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One day "real programmers" will be gold.
by fpauser 10mo ago
One day "real programmers" will be gold.
- okokwhatever 10mo agoOnce we understand demand set the price we'll understand why our "career" is dead. Thank me later.
- MangoToupe 10mo agoI don't think the career is going anywhere unless the career just consists of typing. We need people who understand how computers work more than ever.
- BinaryIgor 10mo agoExactly and arguably we will always - unless AGI
- giantg2 10mo ago"We need people who understand how computers work more than ever." In small numbers, yes. In current/large numbers, maybe not. Do college students need to understand language, grammar, or the subject to write B grade papers? No, they can just prompt an LLM to do it for them. Same thing for basic CRUD apps and websites. We will always need people who understand computers, but it seems likely that the proportion of the overall IT employees that need to know how it works will approach a horizontal asymptote.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo agoSure, they can do it for them - but the purpose of college is not to write papers. The papers are so that the students can demonstrate that they understand the subject and that they have "learned to learn". If an LLM writes it for them then they haven't proven anything other than that they can prompt an LLM. Which is great if your college degree is for "LLM prompting", but not much else. I hope people that use LLMs to generate papers fail in other tests, else the value of a degree will be reduced to nothing - it's already suffering from a lot of "inflation" due to lowered standards and oversupply. (The lowered standards are because graduation rate became a metric and a target)
- giantg2 10mo ago"but the purpose of college is not to write papers. The papers are so that the students can demonstrate that they understand the subject and that they have "learned to learn"." That depends on the perspective. In theory, that is the correct view. To many, the degree is just a piece of paper used to gatekeep jobs.
- QuercusMax 10mo agoIt's not just a piece of paper - it's a piece of paper that shows you can complete a 4-year course of study in a particular field. I'm not sure how useful a piece of paper that says you spent 4 years typing prompts into a LLM could be without a huge change in how education works.
- giantg2 10mo agoI'm not sure how you think those two things are different. Right now, we have people graduating a 4 year course of study in a particular field and spending a large part of that 4 years using LLMs to do a lot of the work.
- MangoToupe 10mo agoEh, maybe. I think it could actually be the opposite: we might need more people than ever to clean up the crap that LLMs spit out.
- gtowey 10mo agoHow would the person promting the LLM know if it were producing "B" grade results? That's the biggest issue right now: you have to know more than the LLM to verify its output or you're likely to get garbage. That's also my biggest concern is that corporations will decide that crap results are good enough as long as it cost them very little to produce.
- giantg2 10mo agoMany workers don't care what grade they get. The PMs just want the shit delivered.