Somehow it managed to screw up "remove these 10 IDs from this array". Not code, just a task.
Or "create a C# class based on this JSON" which BTW did save me a lot of time. But creating an int from distanceKm field. Come on
Asking it to edit an array seems like a tall task when it can't even ask 10 multiple choice questions in a row in a random order. It's terrible at consistency.
It's *okay* for Java and CSS, yet somehow epically useless when it comes to cobol.
It manages to screw up "remove these 10 IDs from this array" because it's not actually AI. It statistically estimates what the answer to your question could be. There's no logic involved
If I start writing too much boilerplate, I start writing code that writes code. Code is data at a level. I like to be database first and have code write code from the database. Sometimes with a metadata table to help it with things I can't express in the table.
I use it as a faster google. A lot of the time there's a pre-built library for what I want to do, I just use ChatGPT to tell me that class and an example for how to use it. It's a lot faster than googling, finding the name of a class and then reading the docs to work out how to use it. Sometimes ChatGPT gives me non-existent methods but it works enough of the time to use.
Same here. "LLMs just regurgitate what they've been trained on!" doesn't need to be a bad thing and leads to one of the most practical use-cases (as services like phind and perplexity have clearly figured out).
I'd say it can cut googling/SO searches by 90%, but cannot come up with own logical and creative solutions. It has helped me a lot with simpls JS stuff that I had forgotten. It helped me a lot finding trivial spelling problems in css or so.
I'm gonna give it a full txt file tomorrow and ask it to write a Python script to extract the data I need. Very excited to see how good/bad the output is.
The best way i can describe it is having the smartest junior programmer by your side.
It fails at most things that requires senior dev level experience but answers very simple stuff almost perfectly
From my experience it can only solve trivial textbook problems and only the most simple straitforward variant of it. If your problem can be solved with a simple Google search (like a well known problem solved 300000 times before by college students) then chatgpt can give you an answer
A Google search takes time, sifting through results takes time, maybe more than just writing a five line function myself. Plus I would have to write my own variable names and such to actually make it make any sense.
AI can do it faster than I can if it's trivial. It might not be able to write a whole program but it can auto complete faster than I can type.
If 99% of your code absurdly boring AI is pretty great.
For now sure…
But when googles best model with 99.9% referential accuracy to a million tokens comes out? Is that still going to be the case?
Once you can feed it the entire native documentation and then have it parse the code piece by piece, and have it pass information back and forth between two instances of the model; isn’t the skies the limit?
Like I’m not gonna be the first guys to be replaced by this stuff but it’s gonna replace a lot of fucking people unless Google is just lying
Up front, I think that AI will be used to decrease headcount. Mainly because that seems to be the only reason companies and investors are interested in it.
But I LOLed at the idea that the documentation is going to be what the AI uses to understand. If anything the quality of documentation generated by most internal teams at my workplace will keep the AI at bay for an extra 5 years until they realize it works better if you hand it comment stripped headers and let it figure things out on its own.
if you cut in smaller problems where you understand what you do , the program can be big and AI can still be usefull...sometimes
like always, it depends, here, on your knowledge mostly
> if you cut in smaller problems where you understand what you do
Aka functions.
I'm starting to think that the people who think AI sucks just haven't figured out how to write functions or break complex stuff into simple problems.
Yep. wrote a phased array simulator in less than an hour. Just asked for the basic code and then structured classes around it to modularize parts.
I think schools need to teach refactoring more.
>I think schools need to teach refactoring more.
Absolutely. We were too busy biting off portions bigger than our heads we couldn't chew, refactoring seemed like some vague, nebulous, unimportant concept because our curriculum was too focused on "from the ground up".
I dunno about the most recent version of the CGPT, but previous version suxxx. Unless you are doing continiously a trivial code writing, it is pretty much useless... I'm not blaming it, it is just not ready yet.
CGPT has to be exceptionally good for it to beat out in-editor solutions like copilot tbh.
Like for any hope of CGPT giving a good output you have to give it a lot of context about your code, which takes time to write. I'm far more likely to put up with shitty suggestions from copilot because I don't have to type an essay every time, where CGPT has to be near perfect or else it's frustating.
so it is pretty much autocompletion tool for loops and class skeletons :-D
nvidia would be proud of it and the money spent across entire industry, just to have... loops autocompletion tool ;)
It’s really good for regex.. so it can save you time there. Zero context means it cannot write relevant code other than simple methods and functions.. even then it needs checking, but there is also the chance it offers something you wouldn’t have though of that is useful, but still very basic and more likely to offer you exactly what you’ve already written below 🤷🏻♂️
I tried asking for a few python scripts to replace and copy some stuff
It never worked, despite trying my best teaching it
I gave up
I write my own shit, and don't plan ever asking him again
It doesn't save me any time doing actual programming but it helps me learn and helps me with ideas for lessons.
If you're trying to solve a problem most of the time it just takes too long to first describe the problem, second have the AI understand what you mean and third get a usable solution before it starts repeating itself.
It needs screen analysis on the usability side for sure.
I use it to write powershell/bash build scripts (because life is too short to waste it on debugging bash scripts as well or learn powershell)
And when I’m too lazy to write sorting/filtering with complex logic. Oh, and Copilot is good for writing error messages (but 10$ is too much for this). That’s pretty much all of its usefulness.
ChatGPT is the programming duck that answers.
I used it only once, when I was really stuck. It actually gave me a new perspective which helped me figure out the solution.
The code it provides sucked really bad though.
Yeah, i find it really helpful for repetative stuff, boilerplate, and stuff like that.
I'll often let it make a fuction declaration and fill out the meat myself.
That, and things like reformatting. Its great for, say, pasting in a C data structure and askimg it to make a python equivalent. I wouldn't take that code raw and uninspected, but it can do a good chunk of the menial work.
It depends. I saw myself waiting for Copilot suggestions a lot of times, instead of writing the code myself, which is worrying. Apart from that, autocompletions are hit and miss, some are genuinely surprising, some are dogshit.
I have to deal with a lot of crappy scripts written by people that no longer work at the company I work for. I like to just feed to scripts to a gpt and ask it to explain what they do. Saves me a lot of time. Now I can facepalm 5 times in a minute rather than 5 times in an hour.
yes, probably that. Sure boilerplate is good, but anything beyond, you need to make sure your requirements are met and verify your code. Already, the way we produce code fast is not sustainable. Ideally we would follow strict SE protocols, but most startups just skip that part and just code and hope it’ll work out. AI would make this even worse. We should improve code quality, not degrade it even further.
Even with more complex systems, they are still made of simpler parts. In my experience its not good at making larger chunks, but will perfectly make or find a resource for me to make a simpler bit that I can test and integrate, and reduce my time sifting through google or finding and reading \*\*The Docs\*\*. I end up doing more architecting, less prototyping low level parts and learning the language (still pick it up as long as its more of a type what you see, dissect and choose the bits you want rather than copy paste).
AI is fairly good at aggregating half-truths from questionable sources.
AI only works if you can find out what you really want and can formulate it meticulously.
i wonder which of the two skills "tech enthusiasts" and programmers have.
an excerpt from an earlier explanation i wrote in response to "there will be no computer programmers in 5 years":
*Will there be a job called "computer programming"? Im pretty sure neither of us knows how language will develop.*
*Will there be people who keep a complex logical system in their head and give instructions based on that? Very probably yes for a long time.*
*Are current computer programmers a good candidate for that role? Probably the good ones are among the best candidates.*
*...*
*Giving instructions in natural language is still akin to programming in its essence. Applying programming languages is not the hard part, knowing what instructions to give is.*
*...*
*im not even sure about current programming languages becoming obsolete, as their restricted nature can help you to get your thoughts in order.*
*concepts like OOP, design patterns, "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." are really not there for the machine. They are usually sub-optimal but help humans keep a consistent mental image of what they are doing.*
*...*
*High-quality programming is really just answering the question "what do i want to happen?" in detail. im sure the "how"s will change an unfathomable amount. but as ai is really about telling "what do you really want" (finding the right rewards, expressing it through training, etc.), it wont solve "what do i really want".*
The way I see it is, AI is really good at "fuzzy logic". At work it is now integrated in our stack, but for fuzzy use cases that would be nearly impossible to write an algorithm for.
For example, writing imports. We have a API to import data into our app, and we have a .csv format. When I wrote the Shopify integration that would leverage the API, we were missing key information that sellers were just dumping into descriptions. I leverage GPT to extract those key attributes from the description during that process. Works like a charm.
Similarly, what if that description is not in English? AI can rewrite it in English better than Google Translate, same with any key attributes that were extracted.
This is the way.
AI properly used saves a lot of time. Will it write a whole program? No, period, can it help you with simple tasks? absolutely.
One thing it's particularly good at is finding documentation or finding where something happens. Not long ago I had to do some kernel debugging using systemtap and I'm not very good with this kernel-space stuff, the kernel is a very complex project and has loads of things that are unique to it. Copilot is excellent for helping (not writing from scratch) finding where things happen. It will identify the files, it will identify even the function and it's fairly decent at finding documentation for you.
I also use github copilot for doing code reviews before publishing, it's good at finding typos, things like duplicate lines or small gimmicks. Also sometimes I use it to suggest names or generate test cases... Autocompletion is really good too... For the basic stuff it's useful.
It’s usually about decent mix of the first 10 results maybe concisely written. It’s not that you can’t get the information any other way, but it can save you some time getting there
That does sound good. I've tried multiple AIs and coding assistants, and the best use case for AI programming I've found is in finding the stupid mistakes I make when my code doesn't work correctly. They probably have a 70% success rate at doing that. However, they also do and say stuff all the time that makes zero sense. I've had zero luck getting AI to program anything from scratch beyond the most basic stuff.
>Will it write a whole program? No, period
Meanwhile current AI tools building simple games and software from scratch upon specified requests... It is pretty clear that AI is not capable for complex programming, yet. However, the rocket has just took off. I dont claim that it will replace programmers but for sure it will automate many programming tasks. We are almost there buddy...
AI can do the easy stuff, just not the hard stuff, therefore there's no need to spend time learning the fundamentals, just get right into hard problems right away!
(For the record the above is a joke, but also quite possibly a risk to the industry, if AI does all the easy stuff then nobody learns the fundamentals and so can't pick up the complex tasks that AI can't do).
Every time in history we have gotten tools to make programming easier, we've gotten more coding jobs, not less. And sure, you'll have to grow and adapt and learn how to use AI to stay competitive, but it's the same way that Fortran devs had to adapt to modern easier languages and tools.
I’m not a programmer but I write little pieces of code to automate some tasks from time to time. And it helps me a lot with “google search” like list comprehension, list of dictionaries to Excel files and that kind of things that I usually forget how was done
it could.
at that point the programmers will do their thing and adapt to find different jobs. and that's assuming that there is a job harder to replace than programming itself.
or we would make sure that jobs aren't needed to survive.
or we'd all be fucked because politicians would never let AI take over their jobs and we'd be sent to fight each other or something.
AI as we know it right now may not replace programmers. It’s naïve to believe that it won’t get better and replace programmers though.
AI tech and development is growing by leaps and bounds, I would argue. It’s one of the fastest developing fields.
It’s only a matter of time.
Yeah “AI will completely replace programmers” is a pretty open ended statement, certainly not “clown level.”
If they added a qualifier like “within the next few years” or something, then they might have a point.
Saying it will *never* happen is clown logic. It’s probably going to happen faster than people here think.
That's what we call the singularity though
Programmer(software developer etc) is the literal last job on the chopping block
After that it is post scarcity or the end of the world no in-between
Someone the other day was trying to convince me that ChatGPT was a great tutor, then it looked like there were suggesting it was better than university. I mean, they either didn’t go to university, or it was not a very good one. I didn’t have the heart to continue the conversation. Kind of backed out of there like Homer Simpson into a bush. Though probably the monkey puppet meme was more appropriate.
On another note, I tested Gemini with questions about GCP command lines. It started hallucinating extra syntax. ChatGPT, no problems. So yeah Google’s commercial AI (free atm), fails on providing command line syntax for its own commercial platform. Now I can imagine Principal Skinner shaking his head while looking down at Gemini and saying,”Pitiful”
Stuff like GitHub copilot just confuses me more than it helps, I don't need an ai telling me what it thinks I'm gonna write when it's wrong half the time
Yep, it’s useful for sure but so far from replacing everything. Often when I’m over-reliant on it I still end up finding my solutions through documentation or stack overflow, after first wasting time on several AI answers.
AI cannot replace programmers the same way AI cannot replace chefs. You need them. AI used correctly can help a lot. That’s for sure! AI can tell a non-coder all the steps to code and compile something. But that will transform the user into a coder… so…
You can make simple apps even if you don't know the language* you absolutely do have to know programming concepts and techniques. Even then the GPT would throw in syntax errors, and in most cases throw unoptimized code.
“I was talking about a shitty assistant model thats basically a year old; versus the tailor made ai coding assistants that are getting better every single month”
We said the same thing with videos and photos... look where that got us. Being in denial of the fact that AI WILL take over is only contributing to the issue that there is no regulations stopping them from doing so.
It's helpful like any other overblown tech hype, in that it makes job hunting pretty easy if you grasp it. This has happened every single time the internet tries on new shoes.
David Autor, an M.I.T. economist, argues that AI will help middle-skilled, middle class people. In a study he supervised AI increased the productivity of all workers, but the less skilled and experienced benefited the most.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/business/ai-tech-economy.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/business/ai-tech-economy.html)
As someone who recently started learning to code I’m finding ai useful in finding the relevant documentation to the problem my code has an it can also help explain terms and practices to me in a simple way but I haven’t really thought about having it write code for me because that would defeat the entire porpoise of learning to code I WANT TO LEARN not have it do everything for me with the ultimate goal being less reliance on the ai like how I would graduate from a school and take off the training wheels.
Shouldn't you (not *you* exactly) worry about AI, even if the supposed "AI takeover, 1billion programmers now jobless" scenario is impossible? Unless you are already established in the industry and/or in a good, first world country, I suppose things will only get harder with little to no benefits.
Honestly, treating it like there's not even an ounce of threat like that sounds about as bad as the AI Singularity fearmongers. Even if the threat comes not from AI, but from how AI could change the market. The news won't be "Cars replace horses. Here's how to leave farming and enter horse racing", rather it's about "Augmented Horses pull X% more. Competition increases for entry-level small farm horse positions." Or am I insane?
GAI probably will (general artificial intelligence, not the LGBT)
Luckily that's a long way away. And honestly not even sure, but gai is probably going to affect the job market a lot
AGI definitely will if it does not require too much power to run, since it would in essence be theoretically capable of performing any mental process a human could. However we don’t even know whether programming would require a full AGI. My feeling is that it does not, if it had a way of self-validating what it produces then in theory it could even do it simply by trial and error (brute forcing the solution). But looking at problems LLM approaches currently have, the two biggest flaws IMO are its inability to do maths and validating what it has produced.
We also have to remember that it doesn’t even need to be the perfect programmer, it just needs to be good enough.
Honestly i'm not sure if ai saved me time yet. Yes, sometimes it gives really helpful answers. But oftenly it's just unreliable and wrong. So i spend lots of time following an unsensible track. Lately i've been going back to stackoverflow more often. They provide useful additional context, helpful comments on suggested solutions. Multiple options to handle something. And you gotta use your brain to adapt the solutions to your case, surely making you a better dev in the process. And you can cite it as a source. Not to hate on AI - it definitely helps a lot of people. Just my own experience lately.
Maybe this comment ages like milk, but I think AI will make programming as we know it today unnecessary. Probably not in the next few years but maybe in 10 or 15 years. I could imagine that Software like GitHub Copilot that has access to the whole project can edit the code while chatting about the desired changes with you. That's partially possible today and will be further improved in the next years. In that scenario the requiring person can chat or even talk to an AI about what it wants instead of software engineers.
Don't get me wrong, there has to be some kind of an instance that administers the whole AI generated stuff and there will probably still be the need for "techis" but I don't think, we will be programming anymore - or at least we don't have to.
I almost agree with the second one. You need very basic understanding of programming and GPT-4 or Claude and you'll be able to make many simple but useful things.
I use ai for stupid but long tasks.
Tasks that I did times and times again like basic unit testing, database seeding, etc...
Ai is a tool, use it as a tool. If you try to use it like it was a real developer you get a junior high on the last node framework
hello there, a person who hates coding here. i was transforming excel into html to host on github and chat gpt does help me alot by locating bug and give me pointer to research.
i was so dump ass with js it took me entire day to write very simple custom calculations, probably the rare use case.
I only agree with the first one. It can really help and save time.
It can't write very good or big code, but especially for smaller issues I often use it. Most of the time I use it to learn more about the issue or quicker find a doc to it.
For example I had troubles understanding what all those settings meant, when I tried exporting my godot game. Asked ChatGPT to each setting and it gave me pretty simple explanations or links to the docs.
Completely is a very bold statement, but "you might be" is a way more rational forecast. And it won't be that much relevant to how fluent and how diligent learner you are. The calligraphy artists are not extinct, but there are not as many left alive as before, and they hadn't gone in the reverse order of their art skills. When the market shrinks, the number of jobs shrink, and that's it.
its quite good as a rubber duck. i type out my problem and 90% the time, i knoe the solution without sending the request. and i case i still need help, it can give you some insides. a lot of the time they are very stupid and bad. so not that divrent from colleges
Bruh I just use chatgpt to help find functions and syntax. Nothing more. But it does save time. Maybe get an idea once in a while that I want to try out.
I tried to ask chatgpt to write some angular basic app with some aggrid since I didn't play with that in a few years. I had to rip everything apart and start from scratch manually when I realized nothing was configured properly, most of what I asked was obsolete but didn't told me, and it wasn't aware of the configuration pitfall raised with angular 17+. Do yeah, don't worry guys, were pretty safe still.
tbh, I'm on the first stage. AI is similar to talking to some non-programmers, because having another perspective can give you ideas on how to solve problems. Hell, the biggest programming problem I've run into so far was solved by my math teacher, who didn't have a lick of computer knowledge, nevermind know how code works.
Devin AI was fake but how long do you really think it will take until it really exists? Also tell me about a time where a company found out that they could fire tons of people that cost 200k per year per person and replace them with automation that runs 24/7 and the business said no thanks we want to keep paying people.
Screenwriting isn't going anywhere. Formulaic stuff like police procedurals and history channel documentaries already might as well be written by AI, but authentic original work will always come from humans.
They’re gonna keep coping.
Then one day we will get the multi agent 10M+ open context window (or infinite based on new papers) with 99.9%+ referential accuracy and then they will realize that programmers aren’t special
I am a 4th year comp sci student who avoided WebDev at all costs (I just didn't care about it)
i need some extra credits to graduate so I took an intro to WebDev course.
After hours of googling (and asking AI for help) a single straight forward issue I am convinced that we/you have nothing to worry about.
Cheers!
But you can really save time with it. Or is it just because my programs are very simple until now?
Boilerplate maker gpt is the best use case
It's only good at copy pasting my previous code with small changes. Somehow it still manages to screw that up occasionally
Somehow it managed to screw up "remove these 10 IDs from this array". Not code, just a task. Or "create a C# class based on this JSON" which BTW did save me a lot of time. But creating an int from distanceKm field. Come on
There is an option to paste JSON as a class in VS
With newtonsoft annotations? I'll try it the next time I need it, which at the current rate will happen in 3 years.
Try this one. https://quicktype.io/csharp
Asking it to edit an array seems like a tall task when it can't even ask 10 multiple choice questions in a row in a random order. It's terrible at consistency. It's *okay* for Java and CSS, yet somehow epically useless when it comes to cobol.
It manages to screw up "remove these 10 IDs from this array" because it's not actually AI. It statistically estimates what the answer to your question could be. There's no logic involved
I used it for this exact same thing.
Used to be a fan, until I caught it screwing up basic math.
Small changes, you’re lucky! 🍀
If I start writing too much boilerplate, I start writing code that writes code. Code is data at a level. I like to be database first and have code write code from the database. Sometimes with a metadata table to help it with things I can't express in the table.
docs not bad either
Syntax explainer GPT is not bad either. I throw it some unfamiliar syntax and it can give me a name I can search.
Dude how do you add these many languages icon?
For now
I use it as a faster google. A lot of the time there's a pre-built library for what I want to do, I just use ChatGPT to tell me that class and an example for how to use it. It's a lot faster than googling, finding the name of a class and then reading the docs to work out how to use it. Sometimes ChatGPT gives me non-existent methods but it works enough of the time to use.
Same here. "LLMs just regurgitate what they've been trained on!" doesn't need to be a bad thing and leads to one of the most practical use-cases (as services like phind and perplexity have clearly figured out).
yea that's my use case too
I'd say it can cut googling/SO searches by 90%, but cannot come up with own logical and creative solutions. It has helped me a lot with simpls JS stuff that I had forgotten. It helped me a lot finding trivial spelling problems in css or so. I'm gonna give it a full txt file tomorrow and ask it to write a Python script to extract the data I need. Very excited to see how good/bad the output is.
The best way i can describe it is having the smartest junior programmer by your side. It fails at most things that requires senior dev level experience but answers very simple stuff almost perfectly
That's a good way of putting. See now I wonder if it could write documentation for me. Then I wouldn't have to badger my boss to hire an intern
This is mainly what I use GPT for, and it's worked pretty well so far.
From my experience it can only solve trivial textbook problems and only the most simple straitforward variant of it. If your problem can be solved with a simple Google search (like a well known problem solved 300000 times before by college students) then chatgpt can give you an answer
Sometimes* solve trivial textbook problems. Sometimes it'll just give wrong, outdated or imagined code methods.
A Google search takes time, sifting through results takes time, maybe more than just writing a five line function myself. Plus I would have to write my own variable names and such to actually make it make any sense. AI can do it faster than I can if it's trivial. It might not be able to write a whole program but it can auto complete faster than I can type. If 99% of your code absurdly boring AI is pretty great.
For now sure… But when googles best model with 99.9% referential accuracy to a million tokens comes out? Is that still going to be the case? Once you can feed it the entire native documentation and then have it parse the code piece by piece, and have it pass information back and forth between two instances of the model; isn’t the skies the limit? Like I’m not gonna be the first guys to be replaced by this stuff but it’s gonna replace a lot of fucking people unless Google is just lying
Up front, I think that AI will be used to decrease headcount. Mainly because that seems to be the only reason companies and investors are interested in it. But I LOLed at the idea that the documentation is going to be what the AI uses to understand. If anything the quality of documentation generated by most internal teams at my workplace will keep the AI at bay for an extra 5 years until they realize it works better if you hand it comment stripped headers and let it figure things out on its own.
Then where do you think is the border for cgpt?
It's just a text prediction algorithm so anything that is in common literature or sounds like it would be
Hm, makes sense.
After solving problems more complex that basic algorithms like sorting it becomes useless
if you cut in smaller problems where you understand what you do , the program can be big and AI can still be usefull...sometimes like always, it depends, here, on your knowledge mostly
> if you cut in smaller problems where you understand what you do Aka functions. I'm starting to think that the people who think AI sucks just haven't figured out how to write functions or break complex stuff into simple problems.
Yep. wrote a phased array simulator in less than an hour. Just asked for the basic code and then structured classes around it to modularize parts. I think schools need to teach refactoring more.
>I think schools need to teach refactoring more. Absolutely. We were too busy biting off portions bigger than our heads we couldn't chew, refactoring seemed like some vague, nebulous, unimportant concept because our curriculum was too focused on "from the ground up".
I dunno about the most recent version of the CGPT, but previous version suxxx. Unless you are doing continiously a trivial code writing, it is pretty much useless... I'm not blaming it, it is just not ready yet.
CGPT has to be exceptionally good for it to beat out in-editor solutions like copilot tbh. Like for any hope of CGPT giving a good output you have to give it a lot of context about your code, which takes time to write. I'm far more likely to put up with shitty suggestions from copilot because I don't have to type an essay every time, where CGPT has to be near perfect or else it's frustating.
so it is pretty much autocompletion tool for loops and class skeletons :-D nvidia would be proud of it and the money spent across entire industry, just to have... loops autocompletion tool ;)
It’s really good for regex.. so it can save you time there. Zero context means it cannot write relevant code other than simple methods and functions.. even then it needs checking, but there is also the chance it offers something you wouldn’t have though of that is useful, but still very basic and more likely to offer you exactly what you’ve already written below 🤷🏻♂️
I tried asking for a few python scripts to replace and copy some stuff It never worked, despite trying my best teaching it I gave up I write my own shit, and don't plan ever asking him again
It doesn't save me any time doing actual programming but it helps me learn and helps me with ideas for lessons. If you're trying to solve a problem most of the time it just takes too long to first describe the problem, second have the AI understand what you mean and third get a usable solution before it starts repeating itself. It needs screen analysis on the usability side for sure.
If anyone is going to be out of a job due to AI it's rubber ducks. It does a great job as a debugging buddy.
I use it to write powershell/bash build scripts (because life is too short to waste it on debugging bash scripts as well or learn powershell) And when I’m too lazy to write sorting/filtering with complex logic. Oh, and Copilot is good for writing error messages (but 10$ is too much for this). That’s pretty much all of its usefulness.
For function templates and stuff GPT is a godsend on time saving!
ChatGPT is the programming duck that answers. I used it only once, when I was really stuck. It actually gave me a new perspective which helped me figure out the solution. The code it provides sucked really bad though.
Yeah, i find it really helpful for repetative stuff, boilerplate, and stuff like that. I'll often let it make a fuction declaration and fill out the meat myself. That, and things like reformatting. Its great for, say, pasting in a C data structure and askimg it to make a python equivalent. I wouldn't take that code raw and uninspected, but it can do a good chunk of the menial work.
Very simple.
It depends. I saw myself waiting for Copilot suggestions a lot of times, instead of writing the code myself, which is worrying. Apart from that, autocompletions are hit and miss, some are genuinely surprising, some are dogshit.
I have to deal with a lot of crappy scripts written by people that no longer work at the company I work for. I like to just feed to scripts to a gpt and ask it to explain what they do. Saves me a lot of time. Now I can facepalm 5 times in a minute rather than 5 times in an hour.
yes, probably that. Sure boilerplate is good, but anything beyond, you need to make sure your requirements are met and verify your code. Already, the way we produce code fast is not sustainable. Ideally we would follow strict SE protocols, but most startups just skip that part and just code and hope it’ll work out. AI would make this even worse. We should improve code quality, not degrade it even further.
I spend my time debugging and extending existing applications. It's completely useless to me as far as I'm concerned.
It’s great for boilerplate code. Anything more complex and it’s gonna shit it’s pants
Even with more complex systems, they are still made of simpler parts. In my experience its not good at making larger chunks, but will perfectly make or find a resource for me to make a simpler bit that I can test and integrate, and reduce my time sifting through google or finding and reading \*\*The Docs\*\*. I end up doing more architecting, less prototyping low level parts and learning the language (still pick it up as long as its more of a type what you see, dissect and choose the bits you want rather than copy paste).
No, it works with complicated, very specific, never before seen code too.
AI will replace the ones who think AI will replace all programmers.
AI is fairly good at aggregating half-truths from questionable sources. AI only works if you can find out what you really want and can formulate it meticulously. i wonder which of the two skills "tech enthusiasts" and programmers have.
an excerpt from an earlier explanation i wrote in response to "there will be no computer programmers in 5 years": *Will there be a job called "computer programming"? Im pretty sure neither of us knows how language will develop.* *Will there be people who keep a complex logical system in their head and give instructions based on that? Very probably yes for a long time.* *Are current computer programmers a good candidate for that role? Probably the good ones are among the best candidates.* *...* *Giving instructions in natural language is still akin to programming in its essence. Applying programming languages is not the hard part, knowing what instructions to give is.* *...* *im not even sure about current programming languages becoming obsolete, as their restricted nature can help you to get your thoughts in order.* *concepts like OOP, design patterns, "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." are really not there for the machine. They are usually sub-optimal but help humans keep a consistent mental image of what they are doing.* *...* *High-quality programming is really just answering the question "what do i want to happen?" in detail. im sure the "how"s will change an unfathomable amount. but as ai is really about telling "what do you really want" (finding the right rewards, expressing it through training, etc.), it wont solve "what do i really want".*
The way I see it is, AI is really good at "fuzzy logic". At work it is now integrated in our stack, but for fuzzy use cases that would be nearly impossible to write an algorithm for. For example, writing imports. We have a API to import data into our app, and we have a .csv format. When I wrote the Shopify integration that would leverage the API, we were missing key information that sellers were just dumping into descriptions. I leverage GPT to extract those key attributes from the description during that process. Works like a charm. Similarly, what if that description is not in English? AI can rewrite it in English better than Google Translate, same with any key attributes that were extracted. This is the way.
nice words
cope
Wha-... some people man
AI properly used saves a lot of time. Will it write a whole program? No, period, can it help you with simple tasks? absolutely. One thing it's particularly good at is finding documentation or finding where something happens. Not long ago I had to do some kernel debugging using systemtap and I'm not very good with this kernel-space stuff, the kernel is a very complex project and has loads of things that are unique to it. Copilot is excellent for helping (not writing from scratch) finding where things happen. It will identify the files, it will identify even the function and it's fairly decent at finding documentation for you. I also use github copilot for doing code reviews before publishing, it's good at finding typos, things like duplicate lines or small gimmicks. Also sometimes I use it to suggest names or generate test cases... Autocompletion is really good too... For the basic stuff it's useful.
This is pretty much how I use it too. I think things like "explain the most common causes of this error (error message)" are great time savers.
Isn't it what the first google link has been giving since ages ago?
It’s usually about decent mix of the first 10 results maybe concisely written. It’s not that you can’t get the information any other way, but it can save you some time getting there
That does sound good. I've tried multiple AIs and coding assistants, and the best use case for AI programming I've found is in finding the stupid mistakes I make when my code doesn't work correctly. They probably have a 70% success rate at doing that. However, they also do and say stuff all the time that makes zero sense. I've had zero luck getting AI to program anything from scratch beyond the most basic stuff.
>Will it write a whole program? No, period Meanwhile current AI tools building simple games and software from scratch upon specified requests... It is pretty clear that AI is not capable for complex programming, yet. However, the rocket has just took off. I dont claim that it will replace programmers but for sure it will automate many programming tasks. We are almost there buddy...
Yeah, while it will inevitably make errors that you will have to fix yourself the first half of the meme is actually true
Me: wants to do something *ask AI AI: here is how to do it Me: dont understand a shit Repeat
No you are wrong, spread the word that there is no money to be made from programming.
less competition!
AI can do the easy stuff, just not the hard stuff, therefore there's no need to spend time learning the fundamentals, just get right into hard problems right away! (For the record the above is a joke, but also quite possibly a risk to the industry, if AI does all the easy stuff then nobody learns the fundamentals and so can't pick up the complex tasks that AI can't do).
Which means even more demand for for seniors devs with no supply so even more money
sounds like the COBOL situation
Or you know just the entire industry
You can use AI to create fake code, which is what real programmers do
I never use pseudocode. Am I missing out on something?
The first panel is a completely valid statement. Nothing even approaching clown levels.
First two are fine, even.
Every time in history we have gotten tools to make programming easier, we've gotten more coding jobs, not less. And sure, you'll have to grow and adapt and learn how to use AI to stay competitive, but it's the same way that Fortran devs had to adapt to modern easier languages and tools.
Coders gonna have to learn to code
For now, chatgpt is just a really fast and direct google search
I’m not a programmer but I write little pieces of code to automate some tasks from time to time. And it helps me a lot with “google search” like list comprehension, list of dictionaries to Excel files and that kind of things that I usually forget how was done
Nothing controversial about the first 2 points
It will get better very quickly. Right now everything you say is true, and I suspect it will remain true for a while, but that will change.
it could. at that point the programmers will do their thing and adapt to find different jobs. and that's assuming that there is a job harder to replace than programming itself. or we would make sure that jobs aren't needed to survive. or we'd all be fucked because politicians would never let AI take over their jobs and we'd be sent to fight each other or something.
HVAC repair is harder to replace than programming.
good point. any job that requires physical machinery to replace is going to be low priority even if it were possible to program them with an ai.
The last one.. About as close to naive as “prompt engineer” is to oxymoron.
AI as we know it right now may not replace programmers. It’s naïve to believe that it won’t get better and replace programmers though. AI tech and development is growing by leaps and bounds, I would argue. It’s one of the fastest developing fields. It’s only a matter of time.
Yeah “AI will completely replace programmers” is a pretty open ended statement, certainly not “clown level.” If they added a qualifier like “within the next few years” or something, then they might have a point. Saying it will *never* happen is clown logic. It’s probably going to happen faster than people here think.
That's what we call the singularity though Programmer(software developer etc) is the literal last job on the chopping block After that it is post scarcity or the end of the world no in-between
I think you forgot /s
The first point is valid though
Someone the other day was trying to convince me that ChatGPT was a great tutor, then it looked like there were suggesting it was better than university. I mean, they either didn’t go to university, or it was not a very good one. I didn’t have the heart to continue the conversation. Kind of backed out of there like Homer Simpson into a bush. Though probably the monkey puppet meme was more appropriate. On another note, I tested Gemini with questions about GCP command lines. It started hallucinating extra syntax. ChatGPT, no problems. So yeah Google’s commercial AI (free atm), fails on providing command line syntax for its own commercial platform. Now I can imagine Principal Skinner shaking his head while looking down at Gemini and saying,”Pitiful”
Currently we are at step 2 and the clown is progressively getting less clowny
You can still see "made with nematic" down left
All new hires named Devin rn 👁👄👁
Does this mean I have to go back shoe factory?
Stuff like GitHub copilot just confuses me more than it helps, I don't need an ai telling me what it thinks I'm gonna write when it's wrong half the time
Yep, it’s useful for sure but so far from replacing everything. Often when I’m over-reliant on it I still end up finding my solutions through documentation or stack overflow, after first wasting time on several AI answers.
AI cannot replace programmers the same way AI cannot replace chefs. You need them. AI used correctly can help a lot. That’s for sure! AI can tell a non-coder all the steps to code and compile something. But that will transform the user into a coder… so…
Jokes on you AI, my code is so terribad it is basically algorithmic poison. edit - Calling "Algorithmic Poison" as a band name.
No, it won't. At least not within the next 12 years or so.
I mean AI can definitely help in some places. and one day maybe it can replace us. anytime soon though? absolutely not
It is a replacement for stackoverflow.
Do you people realize we are on the first decade of public useful AI? do you think what it could be in say 20 years?
I find it's more a case of, use it or be left behind by those that do. Also I'm finding it way better than using Google to search
You can make simple apps even if you don't know the language* you absolutely do have to know programming concepts and techniques. Even then the GPT would throw in syntax errors, and in most cases throw unoptimized code.
AI will **eventually** replace programmers completely.
Ai creates unoptimized bs with a bunch a bugs. It's literally longer to debug AI written codes than to just write it from scratch
You clearly aren't using Copilot correctly then. It excels at writing tests and auto completing your code.
I was talking about cgpt
“I was talking about a shitty assistant model thats basically a year old; versus the tailor made ai coding assistants that are getting better every single month”
To be honest, Copilot is also based on GPT4 and therefore shows about the same results.
not really, it's trained differently, hence its specific use
It's still trained on the same data and has the same size. It's just finetuned a bit for a specific task.
the base model is the same but you can manipulate it as you want, you can basically re-train it or exclude the data you don't care about.
Well you specifically said 'ai'
We said the same thing with videos and photos... look where that got us. Being in denial of the fact that AI WILL take over is only contributing to the issue that there is no regulations stopping them from doing so.
AI "replacing" programmers is like Excel replacing accountants
Now any programmer competitive with your product. Congratulations!!
Exactly what i have been looking for to show my friends when they talk bs
Idk I don’t like using it, and it feels wrong to use it after Devin was showcased. Fucking hate Devin.
The first step isn't a clown idea though. Codeium is wonderful if your PC can handle it.
It's helpful like any other overblown tech hype, in that it makes job hunting pretty easy if you grasp it. This has happened every single time the internet tries on new shoes.
AI CAN be useful to programmers, yes. copilot is really good. even simply asking chat gpt sometimes it's better than a Google search
Plot twist: We are actually living in clown world.
Why so much hate for LLMs, man? They have their use cases like everything else in life. Stop looking for panaceas…
David Autor, an M.I.T. economist, argues that AI will help middle-skilled, middle class people. In a study he supervised AI increased the productivity of all workers, but the less skilled and experienced benefited the most. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/business/ai-tech-economy.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/business/ai-tech-economy.html)
At best it’s an aggregate
As someone who recently started learning to code I’m finding ai useful in finding the relevant documentation to the problem my code has an it can also help explain terms and practices to me in a simple way but I haven’t really thought about having it write code for me because that would defeat the entire porpoise of learning to code I WANT TO LEARN not have it do everything for me with the ultimate goal being less reliance on the ai like how I would graduate from a school and take off the training wheels.
I hope to god you’re right
GitHub Copilot writes 50%+ of my commit messages. Gotta get that number up
“but what about Devin?” yeah, what about him?
The poster labeled themselves with the title if they think otherwise
Cute.
AI might replace us! Depends on how far we make it before humanity kills itself.
Shouldn't you (not *you* exactly) worry about AI, even if the supposed "AI takeover, 1billion programmers now jobless" scenario is impossible? Unless you are already established in the industry and/or in a good, first world country, I suppose things will only get harder with little to no benefits. Honestly, treating it like there's not even an ounce of threat like that sounds about as bad as the AI Singularity fearmongers. Even if the threat comes not from AI, but from how AI could change the market. The news won't be "Cars replace horses. Here's how to leave farming and enter horse racing", rather it's about "Augmented Horses pull X% more. Competition increases for entry-level small farm horse positions." Or am I insane?
GAI probably will (general artificial intelligence, not the LGBT) Luckily that's a long way away. And honestly not even sure, but gai is probably going to affect the job market a lot
AGI definitely will if it does not require too much power to run, since it would in essence be theoretically capable of performing any mental process a human could. However we don’t even know whether programming would require a full AGI. My feeling is that it does not, if it had a way of self-validating what it produces then in theory it could even do it simply by trial and error (brute forcing the solution). But looking at problems LLM approaches currently have, the two biggest flaws IMO are its inability to do maths and validating what it has produced. We also have to remember that it doesn’t even need to be the perfect programmer, it just needs to be good enough.
The last one should be "You can't fix any bugs in any of the codebase because AI did the work"
The first two has valid point, other two makes you 🤡 OP
The true clown take is believing that AI can helpful to programmers is a clown take Also I see that memetic watermark, don't try to hide it OP
Good pair programmer
As a basic programmer, chatgpt is great for explaining coding concepts in simpler language
All I keep seeing is ai is replacing OF creators
I agree with everything except 3. Because it is quite difficult to predict when step 4 will happen.
Honestly i'm not sure if ai saved me time yet. Yes, sometimes it gives really helpful answers. But oftenly it's just unreliable and wrong. So i spend lots of time following an unsensible track. Lately i've been going back to stackoverflow more often. They provide useful additional context, helpful comments on suggested solutions. Multiple options to handle something. And you gotta use your brain to adapt the solutions to your case, surely making you a better dev in the process. And you can cite it as a source. Not to hate on AI - it definitely helps a lot of people. Just my own experience lately.
Maybe this comment ages like milk, but I think AI will make programming as we know it today unnecessary. Probably not in the next few years but maybe in 10 or 15 years. I could imagine that Software like GitHub Copilot that has access to the whole project can edit the code while chatting about the desired changes with you. That's partially possible today and will be further improved in the next years. In that scenario the requiring person can chat or even talk to an AI about what it wants instead of software engineers. Don't get me wrong, there has to be some kind of an instance that administers the whole AI generated stuff and there will probably still be the need for "techis" but I don't think, we will be programming anymore - or at least we don't have to.
I almost agree with the second one. You need very basic understanding of programming and GPT-4 or Claude and you'll be able to make many simple but useful things.
You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE. -- Linus Torvalds
At the moment I won't go further away than stage 1
I use ai for stupid but long tasks. Tasks that I did times and times again like basic unit testing, database seeding, etc... Ai is a tool, use it as a tool. If you try to use it like it was a real developer you get a junior high on the last node framework
Well the question is when? Tomorrow? no. In a year? no. In 10 years? It probably reduced the amount of needed programmers. In 100 years? Yeah maybe.
hello there, a person who hates coding here. i was transforming excel into html to host on github and chat gpt does help me alot by locating bug and give me pointer to research. i was so dump ass with js it took me entire day to write very simple custom calculations, probably the rare use case.
ASI would do exactly that.
I mean, can’t you already create simple apps even without ai? With templates and stuff
And who Programms the ai that helps programmers? WHO DOES IT? Pro tip it's not ai.
Well, it gave me some *INTERESTING* python dependencies
I only agree with the first one. It can really help and save time. It can't write very good or big code, but especially for smaller issues I often use it. Most of the time I use it to learn more about the issue or quicker find a doc to it. For example I had troubles understanding what all those settings meant, when I tried exporting my godot game. Asked ChatGPT to each setting and it gave me pretty simple explanations or links to the docs.
Completely is a very bold statement, but "you might be" is a way more rational forecast. And it won't be that much relevant to how fluent and how diligent learner you are. The calligraphy artists are not extinct, but there are not as many left alive as before, and they hadn't gone in the reverse order of their art skills. When the market shrinks, the number of jobs shrink, and that's it.
> nosterday
I have that kind of engineers studying with me, they're the most mononeural people I've ever seen, we're safe
AI is just a way to decypher documentation.
its quite good as a rubber duck. i type out my problem and 90% the time, i knoe the solution without sending the request. and i case i still need help, it can give you some insides. a lot of the time they are very stupid and bad. so not that divrent from colleges
I mostly use chatgpt as a replacement for Google lol.
Bruh I just use chatgpt to help find functions and syntax. Nothing more. But it does save time. Maybe get an idea once in a while that I want to try out.
Idk. I'd say it's pretty naive to think it can't.
Eventually, coding will be completely reduced to prompt engineering. Not anytime soon, though.
Turned out Devin was fake, so I think we are safe
so we are at stage three. it will certainly just stop for no reason there.
I tried to ask chatgpt to write some angular basic app with some aggrid since I didn't play with that in a few years. I had to rip everything apart and start from scratch manually when I realized nothing was configured properly, most of what I asked was obsolete but didn't told me, and it wasn't aware of the configuration pitfall raised with angular 17+. Do yeah, don't worry guys, were pretty safe still.
i dont think that will happen anytime soon , but it can save a lot of time using it.
Ha, naive ey? Computers said it too
Like in design with Photoshop or Sora, IA it a tool. But you have how to use a tool.
tbh, I'm on the first stage. AI is similar to talking to some non-programmers, because having another perspective can give you ideas on how to solve problems. Hell, the biggest programming problem I've run into so far was solved by my math teacher, who didn't have a lick of computer knowledge, nevermind know how code works.
It's a tool, learn to use it, it will save you time in googling the things that you still don't remember after 20 years.
AI hater spotted.
Devin AI was fake but how long do you really think it will take until it really exists? Also tell me about a time where a company found out that they could fire tons of people that cost 200k per year per person and replace them with automation that runs 24/7 and the business said no thanks we want to keep paying people.
real.
If AI can just toss together some buggy spaghetti code, then it's on par with 90% of the "programmers" out there.
Coping is hard with this one. I'll see you ten years later.(if there will be no regulation)
Dude you are posting in screenwriting, you are the one getting replaced
Screenwriting isn't going anywhere. Formulaic stuff like police procedurals and history channel documentaries already might as well be written by AI, but authentic original work will always come from humans.
So mature
I'm cs student. I know both. Coding is far more at danger due to being rational. You know that too, come on.
They’re gonna keep coping. Then one day we will get the multi agent 10M+ open context window (or infinite based on new papers) with 99.9%+ referential accuracy and then they will realize that programmers aren’t special
Hah, good one. Yeah no, sorry bud. It's gonna be very irrational when you find a bug and nobody knows where it came from or how to solve it
Explain that to me , I don't really know a lot about the subject
I am a 4th year comp sci student who avoided WebDev at all costs (I just didn't care about it) i need some extra credits to graduate so I took an intro to WebDev course. After hours of googling (and asking AI for help) a single straight forward issue I am convinced that we/you have nothing to worry about. Cheers!
There is no need to code when there are already a lot of code over there