4 ms·

Coding won't die, it will simply shift from the language of computers to a weird half-natural half-computing dialect.

Mountain_Skies 3y ago
I remember hearing that exact same thing about SQL. Managers wouldn't need analysts anymore because SQL is a human like language that anyone can use. I've been through at least a half dozen different iterations of this, and each one makes it slightly true while also creating new jobs. Each generation of manager gets a bit more savvy and able to do things on their own, but the amount of work down in the trenches keeps on increasing. Perhaps LLMs will be different; each generation of these tools promises to be the one that lets management cut programmers out of the loop. Perhaps someday one of them will be correct but history so far hasn't worked out that way.
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  That is a bit silly as SQL is a language itself, it's not a thing that can write in (many) other languages while still understanding human natural language. LLMs are that 'blurry jpg of the internet' but now also more finetunable/specialized. I'm going to look at siccing some LLMs on old Jenkins errors today, ideally it will give me more time to spend on building things (and hopefully less fires later). I obviously don't expect it to magically fix everything but I have a good idea of what they're capable of, what they need help with, and what their pitfalls are I can now have some scripts and some "agents" scan through 250GB of logfiles and do various sanity test things and either report back or make a branch and try to fix it, before i even need to look at it. It costs almost nothing and if it finishes early I can have it "go do the same thing but in rolling 3 month windows to see wtf happened when" FWIW I think LLMs are more powerful for the language side of things. I get a lot of the programming improvement from python/metaprogramming/etc - but the combination is like having a group of interns you can make do a bunch of tedious/shit work that nobody wants to do.

I remember hearing that exact same thing about SQL. Managers wouldn't need analysts anymore because SQL is a human like language that anyone can use. I've been through at least a half dozen different iterations of this, and each one makes it slightly true while also creating new jobs. Each generation of manager gets a bit more savvy and able to do things on their own, but the amount of work down in the trenches keeps on increasing. Perhaps LLMs will be different; each generation of these tools promises to be the one that lets management cut programmers out of the loop. Perhaps someday one of them will be correct but history so far hasn't worked out that way.

dontupvoteme 3y ago
That is a bit silly as SQL is a language itself, it's not a thing that can write in (many) other languages while still understanding human natural language. LLMs are that 'blurry jpg of the internet' but now also more finetunable/specialized. I'm going to look at siccing some LLMs on old Jenkins errors today, ideally it will give me more time to spend on building things (and hopefully less fires later). I obviously don't expect it to magically fix everything but I have a good idea of what they're capable of, what they need help with, and what their pitfalls are I can now have some scripts and some "agents" scan through 250GB of logfiles and do various sanity test things and either report back or make a branch and try to fix it, before i even need to look at it. It costs almost nothing and if it finishes early I can have it "go do the same thing but in rolling 3 month windows to see wtf happened when" FWIW I think LLMs are more powerful for the language side of things. I get a lot of the programming improvement from python/metaprogramming/etc - but the combination is like having a group of interns you can make do a bunch of tedious/shit work that nobody wants to do.