1y ago

we are safe

151 comments

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.
- 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.
  
  The problem I have with it is that all the time it saves me I have to use on reading the code. I probably spend more time on that as once in a while the code it produces is broken in a subtle way.
  I see some people swearing by it, which is the opposite of my experience. I suspect that if your coding was copying code from stack overflow then it indeed improved your experience as now this process is streamlined.
  
  Same as ChatGPT is better web search.
- Biggest problem with it is that it lies with the exact same confidence it tells the truth. Or, put another way, it's confidently incorrect as often as it is confidently correct - and there's no way to tell the difference unless you already know the answer.
  
  it's kinda hilarious to me because one of the FIRST things ai researchers did was get models to identify things and output answers together with the confidence of each potential ID, and now we've somehow regressed back from that point
- 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
- 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.
  
  Yeah, they think it can turn a beginner dev into an advanced dev, but really it's more like having a team of beginner devs.
- I'm still convinced that GitHub copilot is actively violating copyleft licenses. If not in word, then in the spirit.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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. :|

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."
  
  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.
- 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
  
  Haha punk it's actually 192.168.1.1. you dun goofed
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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?
- 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.

I just used copilot for the first time. It made me a ton of call to action text and website page text for various service pages inwas creating for a home builder. It was surprisingly useful, of course I modified the output a bit but overall saved me a ton of time.
- Copilot has cut my workload by about 40% freeing me up for personal projects
  
  Copilot is only dangerous in the hands of people who couldn't program otherwise. I love it, it's helped a ton on tedious tasks and really is like a pair programmer
  
  Copilot has cut my personal projects by about 40% freeing me up for work
- i get copilot through github education and let me tell you the first time i put out a bunch of code related to one of my entities, i was floored. it's definitely not there to write your entire app but it saves so much time
- id argue it's more work to get chatgpt to suggest a CTA of "Download now" or "Learn more" than it is to type it by hand.

I think the correct response is "Wow. Has your mom seen it? Send her the link."
- This is so evil I love it
  
  why? wouldn't she simply be unable to open it too?

AI is only as good as the person using it, like literally any other tool in human existence.
It's meant to amplify the workload of the professional, not replace them with a layman armed with an LLM.

This AI thing will certainly replace my MD to HTML converter and definitely not misplace my CSS and JS headers
- MD to HTML? You are a blessing dude.
  
  Yea of course! I can link a bitbucket for the file if you'd like. It's hardcoded to my file structure, but should still be useful if you need something like it

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
  
  Right, the pretty little button needs more shadows
  
  I still have nightmares dealing with a11y requirements
- 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.

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.
- 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

only because ai hasn't replaced the client..... yet
- Who has four thumbs and a top tier business plan? This AI!

Bruh this cracked me up
- Bruh good to hear bruh, bruh

Might be about time for testers to start cr4pping their pants tho.

I firmly believe AI will replace managers before it replaces engineers.

What is the joke here?
- User claims to have made a website using chatgpt, putting programmers out of their jobs. However, it's revealed user knows next to nothing about making that website accessible for others, as revealed from the last line. User sent a local link (that works for their own computer only) to their friend (which naturally shouldn't work).
- Nobody else can see the files on your c:\ drive. Designing a "website" means little if you don't have a place to host it
  
  Is it OK if I put them in D:\ 😂😂😂
  
  Idk, there's a lot of people who have jobs designing websites without a place to host it. Shoot, people get paid to design an image of a website.
- The joke is it's an iMessage chat and they are sending a Windows path which doesn't make sense for iOS or Mac, the only two operating systems that support iMessage.

151 comments