Philosopher: would you like frys with your burger sir?
      • footy 3y ago
        Philosophy is actually one of the majors with highest career earnings out of college. Also anecdotally, I know several people who majored in philosophy (one with a CS minor) and they all do quite well. I'm in my mid 30s and the people I'm talking about are between 28ish and 45.
• mistrial9 3y ago
  the world is not a function of one person at a time; this cheerful cheerleading is appropriate for pre-teens, and really does work. On the other hand, this narrative plays directly into the hands of employers who seek to devalue and routinize complex tasks, delay or withhold career advancement, outsource or sub-contract, or generally jump on the current worldwide trend of firing high skill people and then re-offering lower pay jobs with constraint. Lastly, there is no distinction here between ephemeral code like this week's JS, versus domain knowledge and abstraction like an engineer or architect. personal take - the enthusiastic F-U sounds like stimulants talking...
  • ianbutler 3y ago
    Nope just my birthday :) I'm usually a thorough pessimist, your comment just goes to show can't win either way.
• bigstrat2003 3y ago
  > It's the act of solving the problem not the code itself that entirely matters. I don't necessarily disagree with this, but if you just regurgitate code that a bot gives you, are you actually solving the problem? Every time I see someone post "I asked ChatGPT and it says x", it seems pretty clear to me that the poster doesn't actually understand the topic and just handed it off to the bot. > Code is simply an unfortunate vehicle to do so. It makes me sad that people feel this way. I got into programming because I love writing code. It's exhilarating, there's nothing I would rather do with my life. What you're saying is kind of like if you said "working with the wood is just the unfortunate vehicle for making furniture, so much the better if you can use a CNC machine". You certainly can make furniture more efficiently with tools like that, but it also sucks the joy out of the process.
  • mikeravkine 3y ago
    I always write the fun bits of code myself, it's usually easier then explaining to the model what I want anyway.. but like 80% of any project is scaffolding or plumbing, The Machine can do that for me with 10x speed and precision without taking any enjoyment away from me.
    • bigstrat2003 3y ago
      That's what I'm saying, though. It's all fun for me. Whenever people talk about boilerplate as if it's an onerous requirement, I can't relate. Because I enjoy writing even the most mundane code. Right now, I think machine generation of code is not usable because you can't trust it. The current tools are known to confidently give wrong answers, and accordingly I don't trust them (same as I wouldn't trust a human teammate who did that). But I think that's a problem which will be solved, and once that happens it'll be quite simple. Developers who use such tools will outcompete those who don't, so everyone will have to adapt or die. I'm not worried about not having a job, because I have been in the tech world long enough to know you have to be ready to adapt. I'll adapt, and I'll keep on trucking. But I do think that I will stop enjoying my job, and that makes me sad.
  • smabie 3y ago
    Who's to say rapidly building something with an LLM isn't more exhilarating? ChatGPT and Copilot definitely increase productivity by a non trivial margin and atleast in my experience, I never once thought "Oh I wish I had written that code by hand." In fact, I feel the opposite: LLMs take out the drudgery of much coding and allow you to focus on writing code for the difficult parts.
• oooyay 3y ago
  > Code is simply an unfortunate vehicle to do so. I disagree a bit. Code is the precision vehicle. A majority of our job is problem solving; some problems can be solved generally, other problems require precision. Not all programmers will ever encounter a problem that requires precision solutions. > I also maintain that for a lot of the programming that makes the world go round, it's not that hard. People just convince themselves they won't be able to. I also disagree on this. I've taught a good number of people to code to different degrees and I can confidently say that not everyone is going to have an appetite for this as a job or hobby. That's to say, hobby coding is different from career coding, the incentives are different, and attract/require different personality characteristics to be successful. I think infantilizing programming does no one any favors. I like to describe it as a job where you solve many, many tiny problems and put them together. You must like breaking big problems down into small ones, coordinating and communicating asynchronously and clearly, and have a good head on your shoulders to tolerate the literal endless stream of failure that you'll encounter along the way without being too dissuaded. Lastly, you'll constantly be learning something new; sometimes learning about the same old things, other times learning things far outside your domain. The single most important tool in a programmers war chest is not knowing all the things, but where to look and how to discern good information from bad or so-so information.
  • xkcd-sucks 3y ago
    Coding is basically management (not in the 'leadership' sense, but in the 'directing' sense); by comparison the things carrying out instructions are more predictable in behavior, and you can FAFO due to high speed and low cost of iteration. Some people really do need instructions made more precise and explicit than computer code!
    • talent_deprived 3y ago
      > Coding is basically management Coding...is engineering. Put the world behind the wheel of a car and they can make it go places. This...does not make them an automotive mechanic.
      • 3y ago
• bcrosby95 3y ago
  > I also maintain that for a lot of the programming that makes the world go round, it's not that hard. I guess it depends. I maintain that getting something mostly working is not that hard. But I haven't worked on a webapp that didn't have many obvious (to me) concurrency bugs in them. So does that make it easy or hard? I dunno. Maybe writing correct webapps is hard, but maybe their correctness doesn't really matter.
• smrtinsert 3y ago
  An llm walking me through plumbing doesn't make me a trade professional. Still useful though
• anonzzzies 3y ago
  I find code (but not all code; there is a difference between environments and languages) as a tools and means of thought to be a lot more efficient than english. I use mostly code to talk to gpt4 and it fills gaps that I really don’t like to fill because the language used (usually typescript these days: I don’t work in a vacuum) is so horribly inefficient in expressing ideas in a fluid-as-thought way. The ambiguous human language is a pretty horrible vehicle compared to that and I see english to code in LLMs more like the way people use Excel; just keep messing around until it works (with often with inefficient and completely wrong sub parts because the direct and correct solution was never found) without really caring if the end result is really what you meant, because actually you cannot translate what you meant in anything formal like a precise formula or a piece of elegant code. I see nothing really wrong with that; actually, I have a perverse interest in it; my company troubleshoots and fixes urgent code and infrastructure issues for companies, no matter how bad/old/messy/broken it is. I see my company grow a lot the coming years because of this new wave of software coming up. Because of course, this will go from > you won’t intersect with the new wave of programmers To Mostly everything now is written by this new wave of programmers Why? Because it’s cheaper in the short run. Why hire me for 300$/hr to write something when the dropout with 2 months of experience waiting tables at Wendy’s can use $20/mo chatgpt4 do it faster and for far less? And I agree with that from a business standpoint IF the software wouldn’t need to live long. However, I am older and because of my company activities, I know that a LOT of these short lived departmental or startup software hacks end up as vital parts holding up the company over the decades. I read somewhere (I think here on HN) of someone saying ‘but no one expects me to statically type out a script that removes dollar signs from a csv’ or something like that. If you would give me a $ for every time I encounter a script like that, that started with that same mindset, but has been integrated over the years into vital processes and breaks things in unexpected ways because it’s not made to be there, I would have a free high spec laptop every year. There are 100s of these in every spaghetti hell of a company I walk into. LLMs and the tooling around them will get better; there is my hope that, in a few decades, the LLMs will deliver code for programmers and end users alike that is robust and even proven and 100% test coverage mostly without extra effort on the human side. Then I can retire my company. For now, I see a bright future with exciting new and unexpected horrors (although, to be honest, it cannot get worse than what outsourcing sweatshops produce; we are doing a project now which has 1000s of lines (so far, it is early days) of code which are unreadable (hard to explain, but they are logically wrong mixed by human obfuscation to hide the fact they didn’t understand the tasks they ‘completed’); it almost seems a joke to write code like that).
• anonzzzies 3y ago
  > Code is simply an unfortunate vehicle to do so. Code is generally more efficient and definitely less ambiguous than natural language. Why is that unfortunate?
• ankurdhama 3y ago
  > I also maintain that for a lot of the programming that makes the world go round, it's not that hard Depends on what you mean by "makes the world go". If you mean the shopping cart of a website makes the world go then sure, but if you mean the underlying database engine or OS kernel or deepest part of the stack, then it is definitely not easy. Ultimately, learning the fundamental concepts of programming is not hard at all and anybody can learn them. Programming is hard or easy solely depends on - what the program is supposed to do.
• ngc248 3y ago
  >>> Code is simply an unfortunate vehicle to do so. This is akin to saying "Eating is simply an unfortunate vehicle to get energy"
• raducu 3y ago
  > but, and sorry to be so blunt, fuck em But maybe please don't fuck them? I use Chat GPT 4 for one-off scripts, to explore new technologies/frameworks. Sometimes it's great, but I find it hurts me as much as it helps me in terms of time. The only big win is it really helps me start doing new things whereas without it I would procastinate more. I've seen a colleague mention a Chat GPT discussion in a PR in what I thought was a straight-forward issue, where Chat GPT was just wrong. I find that worrying.