8 ms·

I’d need to see it. I can’t get ChatGPT to outperform a novice. And now I’m having candidates argue that they don’t need to learn the fundamentals because LLMs

I’d need to see it. I can’t get ChatGPT to outperform a novice. And now I’m having candidates argue that they don’t need to learn the fundamentals because LLMs can do it for them.. Good luck HTML/CSS expert who couldn’t produce a valid HTML5 skeleton. Reminds me of the pre-LLM guy who said he was having trouble because usually uses React.. So I told him he could use React. I don’t mean to rag on novices but these guys really seemed to think the question was beneath them. If you want to get back into front-end read “CSS: The Definitive Guide”. Great book, gives you a complete understanding of CSS by the end.

ern 3y ago
Just out of curiosity: is the code generated by ChatGPT not what you expected or is it failing to produce the result that you wanted. I suspect you mean the latter, but just wanted to confirm.
- miiiiiike 3y ago
  The statements are factually inaccurate and the code doesn’t do what it claims it should.
  - meiraleal 3y ago
    Right. That's an experience completely different from the majority here that have been able to produce code that integrates seamlessly into their projects. Do you have any idea why? I guess we should start by what version of ChatGPT you are using.
    - BlueTemplar 3y ago
      ChatGPT might as well not exist - I'm not touching anything GAFAM-related. Any worthy examples of open source neural networks, ideally not from companies based in rogue states like the US ?
      - meiraleal 3y ago
        Falcon is developed by an UAE tech arm, not sure if you would consider it a rogue state or not: https://falconllm.tii.ae/ https://falconllm.tii.ae/
        BlueTemplar 3y ago
        What is «tech» supposed to mean here ? Infocoms ? The United Arab Emirates ? Well, lol, of course I do, that's way worse than the US.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
vidarh 3y ago
Requirements vary. It certainly can't produce really complex visual designs, or code a designer would be very happy with, but I have a hobby project work in progress where gpt4 has produced all of the CSS and templates. I have no doubt that the only reason that worked well is that it's a simple design of a type there is about a billion of in its training set and that it'd fall apart quickly if I started deviating much from that. But if t produced both clean CSS and something nicer looking than I suspect I would have myself. A designer would probably still beat it - this doesn't compete with someone well paid to work on heavily custom designs. But at this point it does compete with places like Fiverr for me for things I can't or don't want to do myself. It'll take several iterations for it to eat it's way up the value chain, but it probably will. But also, I suspect a lot of the lower end of the value chain, or at least part of them, will pull themselves up and start to compete with the lower end of the middle by figuring out how to use LLMs to take on bigger, more complex projects.
- miiiiiike 3y ago
  This meshes pretty well with my experience.
flir 3y ago
I'm always asking it to stitch together ad hoc bash command lines for me, eg "find all the files called *.foo in directories called bar and search them for baz". (`find / -type d -name 'bar' -exec find {} -type f -name '*.foo' \; | xargs grep 'baz'` apparently.) I would have done that differently, but it's close enough for government work.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Except you should at least try to write code for someone else (and probably of lower level of competence - this also helps for your own debugging later) - obscure one-liners like these should be rejected.
  - Zababa 3y ago
    Assuming there is a comment just above the one-liner saying "find all directories named 'bar', find all files named '*.foo' in those directories, search those files for 'baz'", this code is perfectly clear. Even without the comment, it's not hard to understand.
  - flir 3y ago
    I wouldn't call it obscure, just bog standard command line stuff. How would you have done it?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - radiator 3y ago
    To me, the only obscure thing about this is that it is a one-liner. If you write it in three lines, it is fine. Although, I guess the second find and the grep could be shortened, combined into one command.
    - BlueTemplar 3y ago
      I agree - but my point still stands.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
I haven't practiced or needed to use the fundamentals in literal years; I'm sure I'd fumble some of these tests, and I've got err, 15 years of experience. It's good to know the fundamentals and be able to find them IF you find a situation where you need them (e.g. performance tuning), but in my anecdotal and limited experience, you're fine staying higher level.
- dragonelite 3y ago
  Kind of same sort of situation, but i do like to refresh some of the fundamentals every 3~4 years or so. Usually when i do a job hop. Its kind of like asking an olympic sprinter how to walk fast.
- soco 3y ago
  I had a chilling experience of late when, out of curiosity, I tried the actual online practice exam for driving school. Boy did I fail it. I realized that there are quite some road signs I never saw in my life, and more important, that my current solution to all their right of way questions is "slow down and see what the others do" - not even that wrong if I think about but won't get you points in the exam.
  - collyw 3y ago
    And I suspect you would be a lot less likely to be involved in a crash than someone who had just passed the test.
- worksonmine 3y ago
  There are levels of fundamentals though, since parent mentioned HTML/CSS/React I guess they're referring to being able create a layout by hand vs using a CSS framework/library. You don't need to know how a CPU works to fix a CSS issue, but if all you know is combining the classes available you'll have trouble with even the simplest web development. Everyone should know enough fundamentals to be able to write simple implementations of the frameworks they depend on.
j45 3y ago
Sometimes it requires expert guidance to get something meaningful out.
- Art9681 3y ago
  This is the correct answer. I have 23 years of experience in datacenter ops and it has been a game changer for me. Just like any tool on one's arsenal, it's utility increases with practice and learning to use it correctly. ChatGPT is no different. You get out of it what you put in to it. This is the way of the world. I used to be puzzled as to why my peers are so dismissive of this tech. Same folks who would say "We don't need to learn no Kubernetes! We don't need to code! We don't need ChatGPT". They don't! And it's fine. If their idea of a career is working in same small co. doing the same basic Linux sysadmin tasks for a third of the salary I make then more power to them. The folks dismissive of the AI/ML tech are effectively capping their salary and future prospects in this industry. This is good for us! More demand for experts and less supply. You ever hire someone that uses punch cards to code? Neither have I.
  - varelse 3y ago
    [dead]
  - kevindamm 3y ago
    I think it's more akin to using compilers in the early days of BCPL or C. You could expect it to produce working assembly for most code but sometimes it would be slower than a hand-tuned version and sometimes a compiler bug would surface, but it would work well enough most of the time. For decades there were still people who coded directly in assembly, and with good reason. And eventually the compiler bugs would be encountered less frequently (and the programmer would get a better understanding of undefined behavior in that language). Similar to how dropping into inline assembly for speeding up execution time can still have its place sometimes, I think using GPT for small blocks of code to speed up developer time may make some sense (or tabbing through CoPilot), but just as with the early days of higher level programming languages, expect to come across cases where it doesn't speed up DX or introduces a bug. These bugs can be quite costly, I've seen GPT spit out encryption code and completely leave out critical parts like missing arguments to a library or generating the same nonce or salt value every execution. With code like this, if you're not well versed in the domain it is very easy to overlook, and unit tests would likely still pass. I think the same lesson told to young programmers should be used here -- don't copy/paste any code that you do not sufficiently understand. Also maybe avoid using this tool for critical pieces like security and reliability.
itsoktocry 3y ago
>If you want to get back into front-end read “CSS: The Definitive Guide”. Great book, gives you a complete understanding of CSS by the end. Do you realize for how many technologies you can say the same thing? I don't want to read a 600 page tome on CSS. The language is a drop in the bucket of useful things to know. How valuable is a "complete understanding" of CSS? I just want something on my site to look a specific way.
- miiiiiike 3y ago
  > I don't want to read a 600 page tome on CSS. The latest edition is closer to 1,100 pages. It’s worth it. It’s usually worth it for any long-standing technology you’re going to spending a significant amount of time using. Over the years you’ll save time because you’ll be able to get to the right answer in less time, debug faster, and won’t always be pulling out your hair Googling.

ern 3y ago

Just out of curiosity: is the code generated by ChatGPT not what you expected or is it failing to produce the result that you wanted. I suspect you mean the latter, but just wanted to confirm.

miiiiiike 3y ago
The statements are factually inaccurate and the code doesn’t do what it claims it should.
- meiraleal 3y ago
  Right. That's an experience completely different from the majority here that have been able to produce code that integrates seamlessly into their projects. Do you have any idea why? I guess we should start by what version of ChatGPT you are using.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    ChatGPT might as well not exist - I'm not touching anything GAFAM-related. Any worthy examples of open source neural networks, ideally not from companies based in rogue states like the US ?
    - meiraleal 3y ago
      Falcon is developed by an UAE tech arm, not sure if you would consider it a rogue state or not: https://falconllm.tii.ae/ https://falconllm.tii.ae/
      - BlueTemplar 3y ago
        What is «tech» supposed to mean here ? Infocoms ? The United Arab Emirates ? Well, lol, of course I do, that's way worse than the US.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

vidarh 3y ago

Requirements vary. It certainly can't produce really complex visual designs, or code a designer would be very happy with, but I have a hobby project work in progress where gpt4 has produced all of the CSS and templates. I have no doubt that the only reason that worked well is that it's a simple design of a type there is about a billion of in its training set and that it'd fall apart quickly if I started deviating much from that. But if t produced both clean CSS and something nicer looking than I suspect I would have myself. A designer would probably still beat it - this doesn't compete with someone well paid to work on heavily custom designs. But at this point it does compete with places like Fiverr for me for things I can't or don't want to do myself. It'll take several iterations for it to eat it's way up the value chain, but it probably will. But also, I suspect a lot of the lower end of the value chain, or at least part of them, will pull themselves up and start to compete with the lower end of the middle by figuring out how to use LLMs to take on bigger, more complex projects.

miiiiiike 3y ago
This meshes pretty well with my experience.

flir 3y ago

I'm always asking it to stitch together ad hoc bash command lines for me, eg "find all the files called *.foo in directories called bar and search them for baz". (`find / -type d -name 'bar' -exec find {} -type f -name '*.foo' \; | xargs grep 'baz'` apparently.) I would have done that differently, but it's close enough for government work.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
Except you should at least try to write code for someone else (and probably of lower level of competence - this also helps for your own debugging later) - obscure one-liners like these should be rejected.
- Zababa 3y ago
  Assuming there is a comment just above the one-liner saying "find all directories named 'bar', find all files named '*.foo' in those directories, search those files for 'baz'", this code is perfectly clear. Even without the comment, it's not hard to understand.
- flir 3y ago
  I wouldn't call it obscure, just bog standard command line stuff. How would you have done it?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- radiator 3y ago
  To me, the only obscure thing about this is that it is a one-liner. If you write it in three lines, it is fine. Although, I guess the second find and the grep could be shortened, combined into one command.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    I agree - but my point still stands.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

I haven't practiced or needed to use the fundamentals in literal years; I'm sure I'd fumble some of these tests, and I've got err, 15 years of experience. It's good to know the fundamentals and be able to find them IF you find a situation where you need them (e.g. performance tuning), but in my anecdotal and limited experience, you're fine staying higher level.

dragonelite 3y ago
Kind of same sort of situation, but i do like to refresh some of the fundamentals every 3~4 years or so. Usually when i do a job hop. Its kind of like asking an olympic sprinter how to walk fast.
soco 3y ago
I had a chilling experience of late when, out of curiosity, I tried the actual online practice exam for driving school. Boy did I fail it. I realized that there are quite some road signs I never saw in my life, and more important, that my current solution to all their right of way questions is "slow down and see what the others do" - not even that wrong if I think about but won't get you points in the exam.
- collyw 3y ago
  And I suspect you would be a lot less likely to be involved in a crash than someone who had just passed the test.
worksonmine 3y ago
There are levels of fundamentals though, since parent mentioned HTML/CSS/React I guess they're referring to being able create a layout by hand vs using a CSS framework/library. You don't need to know how a CPU works to fix a CSS issue, but if all you know is combining the classes available you'll have trouble with even the simplest web development. Everyone should know enough fundamentals to be able to write simple implementations of the frameworks they depend on.

j45 3y ago

Sometimes it requires expert guidance to get something meaningful out.

Art9681 3y ago
This is the correct answer. I have 23 years of experience in datacenter ops and it has been a game changer for me. Just like any tool on one's arsenal, it's utility increases with practice and learning to use it correctly. ChatGPT is no different. You get out of it what you put in to it. This is the way of the world. I used to be puzzled as to why my peers are so dismissive of this tech. Same folks who would say "We don't need to learn no Kubernetes! We don't need to code! We don't need ChatGPT". They don't! And it's fine. If their idea of a career is working in same small co. doing the same basic Linux sysadmin tasks for a third of the salary I make then more power to them. The folks dismissive of the AI/ML tech are effectively capping their salary and future prospects in this industry. This is good for us! More demand for experts and less supply. You ever hire someone that uses punch cards to code? Neither have I.
- varelse 3y ago
  [dead]
- kevindamm 3y ago
  I think it's more akin to using compilers in the early days of BCPL or C. You could expect it to produce working assembly for most code but sometimes it would be slower than a hand-tuned version and sometimes a compiler bug would surface, but it would work well enough most of the time. For decades there were still people who coded directly in assembly, and with good reason. And eventually the compiler bugs would be encountered less frequently (and the programmer would get a better understanding of undefined behavior in that language). Similar to how dropping into inline assembly for speeding up execution time can still have its place sometimes, I think using GPT for small blocks of code to speed up developer time may make some sense (or tabbing through CoPilot), but just as with the early days of higher level programming languages, expect to come across cases where it doesn't speed up DX or introduces a bug. These bugs can be quite costly, I've seen GPT spit out encryption code and completely leave out critical parts like missing arguments to a library or generating the same nonce or salt value every execution. With code like this, if you're not well versed in the domain it is very easy to overlook, and unit tests would likely still pass. I think the same lesson told to young programmers should be used here -- don't copy/paste any code that you do not sufficiently understand. Also maybe avoid using this tool for critical pieces like security and reliability.

itsoktocry 3y ago

>If you want to get back into front-end read “CSS: The Definitive Guide”. Great book, gives you a complete understanding of CSS by the end. Do you realize for how many technologies you can say the same thing? I don't want to read a 600 page tome on CSS. The language is a drop in the bucket of useful things to know. How valuable is a "complete understanding" of CSS? I just want something on my site to look a specific way.

miiiiiike 3y ago
> I don't want to read a 600 page tome on CSS. The latest edition is closer to 1,100 pages. It’s worth it. It’s usually worth it for any long-standing technology you’re going to spending a significant amount of time using. Over the years you’ll save time because you’ll be able to get to the right answer in less time, debug faster, and won’t always be pulling out your hair Googling.