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Do you have any friends who are in school right now? A friend of mine told me about a web development bootcamp of his where nearly every student relied so heavi

Do you have any friends who are in school right now? A friend of mine told me about a web development bootcamp of his where nearly every student relied so heavily on ChatGPT that few of them learned how to do the course material. The article makes the point that generative AI is a pipeline threat, one which heavily affects juniors and students.

lumost 3y ago
I saw an ad recently "You'll never code as well as ChatGPT." I suspect we'll see some changes to both how and why people code, and it's entirely likely that application types which are difficult for AI to code will become scarcer. Similar dynamics have happened with cloud/mobile/commodity hardware/PC. Every time there is a change, there are folks who claim that the old way was easier and had been working forever.
- sandspar 3y ago
  I suspect as much as well. If AI makes it easier to produce certain products, then advertisers will do their damndest to create demand for those products. And if AI makes production cheaper, safer, and faster, then planners will orient their constructions and designs around making use of those efficiencies. Similar to how the widespread adoption of the car changed our cities, so too will AI change what we build, AI's limitations and all. I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, we have a mental model of "things AI can build" and companies just assume that the majority of our solutions to problems will come from within that set. It doesn't even matter if those AI solutions don't fit the problems very well, as long as they're cheap. The smaller set of "things we still have to get humans to build" will cost more and therefore be de-emphasized and seen as a last resort. An equivalent might be producing features that introduce legal vulnerabilities. You can imagine lots of planners saying, "Can we do without that feature?"
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    I like this graphic of draft (working) horses vs. other (companion/sport) horses over time (1800-2010 in France): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338480301/figure/fig1/AS:845430833283085@1578577826802/Evolution-of-the-horse-population-in-France-from-1800-to-2010-translated-from-French.ppm https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338480301/figure/fi... It shows clearly that farm (and transport) automation wiped out the draft horse population, but that the other horse population, having traversed the same bottleneck (ca. 1970), has rebounded. (and in fact there were absolutely more "others" in 2010 than there were in 1840) Moral: try to be the sort of programmer a little girl (little AI?) would love? > It had come to [Squealer's] knowledge, he said, that a foolish and wicked rumour had been circulated at the time of Boxer's removal. Some of the animals had noticed that the van which took Boxer away was marked "Horse Slaughterer," and had actually jumped to the conclusion that Boxer was being sent to the knacker's. It was almost unbelievable, said Squealer, that any animal could be so stupid. Surely, he cried indignantly, whisking his tail and skipping from side to side, surely they knew their beloved Leader, Comrade Napoleon, better than that? But the explanation was really very simple. The van had previously been the property of the knacker, and had been bought by the veterinary surgeon, who had not yet painted the old name out. That was how the mistake had arisen. —EAB
- jasonjmcghee 3y ago
  ChatGPT even with the best prompts is, in general, not great at coding. Being able to pass leet code isn't a threat to software developers. "You'll never code as well as ChatGPT" is just not true. It has next to no idea what it's doing, and this is very clear if you're experienced in software. It's useful as all hell, as a tool. But the original statement is wholly untrue.
  - gravity2060 3y ago
    So true. Yet, right now it’s the worst it will ever be.
    - almatabata 3y ago
      There is the threat of model collapse though as discussed in this paper: https://browse.arxiv.org/pdf/2305.17493v2.pdf https://browse.arxiv.org/pdf/2305.17493v2.pdf? They discuss that if you train models with the output of other models you can get worse results. If we all start using code from those models how will that impact GPT-5?
      - MacsHeadroom 3y ago
        This paper is a joke in the ML community. Model collapse is not real. This paper made some seriously faulty assumptions in their contrived lab experiment. State of the art models are trained entirely or largely on "synthetic" generated datasets to surpass models trained on purely human data in quality and capability. Even training on uncurated synthetic generated data, from web scrapes after the advent of genersgofe AI, actually leads to more capabilities and quality in models in practice (the exact opposite of what is prediction by the failed model collapse paper).
CaptainFever 3y ago
I notice the college thing but I don't think it's a threat, as long as they are still able to solve problems well and understand the code that they're writing[1]. [1] Yes, we no longer understand assembly code but that one isn't based on fuzzy logic.
SirMaster 3y ago
Sounds like that's their choice and they are only hurting themselves in the learning process.
- sandspar 3y ago
  Whether it's wise or not, many students are using generative AI to solve their homework problems. That's what we have to wrestle with.
  - dpflan 3y ago
    GenAI is pretty much interactive search, cheating with some sort of library/info-system always happens. GenAI is a convenience for this info. You can use Yahoo! answers to get your homework solved, or any socially-networked site...
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Before that it was chegg and yahoo answers or paid tutors. Homework is not a good test of ability. Honestly neither is even just doing well alone in school. Many graduate programs expect you to have done some training conducting research under faculty direction now.
  - andersa 3y ago
    Maybe the concept of homework that isn't interesting enough for them to want to solve it on their own should be thrown out then? Trying to force someone to learn something never works. At least I personally learn the most when there's some cool thing I want to do and delve into a rabbit hole figuring it out, there is basically nothing that can stop me experimenting and reading stuff to understand what's happening then, and I'll use all of the tools I can to speed up that process, whether it's search engines, reading research papers, or messing with the AI and trying to make sense of its output. Having the AI generate mostly-functioning code is often a great first step towards having something to mess around with before going deeper.
- lysecret 3y ago
  Fully agree. Depending on your choices ChatGPT can either enhance of fully remove your learning.
jmuguy 3y ago
Cheating has always been a problem. Maybe some of these bootcamp students will skate by, I'm sure some will even land jobs, but they'll get weeded out eventually. In the end they're just hurting themselves. I don't know what kind of idiot cheats their way through curriculum that they will need in order to literally do the job they hope to be paid for.
- jf22 3y ago
  GenAI isn't just about cheating though, it's replacing the need to even learn the skills people are testing for. Edit: I didn't mean replacing all programming skills as some commenters suggest.
  - VBprogrammer 3y ago
    I struggle to believe that. I've found Copilot / ChatGPT really useful, especially for doing support investigation tasks (chopping and filtering logs mainly). Not once has it just output a perfect answer - it's required me to know what it's trying to do in order to tweak it to my needs. Not having the skills in the first place would leave me with a confused half solution.
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    I challenge anyone in this forum to create a sizeable production-ready application and maintain it using a language/database/platform they have no idea about by simply asking LLMs to build it. I'm pretty sure anyone will spend enough time banging their heads against a wall trying to fix bugs they have zero understanding about or properly learning the technologies (which they should have done in the first place). LLMs are great when you're fairly knowledgeable about the topic. You can ask it to automate stuff and you can spot the errors and fix them. Hopefully it automates enough and makes fewer errors than the time it'd take for you to code from scratch. They currently can make programmers more productive if used right. Now allow a junior to enter the field and never learning some skill because the LLM does it all? Not even close.
    - d0mine 3y ago
mym1990 3y ago
I was in a bootcamp in 2014 and this was still a problem, albeit not with AI, but with the lack of useful material. We were learning very high level concepts about the "flavor of the month framework" rather than any coding fundamentals. I really wouldn't use coding bootcamps as the bar for education pipelines.
- illiac786 3y ago
  > I really wouldn't use coding bootcamps as the bar for education pipelines. 100% agree on this btw. It’s still cheating though.
rco8786 3y ago
That’s just cheating in school. Not an integral part of the software engineering toolset as the article claims.
jajko 3y ago
That sounds lovely, us folks already in the industry for some time have then nothing to worry about. Our hard earned seniority won't be matched by this approach anytime soon, not even caught up. Not that seniority is generally much in how fast you code, in fact in most places it has relatively little to do with code at all.
AlwaysRock 3y ago
Eh. When I was in a bootcamp everyone did the same thing just with stack overflow and any number of other sites. It was harder/slower but most people were doing as much copy paste as they were actually coding. I'd argue that is a lot of what junior engineers do until they learn how to actually code. Tools like ChatGPT are just faster at doing that. I think of it like having a senior engineer who isnt going to get annoyed at being asked too many questions. But its also going to be limited like any other tool.

lumost 3y ago

I saw an ad recently "You'll never code as well as ChatGPT." I suspect we'll see some changes to both how and why people code, and it's entirely likely that application types which are difficult for AI to code will become scarcer. Similar dynamics have happened with cloud/mobile/commodity hardware/PC. Every time there is a change, there are folks who claim that the old way was easier and had been working forever.

sandspar 3y ago
I suspect as much as well. If AI makes it easier to produce certain products, then advertisers will do their damndest to create demand for those products. And if AI makes production cheaper, safer, and faster, then planners will orient their constructions and designs around making use of those efficiencies. Similar to how the widespread adoption of the car changed our cities, so too will AI change what we build, AI's limitations and all. I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, we have a mental model of "things AI can build" and companies just assume that the majority of our solutions to problems will come from within that set. It doesn't even matter if those AI solutions don't fit the problems very well, as long as they're cheap. The smaller set of "things we still have to get humans to build" will cost more and therefore be de-emphasized and seen as a last resort. An equivalent might be producing features that introduce legal vulnerabilities. You can imagine lots of planners saying, "Can we do without that feature?"
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  I like this graphic of draft (working) horses vs. other (companion/sport) horses over time (1800-2010 in France): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338480301/figure/fig1/AS:845430833283085@1578577826802/Evolution-of-the-horse-population-in-France-from-1800-to-2010-translated-from-French.ppm https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338480301/figure/fi... It shows clearly that farm (and transport) automation wiped out the draft horse population, but that the other horse population, having traversed the same bottleneck (ca. 1970), has rebounded. (and in fact there were absolutely more "others" in 2010 than there were in 1840) Moral: try to be the sort of programmer a little girl (little AI?) would love? > It had come to [Squealer's] knowledge, he said, that a foolish and wicked rumour had been circulated at the time of Boxer's removal. Some of the animals had noticed that the van which took Boxer away was marked "Horse Slaughterer," and had actually jumped to the conclusion that Boxer was being sent to the knacker's. It was almost unbelievable, said Squealer, that any animal could be so stupid. Surely, he cried indignantly, whisking his tail and skipping from side to side, surely they knew their beloved Leader, Comrade Napoleon, better than that? But the explanation was really very simple. The van had previously been the property of the knacker, and had been bought by the veterinary surgeon, who had not yet painted the old name out. That was how the mistake had arisen. —EAB
jasonjmcghee 3y ago
ChatGPT even with the best prompts is, in general, not great at coding. Being able to pass leet code isn't a threat to software developers. "You'll never code as well as ChatGPT" is just not true. It has next to no idea what it's doing, and this is very clear if you're experienced in software. It's useful as all hell, as a tool. But the original statement is wholly untrue.
- gravity2060 3y ago
  So true. Yet, right now it’s the worst it will ever be.
  - almatabata 3y ago
    There is the threat of model collapse though as discussed in this paper: https://browse.arxiv.org/pdf/2305.17493v2.pdf https://browse.arxiv.org/pdf/2305.17493v2.pdf? They discuss that if you train models with the output of other models you can get worse results. If we all start using code from those models how will that impact GPT-5?
    - MacsHeadroom 3y ago
      This paper is a joke in the ML community. Model collapse is not real. This paper made some seriously faulty assumptions in their contrived lab experiment. State of the art models are trained entirely or largely on "synthetic" generated datasets to surpass models trained on purely human data in quality and capability. Even training on uncurated synthetic generated data, from web scrapes after the advent of genersgofe AI, actually leads to more capabilities and quality in models in practice (the exact opposite of what is prediction by the failed model collapse paper).

CaptainFever 3y ago

I notice the college thing but I don't think it's a threat, as long as they are still able to solve problems well and understand the code that they're writing[1]. [1] Yes, we no longer understand assembly code but that one isn't based on fuzzy logic.

SirMaster 3y ago

Sounds like that's their choice and they are only hurting themselves in the learning process.

sandspar 3y ago
Whether it's wise or not, many students are using generative AI to solve their homework problems. That's what we have to wrestle with.
- dpflan 3y ago
  GenAI is pretty much interactive search, cheating with some sort of library/info-system always happens. GenAI is a convenience for this info. You can use Yahoo! answers to get your homework solved, or any socially-networked site...
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Before that it was chegg and yahoo answers or paid tutors. Homework is not a good test of ability. Honestly neither is even just doing well alone in school. Many graduate programs expect you to have done some training conducting research under faculty direction now.
- andersa 3y ago
  Maybe the concept of homework that isn't interesting enough for them to want to solve it on their own should be thrown out then? Trying to force someone to learn something never works. At least I personally learn the most when there's some cool thing I want to do and delve into a rabbit hole figuring it out, there is basically nothing that can stop me experimenting and reading stuff to understand what's happening then, and I'll use all of the tools I can to speed up that process, whether it's search engines, reading research papers, or messing with the AI and trying to make sense of its output. Having the AI generate mostly-functioning code is often a great first step towards having something to mess around with before going deeper.
lysecret 3y ago
Fully agree. Depending on your choices ChatGPT can either enhance of fully remove your learning.

jmuguy 3y ago

Cheating has always been a problem. Maybe some of these bootcamp students will skate by, I'm sure some will even land jobs, but they'll get weeded out eventually. In the end they're just hurting themselves. I don't know what kind of idiot cheats their way through curriculum that they will need in order to literally do the job they hope to be paid for.

jf22 3y ago
GenAI isn't just about cheating though, it's replacing the need to even learn the skills people are testing for. Edit: I didn't mean replacing all programming skills as some commenters suggest.
- VBprogrammer 3y ago
  I struggle to believe that. I've found Copilot / ChatGPT really useful, especially for doing support investigation tasks (chopping and filtering logs mainly). Not once has it just output a perfect answer - it's required me to know what it's trying to do in order to tweak it to my needs. Not having the skills in the first place would leave me with a confused half solution.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  I challenge anyone in this forum to create a sizeable production-ready application and maintain it using a language/database/platform they have no idea about by simply asking LLMs to build it. I'm pretty sure anyone will spend enough time banging their heads against a wall trying to fix bugs they have zero understanding about or properly learning the technologies (which they should have done in the first place). LLMs are great when you're fairly knowledgeable about the topic. You can ask it to automate stuff and you can spot the errors and fix them. Hopefully it automates enough and makes fewer errors than the time it'd take for you to code from scratch. They currently can make programmers more productive if used right. Now allow a junior to enter the field and never learning some skill because the LLM does it all? Not even close.
  - d0mine 3y ago

mym1990 3y ago

I was in a bootcamp in 2014 and this was still a problem, albeit not with AI, but with the lack of useful material. We were learning very high level concepts about the "flavor of the month framework" rather than any coding fundamentals. I really wouldn't use coding bootcamps as the bar for education pipelines.

illiac786 3y ago
> I really wouldn't use coding bootcamps as the bar for education pipelines. 100% agree on this btw. It’s still cheating though.

rco8786 3y ago

That’s just cheating in school. Not an integral part of the software engineering toolset as the article claims.

jajko 3y ago

That sounds lovely, us folks already in the industry for some time have then nothing to worry about. Our hard earned seniority won't be matched by this approach anytime soon, not even caught up. Not that seniority is generally much in how fast you code, in fact in most places it has relatively little to do with code at all.

AlwaysRock 3y ago

Eh. When I was in a bootcamp everyone did the same thing just with stack overflow and any number of other sites. It was harder/slower but most people were doing as much copy paste as they were actually coding. I'd argue that is a lot of what junior engineers do until they learn how to actually code. Tools like ChatGPT are just faster at doing that. I think of it like having a senior engineer who isnt going to get annoyed at being asked too many questions. But its also going to be limited like any other tool.