You should see 52% of the first version of my code.
It doesn’t have to be right to be useful.
Yeah, but the non-tech savvy business leaders see they can generate code with AI and think ‘why do I need a developer if I have this AI?’ and have no idea whether the code it produces is right or not. This stat should be shared broadly so leaders don’t overestimate the capability and fire people they will desperately need.
I say let it happen. If someone is dumb enough to fire all their workers… They deserve what will happen next
Mentioned it before but:
LLMs program at the level of a junior engineer or an intern. You already need code review and more senior engineers to fix that shit for them.
What they do is migrate that. Now that junior engineer has an intern they are trying to work with. Or… companies realize they don’t benefit from training up those newbie (or stupid) engineers when they are likely to leave in a year or two anyway.
Programming jobs will be safe for a while. They’ve been trying to eliminate those positions since at least the 90s. Because coders are expensive and often lack social skills.
But I do think the clock is ticking. We will see more and more sophisticated AI tools that are relatively idiot-proof and can do things like modify Salesforce, or create complex new Tableau reports with a few mouse clicks, and stuff like that. Jobs will be chiseled away like our unfortunate friends in graphic design.
You, along with most people, are still looking at automation wrong. It’s never been about removing people entirely, even AI, it’s about doing the same work with less cost.
If you can eliminate one programmers from your four person team by giving the other three AI to produce the same amount of work, congrats you’ve just automated one programming job.
Programming jobs aren’t going anywhere, but either the amount of code produced is about to skyrocket, or the number of employed programmers is going to drop (or most likely both of those things).
Yeah cause my favorite thing to do when programming is debugging someone else’s broken code.
I think where it shines is in helping you write code you’ve never written before. I never touched Swift before and I made a fully functional iOS app in a week. Also, even with stuff I have done before, I can say “write me a function that does x” and it will and it usually works.
Like just yesterday I asked it to write me a function that would generate and serve up an .ics file based on a selected date and extrapolate the date of a recurring monthly meeting based on the day of the week picked and its position (1st week, 2nd week, etc) within the month and then make the .ics file reflect all that. I could have generated that code myself by hand but it would have probably taken me an hour or two. It did it in about five seconds and it worked perfectly.
Yeah, you have to know what you’re doing in general and there’s a lot of babysitting involved, but anyone who thinks it’s just useless is plain wrong. It’s fucking amazing.
Edit: lol the article is referring to a study that was using GPT 3.5, which is all but useless for coding. 4.0 has been out for a year blowing everybody’s minds. Clickbait trash.
Bad take. Is the first version of your code the one that you deliver or push upstream?
LLMs can give great starting points, I use multiple LLMs each for various reasons. Usually to clean up something I wrote (too lazy or too busy/stressed to do manually), find a problem with the logic, or maybe even brainstorm ideas.
I rarely ever use it to generate blocks of code like asking it to generate “a method that takes X inputs and does Y operations, and returns Z value”. I find that those kinds of results are often vastly wrong or just done in a way that doesn’t fit with other things I’m doing.
LLMs can give great starting points, I use multiple LLMs each for various reasons. Usually to clean up something I wrote (too lazy or too busy/stressed to do manually), find a problem with the logic, or maybe even brainstorm ideas.
Impressed some folks think LLMs are useless. Not sure if their lives/workflows/brains are that different from ours or they haven’t given at the college try.
I almost always have to use my head before a language model’s output is useful for a given purpose. The tool almost always saves me time, improves the end result, or both. Usually both, I would say.
It’s a very dangerous technology that is known to output utter garbage and make enormous mistakes. Still, it routinely blows my mind.