I predict that, within the year, AI will be doing 100% of the development work that isn’t total and utter bullshit pain-in-the-ass complexity, layered on obfuscations, composed of needlessly complex bullshit.
That’s right, within a year, AI will be doing .001% of programming tasks.
Can we just get it to attend meetings for us?
Legitimately could be a use case
“Attend this meeting for me. If anyone asks, claim that your camera and microphone aren’t working. After the meeting, condense the important information into one paragraph and email it to me.”
Here is a summary of the most important information from that meeting. Since there were two major topics, I’ve separated them into two paragraphs.
- It is a good morning today.
- Everyone is thanked for their time. Richard is looking forward to next week’s meeting.
The rest of the information was deemed irrelevant to you and your position.
Holy cow! You’ve done it! You could wrap this (static text block) in a web API and sell it.
Edit: /s, I guess. But that text really is easily an 80% solution for meeting summaries.
Hell yes! I’ll join the front of the hype train if they can demo an AI fielding questions while a project manager reviews a card wall.
Y’know… that seems reasonable. I’d place my bet that there’d be something good enough in only a few years. (Text only, I’d bet)
Big companies will take 5 years just to get there.
Fellow freelancer, I see.
“look i registered my own domain name all by myself!”
the domain: “localhost”
I’m an elite hacker and I grabbed your IP address from this post. It’s 192.168.0.1 just so you know I’m not bluffing.
Heheh I’m ddossing them right now. Unfortunately the computer I’m doing it on is having a few connection issues
That gave me a nice chuckle lmao
I’m afraid you need to turn it off and on again
Haha punk it’s actually 192.168.1.1. you dun goofed
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He’s going through a VNC obfuscation layer. His real IP address is 10.0.0.1
Shaking my smh stop trying to sound like a hacker, VNC is for watching videos
Nah bro I’m the haxkdder nemad 4chan and I dox u vip asdres it 10.0.1.1.223.3.01
int ipadress = unhappy_grapefruit2.hacked();
Dude, you need to use the broadcast address.
lol that’s not my ip, you’re like 6 numbers off
I’m an elite FBI KGB K-unit traffic guard. You dun goofed with your silly hacking attempts as I’ve traced your IP back to ::1. Prepare to get your ass counter-hacked
Wow, these new TLDs are terrible! ICANN has really lost it this time!
Engineering is about trust. In all other and generally more formalized engineering disciplines, the actual job of an engineer is to provide confidence that something works. Software engineering may employ fewer people because the tools are better and make people much more productive, but until everyone else trusts the computer more, the job will exist.
If the world trusts AI over engineers then the fact that you don’t have a job will be moot.
People don’t have anywhere near enough knowledge of how things work to make their choices based on trust. People aren’t getting on the subway because they trust the engineers did a good job; they’re doing it because it’s what they can afford and they need to get to work.
Similarly, people aren’t using Reddit or Adobe or choosing their cars firmware based on trust. People choose what is affordable and convenient.
In civil engineering public works are certified by an engineer; its literally them saying if this fails i am at fault. The public is trusting the engineer to say its safe.
Yeah, people may not know that the subway is safe because of engineering practices, but if there was a major malfunction, potentially involving injuries or loss of life, every other day, they would know, and I’m sure they would think twice about using it.
What’s being discussed here is the hiring of engineers rather than consumer choices. Hiring an engineer is absolutely an expression of trust. The business trusts that the engineer will be able to concretely realize abstract business goals, and that they will be able to troubleshoot any deviations.
AI writing code is one thing, but intuitively trusting that an AI will figure out what you want for you and keep things running is a long way off.
In my hometown there’s two types of public transit: municipal and commercial. I was surprised to learn that a lot of folk, even the younger ones, only travel by former, even though the commercials are a lot faster, frequent and more comfortable. When asked why, the answer is the same: If anything happens on municipal transport - you can sue the transport company and even the city itself. If anything happens on a commercial line - there’s only a migrant driver and “Individual Enterpreneur John Doe” with a few leased buses to his name. Trust definitely plays a factor here, but you’re right that it’s definitely not based on technical knowledge.
It’s more thrust than trust.
Hmm. I’ve never thought about it that way. It took a long time for engineering to become that way IIRC - in the past anybody could build a bridge. The main obstacle to this, then, is that people might be a bit too risk-tolerant around AI at first. Hopefully this is where it ends up going, though.
Very interesting point. Probably the most pressing problem then is to find a way for the black box to be formally verified and the role of AI engineers shifts to keeping the CI\CD green.
As someone who works on the city side of development review, I can firmly say I’ll trust a puppy alone with my dinner than a Civil Engineer.
Are civil engineers known to eat off people’s plates?
Think they confused it with uncivil engineers
ChatGPT is hilariously incompetent… but on a serious note, I still firmly reject tools like copilot outside demos and the like because they drastically reduce code quality for short term acceleration. That’s a terrible trade-off in terms of cost.
they drastically reduce code quality for short term acceleration.
Oh boy do I have news for you, that’s basically the only thing middle managers care about, short tem acceleration
I’m still convinced that GitHub copilot is actively violating copyleft licenses. If not in word, then in the spirit.
Removed by mod
they drastically reduce … quality for short term acceleration
Western society is built on this principle
Tell me about it…
I left my more mature company for a startup.
I feel like Tyler Durden sometimes.
How you liking it? How many years have you aged in the months working at your startup?
My hairline has started receding very rapidly. There’s there’s these fine hairs all over my desk, and I see the photo I took when joining directly before turning on my camera every meeting.
Doesn’t sood good at all. I’m sorry to hear that, friend. I really hope there’s enough upsides there compared to working at a more mature company for you.
Sort of. Nobody’s cutting corners on aviation structural components, for example. We’ve been pretty good at maximizing general value output, and usually that means lower quality, but not always.
I’m going to say that’s the exception that proves the rule, assuming they were structural parts and not a minor controller chip for de-icing or something.
The company themself announced it without being prompted, and if whoever introduce these unapproved parts into a small number of engines is caught there’s going to be real hell to pay. The stuff that stops you from falling out of the sky is serious business, and is largely treated as such.
On the other hand, a software function that’s hacked together and inefficient will just fly below the radar, and most people will prefer two cheap outfits to one that’s actually well made for the same price, so quality goes right out the window.
But LinkedIn bros and corporate people are gonna gobble it up anyways because it has the right buzzwords (including “AI”) and they can squeeze more (low quality) work from devs to brag about how many things they (the corporate owners) are doing.
It’s just a fad. There’s just a small bit that will stay after the hype is gone. You know, like blockchain, AR, metaverse, NFT and whatever it was before that. In a few years there will be another breakthrough with it and we’ll hear from it again for a short while, but for now it’s just a one trick pony.
I enjoy using copilot, but it is not made to think for you. It’s a better autocomplete, but don’t ever let it do more than a line at once.
Yup, AI is a tool, not a complete solution.
As a software engineer, the number of people I encounter in a given week who either refuse to or are incapable of understanding that distinction baffles and concerns me.
Same as ChatGPT is better web search.
id rather search the web than chatgpt because i fact check it anyway
An unpopular opinion, I am sure, but if you’re a beginner with something - a new language, a new framework - and hate reading the docs, it’s a great way of just jumping into a new project. Like, I’ve been hacking away on a django web server for a personal project and it saved me a huge amount of time with understanding how apps are structured, how to interact with its settings, registering urls, creating views, the general development lifecycle of the project and the basic commands I need to do what I’m trying to do. God knows Google is a shitshow now and while Stackoverflow is fine and dandy (when it isn’t remarkably toxic and judgmental), the fact is that it cuts down on hours of fruitless research, assuming you’re not asking it to do anything genuinely novel or hyper-specific.
It helps a complete newbie like me get started and even learn while I do. Due to its restrictions and shortcoming, I’ve been having to learn how to structure and plan a project more carefully and thoughtfully, even creating design specs for programs and individual functions, all in order to provide useful prompts for ChatGPT to act on. I learn best by trial and error, with the ability to ask why things happened or are the way they are.
So, as a secondary teaching assistant, I think it’s very useful. But trying to use the API for ChatGPT 4 is…not worth it. I can easily blow through $20 in a few hours. So, I got a day and a half of use out of it before I gave up. :|
Tbf I don’t really wanna do ops work. I barely even wanna do DevOps. Let me just dev
Me too 😭
I don’t want to “kubectl”, I want to " make" 😭so write a Makefile that calls kubectl!
You don’t need to convince the devs, you need to convince the managers.
ಠ_ಠ
Wow, there is a lot of pearl-clutching and gatekeeping ITT. It’s delicious!
On a more serious note, ChatGPT, ironically, does suck at webdev frontend. The one task that pretty much everyone agrees could be done by a monkey (given enough time) is the one it doesn’t understand at all.
The one task that pretty much everyone agrees could be done by a monkey
A phrase commonly uttered about web dev by mediocre programmers who spend 99% of the time writing the same copy-paste spring boot mid-tier code
most of the websites are bloated and shit. Webdev is shit upon because they write code that can’t work 4 months without needing a rewrite
A good chunk of that has to do with trackers and ads. Things forced on webdevs by management.
Not that webdevs couldn’t improve anything otherwise; there are certainly optimizations to be had. But pop open the dev network panel on your browser, clear cache, and refresh the page. A lot of the holdup and dancing elements you’ll see are from third party trackers and ads.
I agree, and in addition to way too many trackers and advertisements clogging up the page, this is also due to the time, effort, and knowledge not being provided to write performant and compliant code, which should be important given the infinite possibilities of client machines. This can be worsened by only having full stack developers who aren’t knowledgeable in web dev (especially CSS) or by sacrificing performance for trendy javascript-bloated design features
You do of course realize that you just said that the problem with the modern web is that webdev can be and far too often is done by monkeys?
I agree that there is a vast difference, even from an end user’s perspective, between a good web developer and a bad one, but the fact remains that the bar for calling oneself a web dev is appallingly low and ChatGPT nevertheless fails to clear it
I suppose you could see it like that, but I’m saying it can’t be done by “monkeys”, and the pervasive notion that it can has led to broken websites across the Internet
I think I see what you mean. Many a very competent backend dev (and many more a kid in their bedroom with zero programming experience) has thought to themselves “how hard can webdev possibly be?” and blindly stumbled through making a website that looks fine on their machine without bothering to understand what the various CSS units do and turning it into an utter monstrosity if you even slightly change the size of the browser window, and the web suffers for it.
As a primarily backend dev myself who’s tried my hand at web once or twice, I still think that web developers are by far the most pampered in the industry when it comes to development tools (I can change CSS parameters with sliders right in my browser, see the page update in real time, and when I’m done I can just export the modified .css file to disk and upload it directly to my server with zero touchup to make my changes live? Are you KIDDING ME?) but I also think it’s important to treat the practice with the respect it deserves. By that I mean taking the time to learn the languages, read through MDN’s excellent documentation, and take the time to fully understand what each CSS parameter actually does instead of trial-and-erroring your way into something that only works for you. The same thing you’d do if you were learning any new programming language. Once you do that, apart from a few hiccups due to browser inconsistencies (any time Safari would like to stop eating glue I’d appreciate it) and having to come up with something that looks good in portrait, and get past a metric f**k ton of googling and memorizing the minute differences between dozens of very similar parameters, it’s some of the most fun I’ve had as a programmer. I love being able to just go “I want a bunch of circles at the top of my page that bounce up and down in sequence.” “Sure, give me two minutes.” I’d stress about that for days in any other environment. Why didn’t anyone tell me it could BE like this?
Right, the pretty little button needs more shadows
I am astonished at your ignorance and your arrogance
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I still have nightmares dealing with a11y requirements
Same but it’s very important
I don’t think it’s very useful at generating good code or answering anything about most libraries, but I’ve found it to be helpful answering specific JS/TS questions.
The MDN version is also pretty great too. I’ve never done a Firefox extension before and MDN Plus was surprisingly helpful at explaining the limitations on mobile. Only downside is it’s limited to 5 free prompts/day.
Chat gpt is also great if you have problems with Linux. It is my nr 1 trouble shooting tool.
GPT 4 Turbo is actually much better than GPT 3.5 and 4 for coding. It has a way better understanding of design now.
These morons are probably going to train AI wrong so job security for the next 100 years.
Don’t forget that GPT4 was getting dumber the more it learned from people.
Bruh this cracked me up
Bruh good to hear bruh, bruh
Might be about time for testers to start cr4pping their pants tho.
The only thing ChatGPT etc. is useful for, in every language, is to get ideas on how to solve a problem, in an area you don’t know anything about.
ChatGPT, how can I do xy in C++?
You can use the library ab, like …That’s where I usually search for the library and check the docs if it’s actually possible to do it this way. And often, it’s not.
Yeah, it’s amazing at showing you the idiomatic way to do really specific, narrow-scoped things in a language you’re not familiar with… except for when it’s wrong.
It’s good at refactoring smaller bits of code. The longer the input, the more likely it is to make errors (and you should prefer to start a new chat than continue a long chat for the same reason). It’s also pretty good at translating code to other languages (e.g. MySQL->PG, Python->C#), reading OpenAPI json definitions and creating model classes to match, and stuff like that.
Basically, it’s pretty good when it doesn’t have to generate stuff that requires creating complex logic. If you ask it about tasks, languages, and libraries that it has likely trained a lot on (i.e. the most popular stuff in FOSS software and example repos), it doesn’t hallucinate libraries too much. And, GPT4 is a lot better than GPT3.5 at coding tasks. GPT3.5 is pretty bad. GPT4 is a bit better to Copilot as well.
I’ve found it great for tracking down specific things in libraries and databases I’m not terribly familiar with when I don’t know the exact term for them
I firmly believe AI will replace managers before it replaces engineers.
only because ai hasn’t replaced the client… yet
Who has four thumbs and a top tier business plan? This AI!
