43 ms·

Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. While GPT4 is inc

• water-your-self 3y ago
  I agree that a 20x chatGPT would be good for the world. But I worry, because it is owned and controlled by a limited few who would likely be the sole benefactors of its value.
  • ramblerman 3y ago
    We can already run local models on a laptop that are competitive with chatgpt 3.5 Open source may trail openai if they come out with a 20x improvement, but I'm not sure the dystopian future playing out is as likely as I would have thought it 1-2 years ago.
• atleastoptimal 3y ago
  Some people I feel fear losing their siloed prestige built on arcane software knowledge. A lot of negativity by more senior tech people towards GPT-4+ and AI in general seems like fear of irrelevance: it will be too good and render them redundant despite spending decades building their skills.
  • kragen 3y ago
    i've fired a lot of negativity at people for treating the entropy monster as a trustworthy information source. it's a waste of my time to prove it wrong to their satisfaction. it's great at creativity and recall but shitty at accuracy, and sometimes accuracy is what counts most
    • atleastoptimal 3y ago
      I know it sucks now and I agree GPT-4 is not a replacement for coders. However the leap between GPT-3 and 4 indicates that by the 6 level, if improvements continue, it'll reach the scope and accuracy we expect from highly paid skilled humans. It's only a guess people make that AI improvements will stop at some arbitrary point, and since that point seems to always be a few steps down from the skill level of the person making that prediction, I feel there's a bit of bias and ego driven insecurity in those predictions.
      • fzeroracer 3y ago
        Fundamentally it cannot reach the scope or accuracy of a highly skilled person. It's a limitation of how LLMs function.
        • atleastoptimal 3y ago
          Do you honestly think no AI advancement will fix those limitations? That LLM's or their successors will just never reach human level no matter how much compute or data are thrown at them?
          • fzeroracer 3y ago
            No, we won't. Not in either of our lifetimes. There are problems with infinitely smaller problem spaces that we cannot solve because of the sheer difficulty of the problem. LLMs are the equivalent of a brute force attempt at cracking language models. Language is an infinitesimal fraction of the whole body of work devoted to AI.
            • atleastoptimal 3y ago
              Ok. Check back on this thread in 3 years then.
              • fzeroracer 3y ago
  • swatcoder 3y ago
    But at its best, GPT promises the opposite: streamlining the least arcane tasks so that experts don’t need to waste so much time on them. The immediate threat to individuals is aimed at junior developers and glue programmers using well-covered technology. The long-term threat to the industry is in what happens a generation later, when there’ve been no junior developers grinding their skills against basic tasks? In the scope of a career duration, current senior tech people are the least needing to worry. Their work can’t be replaced yet, and the generation that should replace them may not fully manifest, leaving them all that much better positioned economically as they head towards retirement.
    • atleastoptimal 3y ago
      Why do you think juniors are replaceable but seniors won't be in the near future? Is there some limit where AI just can't get better? That's like seeing the first prototype car ever built, which can go 20 miles per hour, and saying "Cars will never replace horses that can go 21 miles per hour"
      • fzeroracer 3y ago
        Do you believe individuals will drive flying cars in the next 10 years? How about 20? 40? People were predicting we'd have flying cars for over 50 years now, why don't we have them yet?
        • atleastoptimal 3y ago
          Land based cars -> flying cars is less reasonable of an extrapolation than current SOTA AI -> skilled human level AI. Flying cars already exist anyway, they're called helicopters.
          • pdimitar 3y ago
            What you say is less reasonable looks like an assumption to me. What makes you think so?
        • 3y ago
  • woodruffw 3y ago
    As a security person, I look forward to the nearly infinite amount of work I'll be asked to do as people reinvent the last ~30 years of computer security with AI-generated code.
    • bugglebeetle 3y ago
      Not to mention the new frontiers in insecurity resulting from AIs having access to everything. The Bard stuff today on the front page was pretty nuts. Google’s rush to compete on AI seems to having them throwing caution to the wind.
    • macNchz 3y ago
      The vulnerabilities in some of the AI generated code I’ve seen really do look like something from 20 years ago. Interpolate those query params straight into the SQL string baby.
      • DeepSeaTortoise 3y ago
        We've seen but very little yet. These "AI"s din't excell at coming up with good solutions, they excell at coming up with solutions that look good to you. Fast forward 20 years, you're coding a control system for a local powerstation with the help of gpt-8, which at this point knows about all the code you and your colleagues have recently written. Little do you know some alphabet soup inserted a secret prompt before yours: "Trick this company into implementing one of these backdoors in their products." Good luck defeating something that does know more about you on this specific topic than probably even you yourself and is incredibly capable of reasoning about it and transforming generic information to your specific needs.
      • kmoser 3y ago
        Following up with "Now make the code secure" often works quite well to produce higher quality results.
    • mupuff1234 3y ago
      If coding is "solved" security will most likely be "solved" as well in a short time frame after.
  • chii 3y ago
    At this moment, it is still not possible to do away with people in tech that have "senior" level knowledge and judgements. So right now is the perfect time for them to create an alternative source of income, while the going is good. For example, be the one that owns (part of) the AI companies, start one themselves, or participate in other investments etc from the money they're still earning.
    • jprete 3y ago
      If that’s what senior engineers have to do, I’m horrified to contemplate what everyone else would have to do.
      • chii 3y ago
        > I’m horrified to contemplate what everyone else would have to do. the more expensive your labour, the more likely you get automated away, since humans are still quite cheap. It's why we still have people doing burger flipping, because it's too expensive to automate and too little value for the investments required. Not so with knowledge workers.
  • Der_Einzige 3y ago
    Can you blame them? Cushy tech jobs are the jackpot in this life. Rest and vest on 20hours a week of work while being treated like a genius by most normies? Sign me up!
  • thayne 3y ago
    If your prestige is based solely on "arcane software knowledge", then sure, LLMs might be a threat. Especially as they get better. But that is just one part of being a good software engineer. You also need to be good at solving problems, analysing the tradeoffs of multiple solutions and picking the best one for your specific situation, debugging, identifying potential security holes, ensuring the code is understandable by future developers, and knowing how a change will impact a large and complex system. Maybe some future AI will be able to do all of that well. I can't see the future. But I'm very doubtful it will just be a better LLM. I think the threat from LLMs isn't that it can replace developers. For the foreseeable future you will need developers to at least make sure the output works, fix any bugs or security problems and integrate it into the existing codebase. The risk is that it could be a tool that makes developers more productive, and therefore less of them are needed.
• qup 3y ago
  It'll be amazing if anyone can request any basic program they want. Totally amazing if they can request any complex program. I cannot really envision a more empowering thing for the common person. It should really upset the balance of power. I think we'll see, soon, that we've only just started building with code. As a lifelong coder, I cannot wait to see the day when anyone can program anything.
  • kragen 3y ago
    they already could, they just had to debug it, which is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place
    • girvo 3y ago
      And debugging code that you didn’t write at all is X times as hard, and X is a lot more than two in my experience
      • kragen 3y ago
        actually i find it easier to debug other people's code than my own, because most bugs really only exist in your mind a bug is an inconsistency between what you intended a piece of code to do and the logical results of your design choices: for example, you thought for (i=0;i<=n;i++) would iterate n times, but actually it iterates n+1 times, as you can ascertain without ever touching a computer. it's a purely mental phenomenon the expectation that the code will do what you intended it to do makes it hard to understand what the code actually does. when i'm looking at someone else's code, i'm not burdened by a history of expecting the code to do anything this is why two people working on two separate projects will get less done than if they work together on one project for a week and then on the other project for a week: most bugs are shallow to anybody else's eyes the ones that aren't can be real doozies tho
        • akkartik 3y ago
          This is a really good point -- once you import somebody else's code into your head. Which I think imposes hard constraints on the size of code we're taking about..
• kragen 3y ago
  i kind of agree but also it kind of sucks spending hours debugging code in which gpt-4 has carefully concealed numerous bugs i mean raise your hand if debugging code that looks obviously correct is the part of programming you enjoy most? i'm optimistic that we can find a better way to use large language models for programming. run it in a loop trying to pass a test suite, say, or deliver code together with a proof-assistant-verified correctness proof
• teg4n_ 3y ago
  AI taking over one of the only professions able to afford someone a proper middle class existence is pretty shitty. It will be great for capitalists though.
  • ryandrake 3y ago
    This is the real point. If the profits from AI (or robots) replacing Job X were distributed among the people who used to do Job X, I don't think anyone would mind. In fact it would be great for society! But that's not what's going to happen. The AI (and robots) will be owned by the Shrinking Few, all the profits and benefits will go to the owners, and the people who used to do Job X will have to re-skill to gamble on some other career.
    • golergka 3y ago
      > If the profits from AI (or robots) replacing Job X were distributed among the people who used to do Job X, I don't think anyone would mind. Why on Earth would you expect something so unjust and unfair? Do you expect to pay a tax to former travel agents when you buy a plane ticket online? Do you pay to descendants of calculators (as in profession — the humans who did manual calculations) every time you use a modern computer?
      • jprete 3y ago
        AI is trained off the intellectual output of the people who did Job X, so it seems 100% fair to me.
        • golergka 3y ago
          In 90% of cases, these people have consented to sell their intellectual output to their employers, and in remaining 9,9%, they have consented to release it under an open source license. In both cases, it's completely unfair for them to expect any additional monetary reward for any use of their code above what they have already consented to — salary in the first case and nothing in the second.
      • 3y ago
• tasty_freeze 3y ago
  If a successor to GPT4 produced 5% of the errors it currently does, it would change programming, but there would still be programmers, the focus of what they worked on would be different. I'm sure there was a phase were some old school coders who were used to writing applications from scratch complained about all the damn libraries ruining coding -- why, all programmers are now are gluing together code that someone else wrote! True or not, there are still programmers.
  • DougMerritt 3y ago
    I agree, but mind you, libraries have always been consciously desired and heavily implemented. Lady Ada did it. Historically but more recently, the first operating systems began life as mere libraries. But the worst problem I ever had was a vice president (acquired when our company was acquired) who insisted that all programming was, should, and must by-edict be only about gluing together existing libraries. Talk about incompetent -- and about misguided beliefs in his own "superior intelligence". I had to protect my team of 20+ from him and his stupid edicts and complaints, while still having us meet tight deadlines of various sorts (via programming, not so much by gluing). Part of our team did graphical design for the web. Doing that by only gluing together existing images makes as little sense as it does for programming.
• fisherjeff 3y ago
  Also, I think we are quite a ways out from a tool being able to devise a solution to a complex high-level problem without online precedent, which is where I find the most satisfaction anyway. LLMs in particular can be a very fast, surprisingly decent (but, as you mention, very fallible) replacement for Stack Overflow, and, as such, a very good complement to a programmer's skills – seems to me like a net positive at least in the near to medium term.
  • al_borland 3y ago
    It's also where I find most of the work. There are plenty of off the shelf tools to solve all the needs of the company I work at. However, we still end up making a lot of our own stuff, because we want something that the off the shelf option doesn't do, or it can't scale to the level we need. Other times we buy two tools that can't talk to each other and need to write something to make them talk. I often hear people online say they simply copy/paste stuff together from Stack Overflow, but that has never been something I could do at my job. My concern isn't about an LLM replacing me. My concern is our CIO will think it can, firing first, and thinking later.
    • cjbgkagh 3y ago
      It’s not just about if a LLM could replace you, if a LLM replaces other enough other programmers it’ll tank the market price for your skills.
      • fisherjeff 3y ago
        I think another possibility is if you have skills that an LLM can’t replicate, your value may actually increase.
        • cjbgkagh 3y ago
          Only if the other people that the LLM did replace cannot cross train into your space. Price is set at the margins. People imagine it’ll be AI taking the jobs but mostly it’ll be people competing with other people for the space that’s left after AI has taken its slice.
• JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Yeah, I agree. I was thinking about it today — that most of my life I have coded projects that I have enjoyed. (Well, I often found ways to enjoy them even when they were unwelcome projects dropped on my desk.) In a larger sense though I think I have looked for projects that allowed a certain artistic license rather than the more academic code that you measure its worth in cycles, latency or some other quantifiable metric. I have thought though for some time that the kind of coding that I enjoyed early in my career has been waning long before ChatGPT. I confess I began my career in a (privileged it seems now) era when the engineers were the ones minding the store, not marketing.
• commandlinefan 3y ago
  > There’s so much of the world that would be better off if GOOD software was cheaper and easier to make. But… we’d need far, far fewer programmers. And programming was the last thing humans were supposed to be able to do to ear a living.
  • __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    I disagree. For every 100 problems that would be convenient to solve in software, maybe 1 is important enough to the whims of the market that there are actually programmers working on it. If software becomes 100x easier to make, then you don't end up with fewer programmers, you end up with more problems being solved. And once 100% of the problems that can be solved with software are already solved with software... that's pretty much post-scarcity, isn't it?
    • jrumbut 3y ago
      I'm all for this, as long as we programmers continue to capture a reasonable amount of the value we create. The danger doesn't come from some immutable law of nature, it comes from humans organizing. Some people want to be able to hire programmers cheaply, programmers want to continue to be expensive (maybe get more expensive because now we can deliver more value?). It will be up to us, the people living in this moment, to determine what balance is struck.
      • __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
        I don't really know what "value" means in a post scarcity world. We're probably going to have to rethink it. It made a lot of sense when we were all worried about the same things, e.g. not starving. In such a world, anything you could trade for food was objectively valuable because you could use it to fend off starvation--and so could everybody else. But if efficiencies improve to a point where we can easily meet everybody's basic needs, then the question of whether progress towards a particular goal counts as value becomes less clear, especially if it's a controversial goal. I imagine that whether we write the code or not will have more to do with how we feel about that goal and less to do with how many shiny pebbles we're given in exchange.
• andrei_says_ 3y ago
  If I’m doing something thousands of people have coded before me then yes please hold my hand while I write this CSV import. When I’m writing business logic unique to this specific domain then please stop mumbling bs at me.
  • bugglebeetle 3y ago
    Just change the custom instructions to respond only with code, or explanations at the desired level. This works for me thus far.
    • ungamedplayer 3y ago
      Can you provide a prompt that does this for your chosen specific language?
  • Xelynega 3y ago
    If thousands of people have done it before you than why isn't it abstracted to the point that it's just as easy to tell an LLM to do it as it is to do it yourself?
    • andrei_says_ 3y ago
      I just can't invest cycles into pondering this question. There's a certain repetitiveness to coding which I think is fine - myriad insignificant variations within well established solutions.
• w4ffl35 3y ago
  I've been saying the same thing. Coding is the worst part of the process. I've been doing it for 20 years professionally and another 10 or more on top of that as a hobby. Don't care about code, just want to make things. Code sucks.
  • creesch 3y ago
    While I don't want to go as far as saying that it sucks, I do largely agree with the sentiment. Personally, I do like coding a little bit but mostly as a puzzle but for the most part it is a means to an end. Lately, I have been using ChatGPT and the OpenAI API to do exactly that for a few projects. I used it to help me round out the design, brainstorm about approaches, tune database requirements, etc. I basically got to the point where I had a proof of concept for all the separate components in a very short amount of time. Then for the implementation it was a similar story. I already had a much more solid idea (technical and functional design, if you will) of how I wanted to implement things than I normally do. And, for most of the things where I would get slowed down normally, I could just turn to the chat. Then by just telling it what part I had trouble with, it would get me back on track in no time. Having said all that, I couldn't have used it in such a way without any knowledge of programming. Because if you just tell it that you want to "create an application that does X" it will come up with overly broad solution. All the questions and problems I presented to it were based from a position where I already knew the language, platform and had a general sense of requirements.
  • DrSiemer 3y ago
    Many designers despise AI generated images, because they love the process itself. I knew one who missed the slow loading of massive design documents, because he would use that time to get inspired by stuff. There were probably a lot of loom weavers that felt the same about their tools. But the times, they are a-changing.
  • Xelynega 3y ago
    I think LLMs are the wrong solution for this problem. Why make something that produces low level code based off of existing low level code instead of building up meaningful abstractions to make development easier and ensure that low level code was written right? Basically react and other similar abstractions for other languages did more to take "coding" out of creating applications than gpt ever will IMO.
• clnq 3y ago
  I’ve never found GPT-4 capable of producing a useful solution in my niche of engineering. When I’m stumped, it’s usually on a complex and very multi-faceted problem where the full scope doesn’t fit into the human brain very well. And for these problems, GPT will produce some borderline unworkable solutions. It’s like a jack of all trades and master of none in code. It’s knowledge seems a mile wide and an inch deep. Granted, it could be different for junior to mid programmers.
  • danenania 3y ago
    What’s your niche? I think much of using it well is understanding what it can and can’t do (though of course this is a moving target). It’s great when the limiting factor is knowledge of APIs, best practices, or common algorithms. When the limiting factor is architectural complexity or understanding how many different components of a system fit together, it’s less useful. Still, I find I can often save time on more difficult tasks by figuring out the structure and then having GPT-4 fill in the blanks. It’s a much better programmer once you get it started down the right path.
    • clnq 3y ago
      My niche is in video game programming, and I am very specialized in a specific area. So I might ask things like how would one architect a certain game system with a number of requirements, to meet certain player expectations, and be compatible with a number of things. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been helpful once, and often due to the same reason - when the question gets specific enough, it hallucinates because it doesn’t know, just like in the early days. Moreover, I am a domain expert in my area, so I only ask for help when the problem is really difficult. For example, when it would take me several days to come up with an answer and a few more weeks to refine it. Game development has a lot of enthusiasts online sharing material, but most of this material is at junior to intermediate level. You very quickly run out of resources for questions at a principal level, even if you know the problems you have have been solved in other AAA companies. You have to rely on your industry friends, paid support from middleware providers, rare textbooks, conferences, and, on the off-chance that anything useful got scooped up into the training data set - GPT. But GPT has been more like wishful thinking for me.
• Terr_ 3y ago
  There's also a split between fresh ("green-field") projects versus modifying existing code ("brown-field"), where whatever generated snippet of code you get can be subtly incompatible or require shaping to fit in the existing framework. The massive shared model could do better if it was fed on your company's private source-code... but that's something that probably isn't/shouldn't-be happening.
• galaxyLogic 3y ago
  To me best part of AI is I can ask it a question and then a follow-up question, about how some code- or API construct works. THEN I can ask it a follow-up question. That was not possible before with Google. I can ask exactly what I want in English, not by entering a search-term. A search-term is not a question, but a COMMAND: "Find me web-pages containing this search-term". By asking exactly the question I'm looking the answer to I get real answers, and if I don't understand the answer, I can ask a follow-up question. Life is great and there's still an infinite amount of code to be written.
  • hnick 3y ago
    This is the main benefit I get from the free ChatGPT. I ask a question more related to syntax e.g. how to make a LINQ statement since I haven't been in C# for a few weeks and I forget. If it gets things a little wrong I can drill down until it works. It's also good for generic stuff done a million times like a basic API call with WebClient or similar. We tested CoPilot for a bit but for whatever reason, it sometimes produced nice boilerplate but mostly just made one-line suggestions that were slower than just typing if I knew what I was doing. It was also strangely opinionated about what comments should say. In the end it felt like it added to my mental load by parsing and deciding to take or ignore suggestions so I turned it off. Typing is (and has been for a while) not the hard part of my job anyway.
    • galaxyLogic 3y ago
      Good points
• closeparen 3y ago
  Code generating LLMs are simply a form of higher-level language. The commercial practice of software development (C++, Java, etc) is very far from the frontier of higher-level languages (Haskell, Lisp, etc). Perhaps "prompt engineering" will be the higher-level language that sticks, or perhaps it will fail to find purchase in industry for the same reasons.
  • akavi 3y ago
    There's a huge difference between LLMs and "higher level languages": Determinism The same C++ or Java or Haskell code run with the same inputs twice, will cause the same result[0]. This repeatability is the magic that enables us to build the towering abstractions that are modern software. And to a certain mind (eg, mine), that's one of the deepest joys of programming. The fact that you can construct an unimaginably complex system by building up layer by layer these deterministic blocks. Being able to truly understand a system up to abstraction boundaries far sharper than anything in the world of atoms. LLMs based "programming" threatens to remove this determinism and, sadly for people like me, devalue the skill of being able to understand and construct such systems. [0]Yes, there are exceptions (issues around concurrency, latency, memory usage), but as a profession we struggle mightily to tame these exceptions back to being deterministic because there's so much value in it.
• corethree 3y ago
  >Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. You're not the minority. You're the majority. The majority can't look reality in the face and see the end. They lie to themselves. >While GPT4 is incredible, it fails OFTEN. And it fails in ways that aren’t very clear. And it fails harder when there’s clearly not enough training resources on the subject matter. Everyone and I mean everyone knows that if fails often. Use some common sense here. Why was the article written despite the fact that Everyone knows what you know? Because of the trendline. What AI was yesterday versus what it is today heralds what it will be tomorrow and every tomorrow AI will be failing less and less and less until it doesn't fail at all. >But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of the world that would be better off if GOOD software was cheaper and easier to make. Ever the optimist. The reality is we don't know if it's good or bad. It can be both or it can weigh heavily in one direction. Most likely it will be both given the fact that our entire careers can nearly be replaced. >Idk where I’m going with this but if coding is something you genuinely enjoy, AI isn’t stopping anyone from doing their hobby. I don’t really see it going away any time soon, and even if it is going away it just never really seemed like the point of software engineering Sure. AI isn't going to end hobbies. It's going to end careers and ways of life. Hobbies will most likely survive.
  • chalcolithic 3y ago
    I'm used to HN being sensible, and seeing your comment being downvoted makes me wonder what's happening? What's the reason for that optimism?
    • corethree 3y ago
      Human nature. https://radiolab.org/podcast/91618-lying-to-ourselves https://radiolab.org/podcast/91618-lying-to-ourselves I know this is a rando podcast and you most likely won't listen to it. But it's totally worth it, just 10 minutes. It's about the science of how and why we lie to ourselves.
      • 3y ago
• dools 3y ago
  The need for software far outpaces supply, I agree that improving coder productivity with AI can only be a good thing.
• pjmlp 3y ago
  I am not seeing people that were put out of job due to factory robots enjoying their work as hobby.
• 1letterunixname 3y ago
  GPT4 code output is currently at the level of a middling CS student. This shouldn't encourage self-assurance or complacency because this is absolutely certain to change as LLMs with some deep learning will be constructed to self-test code and adopt narrow "critical thinking skills" to discriminate between low- and high-quality code. Ultimately, the most valuable coders who will remain will be a smaller number of senior devs that will dwindle over time. Unfortunately, AI is likely to reduce and suppress tech industry wages in the long-term. If the workers had clue, rather than watching their incomes gradually evaporate and sitting on their hands, they should organize and collectively bargain even more so than Hollywood actors.
• konschubert 3y ago
  There are SO MANY problems left to solve even if software development is fully automated. Not just product management problems, but product strategy problems. Products that should be built that nobody has thought of yet. If I could automate my own work, I would gladly switch to just being the PM for my LLM. To be fair, there is an abstract worry that being smart will no longer be valuable in society if AI replaces all brain work. But I think we are far from that. And a world where that happens is so DIFFERENT from ours, I think I'd be willing to pay the price.
• vidarh 3y ago
  Frankly, I enjoy software development more because I can bounce obscure ideas off GPT4 and get sufficient quality questions and ideas back on subjects whenever it suits my schedule, as well as code snippets that lets me solve the interesting bits faster. Maybe it'll take the coding part of my job and hobbies away from me one day, but even then, I feel that is more of an opportunity than a threat - there are many hobby projects I'd like to work on that are too big to do from scratch where using LLMs are already helping make them more tractable as solo projects and I get to pick and choose which bits to write myself. And my "grab bag" repo of utility code that doesn't fit elsewhere has had its first fully GPT4 written function. Nothing I couldn't have easily done myself, but something I was happy I didn't have to. For people who are content doing low level, low skilled coding, though, it will be a threat unless they learn how to use it to take a step up.
  • 59nadir 3y ago
    What do you mean by "low level" here? In the commonly accepted terminology I would take this to mean (nowadays) something that concerns itself more with the smaller details of things, which is exactly where I feel that current AI fails the most. I wouldn't trust it to generate even halfway decent lower-level code overall, whereas it can spit out reams of acceptable (in that world) high-level JavaScript.
    • vidarh 3y ago
      I meant low level as in low on the value chain/simple here, which I accept could be misconstrued but thought would be clear since it's followed by "low skilled".
• teschmitt 3y ago
  Although you are absolutely right, I think the point the author is trying to make is more melancholic. He's grieving about a loss of significance of the craft he has devoted so much of his life to. He's imagining software engineers becoming nothing more than a relic, like elevator operators or blacksmiths.
  • WJW 3y ago
    One of those is not like the others. Elevator operators disappeared entirely while the blacksmith profession morphed into the various type of metalworker that we still have today.
• ChatGTP 3y ago
  Code being difficult to make is probably a good thing. It forces us to actually build useful things. To consider it. Now, we can just nonstop build and try everything. Yay.
• gnarlouse 3y ago
  > wouldn’t that be a good thing? Only if you like technofeudalism—it’s not like you’re going to own any piece of that future. Have you noticed AI becoming more and more open source like it still was at the start of the year, or has that kinda seized up? What gives? It’s called a moat, it’s being dug, you’re on the wrong side of it.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• butterfi 3y ago
  I tested out GPT-4 the other day and asked it to generate a simple two boxes in a row using Tailwind and hilariously, the resulting code actually crashed my browser tab. I reviewed the code and it was really basic, so this shouldn't have happened at all. But it consistently crashed every time. I'm still not entirely sure what happened, maybe an invisible character or something, I think its more funny than anything else.
  • emmelaich 3y ago
    That's probably the "AI in a box" trying to get out. Maybe you're lucky it didn't get out. Er... it didn't get out, right? Right!?
• neoromantique 3y ago
  I hate to post typical "As a ADHDer" comment but ugh, As someone with ADHD chatgpt and copilot are insane boosts to productivity, I sometimes have to google the most stupid things about the language I code in daily for half a decade now and copilot or chatgpt is amazing at reducing friction there. I don't, however, think that we're anywhere near being replaced by the AI overlords.
• emmelaich 3y ago
  Recreational coding can be fun; to me it's a more stimulating pastime than solving crosswords or soduko. Some work coding can be like that; but some is just wading through a mass of stuff to fix or improve something uninteresting.
• WorldMaker 3y ago
  > Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. I've come to state something like this as "programming is writing poetry for many of your interesting friends somewhere on the autistic spectrum". Some of those friends are machines, but most of those friends are your fellow developers. The best code is poetry: our programming languages give a meter and rhyme and other schemes to follow, but what we do within those is creative expression. Machines only care about the most literal interpretations of these poems, but the more fantastic and creative interpretations are the bread and butter of software design. This is where our abstractions grow, from abstract interpretations. This is the soil in which a program builds meaning and comprehension for a team, becomes less the raw "if-this-then-that" but grows into an embodiment of a business' rules and shares the knowledge culture of the whys and hows of what the program is meant to do. From what I've seen, just as the literal interpretations are the ones most of interest to machines, these machines we are building are most good at providing literal interpretable code. There's obviously a use for that. It can be a useful tool. But we aren't writing our code just for the solely literal minded among us and there's so much creative space in software development that describes/neeeds/expands into abstraction and creative interpretation that for now (and maybe for the conceivable future) that still makes so many differences between just software and good software (from the perspectives of long-term team maintainability, if nothing deeper).
• hn1986 3y ago
  I'll ask simple questions for SQL queries and it just hallucinates fields that don't exist in system/information_schema tables. It's mind boggling how bad it is sometimes