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> Students can spend more time on optimization, ethical issues, and the user-friendliness of a system rather than focusing on the syntax of the code And when t

• simonw 2y ago
  I've been programming for 25 years. Thanks to LLM assistance I hope to never have to hand-write code that converts XML to JSON ever again. (Last night I ended up writing that kind of code because GPT-4 didn't quite get it right for me, but 90% of my code like that has been LLM-created in the past 6 months and I look forward to that creeping closer to 100%)
  • ado__dev 2y ago
    I think us folks that have been coding for 20+ years can properly utilize AI coding assistants because we can take the code it spits out and usually understand it pretty quickly and debug it if needed. It's just a skill that comes from writing code for so long. I have seen many jr level programmers struggle with AI coding assistants because they ask a question, get some code, paste it in, realize it doesn't work, but don't know why or the right questions to ask to properly debug it and get it working.
    • jaredsohn 2y ago
      then they should ask the ai questions about it to learn. Even ask it what the right questions are if needed.
      • lupire 2y ago
        Does that work? Can a novice an LLM into coaxing requirements out of the novice?
        • kolinko 2y ago
          Yes. You ask an LLM to ask you questions until it's clear what you want to do.
      • ado__dev 2y ago
        You can do this, and sometimes it works, but more often than not it does not. it's basically the blind leading the blind. With the current state of LLM hallucinations, it's very easy to be given bad or outright wrong answers, and if you don't know any better (which as a jr you probably don't) you'll just end up running in circles. I think this will def get better over time though.
        • visarga 2y ago
          damn right, I tried using GPT-4 for to make a text editor enhanced with CodeMirror 6, but the model kept confusing with version 5, and the thing is, they moved stuff around and deleted some modules, so it was a total mess when you refactor the whole framework you should change its name to keep docs straight, a mere version change is not strong enough for LLMs
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • kolinko 2y ago
      As for jr programmers, otherwise they'd spend time trying to find a stackoverflow answer :)
      • ado__dev 2y ago
        Nothing wrong with SO or even using an AI assistant as a jr. You should use any tool that helps you, but I still believe nothing beats practice and doing some manual coding to really learn and understand the concepts.
        • Atotalnoob 2y ago
          I suggest to my juniors not to copy and paste, but to write the code out by hand while looking at whatever they would copy and paste. A lot of them say they find that useful, even though it’s slower, they HAVE to read the code they are copying and pasting
        • skydhash 2y ago
          I still think one should reach out to a book first, then goes on to whatever method is best (asking a senior/mentor, SO, ChatGPT,...). It gives you more information and the material for better questions.
  • brittlecode 2y ago
    [dead]
  • Workaccount2 2y ago
    I can only imagine that given current trends, this period of "LLM writes boilerplate/broken code and SWE builds on it/fixes it" will be incredibly fleeting.
  • mrcode007 2y ago
    Why would you write code for that? It’s just a few lines of XSLT!
    • simonw 2y ago
      XSLT is the perfect example of a technology that I might consider using today if I can get an LLM to do all of the work for me - see also jq and AppleScript which I use frequently now after avoiding them both for years.
      • mrcode007 2y ago
        I think you missed the point. People attempt to solve problems with LLMs that are problems only to them because they are unaware of existing solutions that have solved the these “problems” a long time ago. If you don’t know something exists, you can’t ask an LLM about it.
        • simonw 2y ago
          Asking "give me options for" is one of my go-to prompts for this kind of thing. I just tried "Give me options for converting XML to JSON" and XSLT was 5th out of the 6 it gave me: https://chat.openai.com/share/85aa3e93-f557-426c-b0ce-f3bce7822cb3 https://chat.openai.com/share/85aa3e93-f557-426c-b0ce-f3bce7...
    • bonzini 2y ago
      Does it do escaping in a reasonable way?
      • simonw 2y ago
        I played around with it a bit and it looks like you have to do some pretty gnarly things to get JSON string escaping to work in XSLT output - at least for the XSLT 1.0 version supported by most web browsers: https://chat.openai.com/share/4bc7922b-b1c2-411c-aef9-b41b0f0e9936 https://chat.openai.com/share/4bc7922b-b1c2-411c-aef9-b41b0f...
    • 2y ago
  • tibbydudeza 2y ago
    I stand on the shoulders of giants - all the kind folks who freely contributed to the Python package system. I can now spend time solving actual problems rather than reinventing the wheel.
    • zer00eyz 2y ago
      You (and i) are more of a raccoon picking though a dumpster looking for working scraps of code that you can glue together. Let's be candid, we all have package management Stockholm syndrome to some degree... the reality is that our laziness keeps us going back for more. The performance gain comes at the cost of not knowing how some large percentage of your stack works or if it is going to be the next XZ. Im not going to stop using packages, because that would suck, but I'm not so rosy eyed about them any longer. There are lots of problems in ecosystems and we're bad about addressing them.
      • williamcotton 2y ago
        There is no such thing as a free lunch!
      • enceladus06 2y ago
        Lots of different ecosystems. Mamba + docker are great though. Pip is ok. Apt works, but we were using the same thing in 2006. If these different bits didn't exist, and have ChatGPT telling me that they exist then most work wouldn't get done...so there's that.
      • tibbydudeza 2y ago
        Agree - nodejs npm system - some of the code - eish. I love the racoon analogy :). Pandas for me a was game changer and a new career path.
      • int_19h 2y ago
        Vernor Vinge very accurately predicted how programming will develop 25 years ago. "Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines — flying machines, the peasants said — from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said — was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex — and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely… the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0 - second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what — even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy ...”"
  • bugfix 2y ago
    It's a great tool when you can actually read and understand the code AI is feeding you. When you don't really know how the language works or don't know programming in general, you end up getting stuck trying to guess why this valid piece of code (that looks like it should do what you asked the LLM for), is not working properly.
  • llm_trw 2y ago
    >(Last night I ended up writing that kind of code because GPT-4 didn't quite get it right for me, but 90% of my code like that has been LLM-created in the past 6 months and I look forward to that creeping closer to 100%) I have bad news for your long term employability if that's the case. I find that my code is 25% LLM-able on a good day with minor editing. On a bad day it is 10% LLM-able with me having to edit every line to get them to fit together.
    • simonw 2y ago
      I wasn't talking about all of the code I write, I was talking about code along the lines of "convert this XML format to JSON".
      • llm_trw 2y ago
        Fair enough. I have to admit I've written a gpt4 api shell utility which transforms text based on descriptions like "split string on '-' after a '~' but only if it's in a the second csv column and select the third". I feel dirty using it - send your data to the cloud and use a ~peta flop- but it's faster than trying to remember how to do it in awk for under 1000 lines.
    • kragen 2y ago
      i really don't think simon motherfucking willison needs to worry about his long-term employability, unless either he suffers a disabling injury, or llms get better than humans at everything, or somehow people stop wanting software
  • Animats 2y ago
    > Thanks to LLM assistance I hope to never have to hand-write code that converts XML to JSON ever again. There is that. Although, if you need, say, to convert .fbx to Collada, there won't be enough examples out there for an LLM to infer how to do it. There's progress; most tools that wrangle meshes now speak glTF, so at least you only need O(N) converters, not O(N^2). There are a number of programming in the large problems that tend not to be taught. A large collection of problems revolve around having state in one place that you want somewhere else. Sometimes you can just pack up the whole state and send it. That works if it's not too big and doesn't change too often. Perhaps the data is huge. Or somebody isn't allowed full access to it. Or it's changing rapidly. Or you need to keep up with changes with low latency. Or you must have guaranteed eventual consistency. Those problems come up all the time in areas from finance to game dev. Inefficient solutions to such problems lead to bloated browsers, slow web pages, and inefficient back ends. An example is XMLRPC. Efficient solutions to those problems are complex, hard to modify, obscure, and hard to debug. An example is the internal representation of Microsoft Word .doc documents. Much of the web is trying to ship state from somewhere to somewhere else, in rather bulky ways. This can have business implications. In the metaverse area, where I've been doing some things, Improbable tried to deal with such synchronization problems in a very general way. They blew through about US$400 million in venture capital, and produced a working system that needs so much server capacity that five indy games went bust, and their big demo, Otherside, is so expensive to run that they only turn it on for demos a few times a year. This may also be why Meta blew their metaverse business so badly and spent so much money. Doing this by special casing code results in an obscure, hard to modify system with race conditions and consistentency problems. That's the classic MMO approach, and is used by Second Life/Open Simulator. A general understanding of such problems is useful, and is teachable. But what do you read for that? Not books on "how to do thing X in framework Y".
  • mirsadm 2y ago
    I've been programming for about as long but I've yet to see a case where searching on Google (and often opening Stack overflow) wasn't quicker than ChatGPT. More often than not if I'm looking something up I'll get a bunch of answers on SO and quickly skim through them to get what I was looking for. This is way quicker than prompting over and over again hoping to get an answer. But after programming for so long the types of things I'm searching are basically API references. I know exactly where I'm going I don't need help getting there.
    • simonw 2y ago
      You have to learn how to most effectively use ChatGPT etc. If you use it the same way you use Google you'll probably get better results from Google. Here's an example from yesterday where I knocked together a tool for converting Atom XML to JSON using XSLT in a couple of minutes on my phone, just out of curiosity to see what it would look like: https://chat.openai.com/share/4bc7922b-b1c2-411c-aef9-b41b0f0e9936 https://chat.openai.com/share/4bc7922b-b1c2-411c-aef9-b41b0f...
• t-writescode 2y ago
  > where exactly are the optimization and ethics when transforming XML into JSON and back again? What's are the XML and JSON being used for? If you're working for a company, you almost certainly aren't working for the "XML to JSON, library salesperson" company, you're probably connecting different API endpoints. What do those endpoints do? Do they do ethical things?
• avgDev 2y ago
  This is actually what sucks about interviewing. My work is mostly working with managers/executives to deliver them a solution, I provide tremendous value to the business. I am full stack dev and can write a complete solution with tests, CI/CD pipelines and setup infrastructure. I once interviewed and was asked what is the difference between thread and a task. I provided a 'dumb' correct answer because I did not remember the text book definition, as I have been out of school for several years. The interviewer ignored everything I've said and told me "Actually, it's <insert textbook defintion>". It almost seems that computer science teaches you too much of the theory and not enough of "get shit done". I really enjoyed computer science and graduated with honors, but writing business code is kind of meh and boring. I know people who dropped out of CS due to having a hard time with algorithms and more advanced courses. I feel like they should have stayed and would do fine doing boring work. However, nobody tells you this, there seems to be a lot of gatekeeping in tech.
  • leetrout 2y ago
    > there seems to be a lot of gatekeeping in tech Yes. And in many other industries but it is especially bad with the types CS attracts.
• kolinko 2y ago
  A dev who coded Dijkstra will catch up with any new framework in no time. A dev who never went into algorithms will not even know how to program some things and where to find information. Having worked with both kinds - I'll take a dev with experience in algorithms and no knowledge of a framework we need to use over an opposite. Especially in times of GPT, where gpt will allow you to switch to a new framework in no time, but struggle with anything besides the boilerplate code structure.
  • epolanski 2y ago
    I don't get how your comment relates to the previous post. The user never stated the opposite.
    • layer8 2y ago
      Not every comment needs to be a rebuttal.
  • amadeuspagel 2y ago
    Curious. I see a lot of whining about the rapid changes in frontend development on HN. Are these all just people who failed to learn Dijkstra's algorithm?
    • layer8 2y ago
      It's not an issue of ability, it's one of annoyance.
• Maxatar 2y ago
  >And when they land a job in the industry, where exactly are the optimization and ethics when transforming XML into JSON and back again? The programmers who are mostly only capable of doing this kind of grudge work will lose their jobs and need to transition and adapt to a new form of grudge work. And yes, as you point out, that's a lot if not most of them.
  • smokel 2y ago
    I must admit that my post was not very clear (reflecting the current state of my thoughts about this matter), but what I meant to say is exactly the opposite of your suggestion. Some people believe that AI will take our jobs, but my point is that our work is already practically trivial, yet for some odd reason we are still in short supply. As much as some of us have become JIRA slaves, our future generations will probably become AI slaves. True creative programming is beholden to a very select group of people, simply because there is so little demand for new things.
    • Maxatar 2y ago
      I have multiple friends who are doctors, and they will all tell you that 95% of their work is just trivial grudge work that almost anyone can do. Most cases that come to them are easily treatable and don't really require much of any expertise to diagnose or manage. Nevertheless, doctors in many areas are in short supply and it's incredibly hard to become a doctor. Why? Because for the 5% of hard cases when you absolutely need an expert or else there are serious consequences, and it's very hard in advance to predict if someone's case is the 95% of trivial grudge work, or that 5% of critical work. Software development is the same, the vast majority of the work is trivial grudge work and there's a lot of that grudge work, enough of it to keep millions of people employed. But there's still that 5% of the time when you need to be an expert, when you need to know data structures and algorithms and good architecture and have solid knowledge of your domain. The problem with software development is that most people just take that 95% for granted, get complacent and think that the 95% of trivial work is the job and that they don't need to be prepared for the remaining 5%. My opinion, and that's all it is, is that in the future there won't be a need for that 95% of work, it will be automated and all that's left will be the remaining 5%. The people who became complacent and came to believe that their job is the 95% of trivial work will find themselves in a very difficult position.
• faizshah 2y ago
  90% of my job is spent redesigning and optimizing code that “just transforms XML into JSON and back again.” The problem is when you don’t have a good mental model for how the code works and how it will evolve over time you make bad design decisions. An algorithm that’s fast for 99% of inputs can be accidentally quadratic for 1% of inputs and lead to major tail latency (group membership in AuthZ systems is a great example) which leads to months of wasted human effort over years because of the bad design decision (and now nobody is at the company who knows how it works anymore). Does this sound familiar to anyone else? The point of learning Dijkstra’s algorithm isn’t to be able to reproduce it, the point is that you know what’s available to you to solve a problem and what areas of the algorithm you can tweak for your use case. If you don’t have a good mental model of how the code works and how you write a maintainable solution then you’re not able to analyze the tradeoffs of the high level competing requirements like AppSec vs UX vs Maintenance vs Engineering Effort that is at the heart of what a software engineer does. And this doesn’t change with AI either, the code that comes out of LLMs is often poorly designed but you can’t tell that unless you have worked on different types of systems to know why we might use immutable data here but shared memory in this situation.