4 ms·

> The problem is that the average person doesn't know how to explain & solve a problem in sufficient detail to get a working solution. I intuit this also is an

by froh 2y ago

> The problem is that the average person doesn't know how to explain & solve a problem in sufficient detail to get a working solution. I intuit this also is an intrinsic limit to LLM based approaches to "you don't need them expensive programmers no more" with LLMs magically "generating the solution" you move the responsibility for concise expression of the problem up the ladder. and then you "program" in prompts, reviewing the LLM-proposed formalization ("code"). I other words, the nature of "programming" changes to prompt engineering. alas you still have to understand formal languages (code)... so there'll always be plenty to do for humans who can "math" :-)

jasfi 2y ago
A lot of business people want to get something functional that they can sell, and hire a programmer if/when they can afford one. That niche is seeing a lot of uptake with regards to LLM based approaches. This works for them because an MVP typically isn't a lot of code for what they need, and LLMs have a limited scope within which they can generate something that works.
devjab 2y ago
This is only true to an extend. We have a lot of digitally inclined workers who’re developing programs or scripts to handle a lot of things for them. It’s imperfect and often wildly insecure and inefficient, but unlike any previous no-code or “standard” solution it actually works. Often in conjunction with “standard” solutions. On one hand you’re correct in that there will always be a need for programmers. I really doubt there will be a great need for generalist programmers though. The one area that may survive is the people who’re capable of transforming business needs and rules into code. Which requires a social and analytical skillset for cooperating with non tech people. You’ll also see a demand for skilled programmers at scale and for embedded programming, but the giant work force of generalist developers (and probably web developers once Figma and similar lets designers generate better code) is likely going to become much smaller in the coming decades. Then is basically what the entire office workforce is facing. AI believers have been saying AI would do to the office what robots did to the assembly line for years, but now it actually seems like they’re going to be correct.
- stroupwaffle 2y ago
  Another parallel is type foundries and printing presses. At one point people operated these linotype machines which used molten lead. Of course this transitioned to photo typesetting which, to the dismay of everyone had poor results. Along came Donald Knuth and TeX to fix those deficiencies. NOTE: mechanical printing has a profoundly better result no matter what. It is the ink and the impression in paper that makes it superior (for letterforms and such). So, if AI follows suit, we will witness the dumb (but very knowledgeable) AI start to supplant workers with questionable results; and then someone (or a team) will make a discovery to take it to the limit and it’ll be game over for large swaths of jobs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting
  - Animats 2y ago
    TeX was predated by a family of macro-based document languages that began with RUNOFF and continued through roff, nroff, troff, ditroff, and groff. Plus tbl, eqn, and mm*. Some manual pages still use that stuff. Most Linux systems still install it by default. TeX has roughly the same concept, a macro-based layout language, but a better design with far less cruft.
mmcdermott 2y ago
There is a disconnect somewhere. When I read online, I hear about how GenAI/LLMs replace programmers and office workers. When I go to work, I mostly hear the question of how we can apply GenAI/LLMs, apart from discussion of the general buzz. Maybe this is a reflection of local conditions, I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem like the truly revolutionary changes require the solution to find a problem. It was immediately clear what you could do with assembly line automation, or the motor car, or the printing press.
- eru 2y ago
  Electricity famously took perhaps twenty years for people to slowly figure out how to re-organise factories around it.. Hence the delayed impact on productivity figures. To elaborate: in the bad old days of you had one big engine, eg a steam engine, that was driving shafts and belts all around the factory. There was a lot of friction, and this was dangerous. So you had to carefully design your factory around these constraints. That's the era of multi-story factories: you used the third dimension to cram more workstations closer to your prime mover. With electricity, even if you have to make your own, you just need cables and you can install small electric motors for every task on every workstation. Now your factory layout becomes a lot more flexible, and you can optimise for eg material flow through your factory and for cost. That's when factories becomes mostly sprawling one-story buildings. I simplify, but figuring all of that out took time.
  - conradev 2y ago
    a quote from Steve Jobs, explaining that the breakthrough invention was the fractional horsepower motor: "Let’s look at the brief history of computers. Best way to understand it’s probably an analogy. Take the electric motor. The electric motor was first invented in the late 1800s. And when it was first invented, it was only possible to build a very, very large one, which meant that it could only be cost-justified for very large applications. And therefore electric motors did not proliferate very fast at all. But the next breakthrough was when somebody took one of these large electric motors and they ran a shaft through the middle of a factory and, through a series of belts and pulleys, brought…shared the horsepower of this one large electric motor on 15 or 20 medium-size workstations, thereby allowing one electric motor to be cost-justified on some medium-scale tasks. And electric motors proliferated even further then. But the real breakthrough was the invention of the fractional-horsepower electric motor. We could then bring the horsepower directly to where it was needed and cost-justified it on a totally individual application. And I think there’s about 55 or so fractional-horsepower motors now in every household."
immibis 2y ago
In fact we've been using programming LLMs for a long time, which we call compilers.
- mannykannot 2y ago
  The acronym LLM stands for what is now a term of art for a class of information- processing systems which are produced by, and themselves produce their output by, methods very unlike those for compilers. This is just as well, considering the consequences that would follow from compilers routinely hallucinating.
adamc 2y ago
Not to mention someone would need to evaluate and test the proposed solution... which with today's LLMs I would not bet heavily on its correctness. This is some years ago, but a friend of mine, trained in a 4GL that was still a procedural programming language, went somewhere that was using a higher level, model-based generation of code based on that language. It turned out they still needed a few people who understood how things worked beneath the hood. I am deeply skeptical that human-language level specifications will ever capture all the things that really need to be said for programming, any more than they do for mathematics. There are reasons for formalisms. English is slippery.

by froh 2y ago

jasfi 2y ago

A lot of business people want to get something functional that they can sell, and hire a programmer if/when they can afford one. That niche is seeing a lot of uptake with regards to LLM based approaches. This works for them because an MVP typically isn't a lot of code for what they need, and LLMs have a limited scope within which they can generate something that works.

devjab 2y ago

This is only true to an extend. We have a lot of digitally inclined workers who’re developing programs or scripts to handle a lot of things for them. It’s imperfect and often wildly insecure and inefficient, but unlike any previous no-code or “standard” solution it actually works. Often in conjunction with “standard” solutions. On one hand you’re correct in that there will always be a need for programmers. I really doubt there will be a great need for generalist programmers though. The one area that may survive is the people who’re capable of transforming business needs and rules into code. Which requires a social and analytical skillset for cooperating with non tech people. You’ll also see a demand for skilled programmers at scale and for embedded programming, but the giant work force of generalist developers (and probably web developers once Figma and similar lets designers generate better code) is likely going to become much smaller in the coming decades. Then is basically what the entire office workforce is facing. AI believers have been saying AI would do to the office what robots did to the assembly line for years, but now it actually seems like they’re going to be correct.

stroupwaffle 2y ago
Another parallel is type foundries and printing presses. At one point people operated these linotype machines which used molten lead. Of course this transitioned to photo typesetting which, to the dismay of everyone had poor results. Along came Donald Knuth and TeX to fix those deficiencies. NOTE: mechanical printing has a profoundly better result no matter what. It is the ink and the impression in paper that makes it superior (for letterforms and such). So, if AI follows suit, we will witness the dumb (but very knowledgeable) AI start to supplant workers with questionable results; and then someone (or a team) will make a discovery to take it to the limit and it’ll be game over for large swaths of jobs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting
- Animats 2y ago
  TeX was predated by a family of macro-based document languages that began with RUNOFF and continued through roff, nroff, troff, ditroff, and groff. Plus tbl, eqn, and mm*. Some manual pages still use that stuff. Most Linux systems still install it by default. TeX has roughly the same concept, a macro-based layout language, but a better design with far less cruft.

mmcdermott 2y ago

There is a disconnect somewhere. When I read online, I hear about how GenAI/LLMs replace programmers and office workers. When I go to work, I mostly hear the question of how we can apply GenAI/LLMs, apart from discussion of the general buzz. Maybe this is a reflection of local conditions, I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem like the truly revolutionary changes require the solution to find a problem. It was immediately clear what you could do with assembly line automation, or the motor car, or the printing press.

eru 2y ago
Electricity famously took perhaps twenty years for people to slowly figure out how to re-organise factories around it.. Hence the delayed impact on productivity figures. To elaborate: in the bad old days of you had one big engine, eg a steam engine, that was driving shafts and belts all around the factory. There was a lot of friction, and this was dangerous. So you had to carefully design your factory around these constraints. That's the era of multi-story factories: you used the third dimension to cram more workstations closer to your prime mover. With electricity, even if you have to make your own, you just need cables and you can install small electric motors for every task on every workstation. Now your factory layout becomes a lot more flexible, and you can optimise for eg material flow through your factory and for cost. That's when factories becomes mostly sprawling one-story buildings. I simplify, but figuring all of that out took time.
- conradev 2y ago
  a quote from Steve Jobs, explaining that the breakthrough invention was the fractional horsepower motor: "Let’s look at the brief history of computers. Best way to understand it’s probably an analogy. Take the electric motor. The electric motor was first invented in the late 1800s. And when it was first invented, it was only possible to build a very, very large one, which meant that it could only be cost-justified for very large applications. And therefore electric motors did not proliferate very fast at all. But the next breakthrough was when somebody took one of these large electric motors and they ran a shaft through the middle of a factory and, through a series of belts and pulleys, brought…shared the horsepower of this one large electric motor on 15 or 20 medium-size workstations, thereby allowing one electric motor to be cost-justified on some medium-scale tasks. And electric motors proliferated even further then. But the real breakthrough was the invention of the fractional-horsepower electric motor. We could then bring the horsepower directly to where it was needed and cost-justified it on a totally individual application. And I think there’s about 55 or so fractional-horsepower motors now in every household."

immibis 2y ago

In fact we've been using programming LLMs for a long time, which we call compilers.

mannykannot 2y ago
The acronym LLM stands for what is now a term of art for a class of information- processing systems which are produced by, and themselves produce their output by, methods very unlike those for compilers. This is just as well, considering the consequences that would follow from compilers routinely hallucinating.

adamc 2y ago

Not to mention someone would need to evaluate and test the proposed solution... which with today's LLMs I would not bet heavily on its correctness. This is some years ago, but a friend of mine, trained in a 4GL that was still a procedural programming language, went somewhere that was using a higher level, model-based generation of code based on that language. It turned out they still needed a few people who understood how things worked beneath the hood. I am deeply skeptical that human-language level specifications will ever capture all the things that really need to be said for programming, any more than they do for mathematics. There are reasons for formalisms. English is slippery.