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imnos t1_ixyq8xw wrote

Cue the software developers and naysayers saying how bad it will be and how development jobs are safe for many years to come.

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dasnihil t1_ixyt4hr wrote

it is safe for about a decade imo. i work in this field and am aware of the challenges in automation. i activity use gpt3 and other automation libs at work. last week i gave it a amr/discount calculation method/code and asked it to explain it. saved me a solid hour probably. i also use it for writing complex sqls or codes, and i just cleanup the output it gives, usually accurate or time saving. i give it 10 years before my enterprise clients are ok with codes coming off a machine going to prod without human code review.

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amranu t1_ixyuyr0 wrote

GPT-3 is a solid 2 years old, current LLM are significantly better at improving code. Software engineering is going to be small business only in the future, if at all once these are made widely available. Start learning to craft prompts.

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_gr4m_ t1_ixzctmy wrote

Needing to have to carefully craft prompts will be replaced by ai almost immediatly. I don’t understand how people are thinking that coding will be obsolete but prompting not.

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amranu t1_ixzd3fd wrote

Yes and no. Crafting prompts will still be useful for creating your own stuff with AI. But certainly you can use AI to craft prompts for you as necessary.

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gantork t1_ixzhmhp wrote

I doubt it. Prompts are a very primitive way of communicating, at some point you will be able to have natural human level conversations with AIs instead of prompts.

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amranu t1_ixzjzpz wrote

> at some point you will be able to have natural human level conversations with AIs instead of prompts.

You already can, but such conversations are also prompts.

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gantork t1_ixzn2oo wrote

I guess you can define that as prompts, but I mean that there will be no such thing as prompt engineering/crafting, you'll just talk to it the same way you talk to an artist when commissioning something in the case of generative AIs, for example.

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dasnihil t1_ixzitn8 wrote

that's what i meant by human biases and ambiguities, and that spans multiple cultures and languages and human history. we just have to train it better, the data sets seem more primitive than the algorithms.

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Artanthos t1_iy1d9hr wrote

Natural human communication is horribly imprecise when designing anything.

Blueprints, flowcharts, artist renditions, etc. are all tools for telling the builders what to build and how it should look.

Autonomous coding will replace the builders.

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Altruistic_Rate6053 t1_iy5ftvn wrote

What if we get to a level where AI can sense how you feel and know what you want intuitively without much prompting ? Kinda like the opposite of a “tricky genie” that gives you what you technically want but still leaves you unsatisfied

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Artanthos t1_iy1b35l wrote

You still have to precisely explain what you want done.

Higher level engineers tell coders what to code, but don’t write much code themselves.

Automation will replace most of the coders, but it won’t replace the people telling them what to build.

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dasnihil t1_ixyvduq wrote

I've already figured some quirks since I've been asking for c#/sql stuff. even azure pipeline yamls and some basic ansible scripts. plus i play with a lot of image generation tools. prompt skills is an intuition that will be taught in schools. we're just a bit early. eventually when the ai embraces human biases and ambiguities, we won't have to learn much about prompts.

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imnos t1_ixyvu0j wrote

I'm not sure if it's safe for a decade but I've been using Copilot for over a year and it's a huge time saver like you say. 90% of the time it gets what I need with at least 90% accuracy. Really helpful for writing repetitive code.

I find it works best if your codebase is consistent and well structured.

With GPT-4 on the horizon, and DeepMind also having a model that can compete with "the average developer", I'm super interested to see how things change in the next few years.

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Polend2030 t1_ixzwbck wrote

Just curious - how many time you code and how many time spend on copilot? Can beginner use it without much knowledge of coding ?

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imnos t1_iy0wz76 wrote

I've been coding for 5+ years professionally so I mostly use it to save the effort of typing.

You need to be able to look at what Copilot spits out and understand if it's correct or not, so I'd say it wouldn't be much use for a newbie. You have to know how to structure your code and then let Copilot fill things out whilst keeping an eye on what it's doing.

Sometimes it saves me Googling something I don't know how to do if I can instruct it correctly - and then I just test that what it wrote works, so you may be able to learn some things from it but you'll be able to use it to it's full potential once you have some knowledge/experience under your belt.

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Frumpagumpus t1_iy4hspr wrote

i think it would still be useful for a newbie (maybe even more useful than for someone experienced). it could function as a somewhat unreliable mentor lol. or a learning buddy i guess.

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dasnihil t1_iycrluq wrote

for someone who actually wants to learn coding, it'd be more than a mentor. gpt-3 can explain problems with a code, or explain the logic behind writing the codes too, not just a tool that gives you codes. it's a tool with plethora of knowledge and capable of coherent conversations with it's students :)

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VisibleSignificance t1_iy0gi66 wrote

> writing repetitive code

... how much repetitive code do you even need to write anyway?

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turbofisherman t1_iy0ochj wrote

Unit tests, for one, are much easier to write with Copilot. Huge time saver!

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Pixelmixer t1_iy0qky7 wrote

Dude generating unit tests directly from properly written specs would be a godsend. Consequently, properly written specs would be a godsend.

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imnos t1_iy0xy2v wrote

Er, a lot? If your codebase is well structured most of it will follow similar patterns which you just need to repeat, with different class/variable names etc. That makes it ripe for automation with Copilot.

Then there's unit tests which cover the above - if you keep the structure similar then copilot can fly through it.

Likewise for generating things like seed data. Need to create some seeds for your database just write out what you need in a comment and Copilot gets it mostly right.

So much time saved.

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imnos t1_iy0ynmm wrote

I spoke about repetitive code but it's also helpful for when you don't know something - saves you the step of Googling or checking documentation.

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gobbo t1_iy07odr wrote

Automation is a two-edged sword. It puts management level decisions into every day life where they didn't exist before.

An example I use a few times a week is talking to boomers about how computers are not the automation appliances they had hoped for yet. They still have to figure out how to do many of the things the automation is not fully capable of.

For example, if you are over 45 or so, you probably remember being a young person and looking at white-collar jobs listed like filing clerk level one or three.

Those jobs practically don't exist anymore. Everyone does their own filing, and the filing cabinet is a hard drive that they carry around with them or are primarily responsible for. In a large corporation, you might have a sysadmin who is doing some of the filing cabinet maintenance, but you still have to file your own shit.

If you told someone in 1970, that one of the unacknowledged but dominant effects of computers in 2020 would be that more people have to learn to become filing clerks, they would've looked at you funny.

AI fully integrated will be similarly replacing jobs and throwing unexpected responsibilities on us.

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Frumpagumpus t1_iy4i893 wrote

not just AI, i use an operating system called nixos which gives you somewhat unprecedented levels of control over building your operating system. or it makes that level of control far more accessible than it had been before (when you would rely on your distro package maintainers exclusively to build your software). i think nixos will only get more widespread in industry, semi usurping docker (in some of its roles) in some environments. probably there are other examples (maybe yubikey/password managers somewhat?).

i had never recompiled my kernel myself for example before using it.

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gobbo t1_iy4lfvd wrote

Updoot for mentioning nixOS, which I am still holding out hope for getting a user-friendly-enough package manager.

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DyingShell t1_ixz4t49 wrote

So you are already replacing people by using those tools since that would mean the companies require less programmers to do the same work, the tool does most of the heavy lifting and will continue to automate more work each year making job positions decline with it.

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dasnihil t1_ixz58di wrote

actually the opposite in my company, we hire more because each can do more and they can make more, but I'm the only dude who's doing this that i know of.

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DyingShell t1_ixz5ih2 wrote

So you simply chew out application after application? You don't think coding jobs will decline as AI can automate more and more? Also you don't know when AI might replace you, nobody does.

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dasnihil t1_ixz7w0q wrote

we don't care to count how many applications we can produce. i do my 8 hours and take money home. if I'm replaced, I'm replaced lol.

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DyingShell t1_ixz7yp3 wrote

Oh so you don't actually want to do this? interesting.

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dasnihil t1_ixz8azu wrote

i like doing new things, I've done computers for 20 something years now, but every few years a new thing in it. now i want to build furniture and learn about various disciplines of science, particularly relating biology to computation. why do you ask?

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DyingShell t1_ixz92nk wrote

Oh I didn't realize you were THAT old, sorry.

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everything_in_sync t1_ixz9lcj wrote

Yet everyone realized you are extremely young maturity wise.

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DyingShell t1_ixza2um wrote

There is nothing better than being young, I'll make sure to visit your grave in the coming decades!

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FTRFNK t1_iy0j6ys wrote

Ah but idiots tend to die first anyways by living an ignorant life filled with mistakes. So maybe he'll be visiting your early grave 🤷‍♂️

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[deleted] t1_iy0o1b7 wrote

[deleted]

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dasnihil t1_iy0uv26 wrote

you can just sign up beta and use openai playground for that. da vinci model is still dirt cheap imo.

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uniquely_Darkly t1_ixyzt9e wrote

Software developers

Let’s create AI. It’ll be cool just like on the sci-fi movies we watched growing up.

America:

It took our jerbs

Software developers:

Embrace the future, mate…

AI:

We can program, too. We won’t be needing you anymore.

Software developers:

wait, hold up…?!

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botfiddler t1_iy1m953 wrote

I think it will only cut of the middle part. The best ones will still be needed and the occasional coder and generalist will use the new opportunities to be creative with it. Some people might also get protection through some human based certification requirements.

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TinyBurbz t1_ixzzi4v wrote

Cue the "project managers" saying "lets just use an AI" for everything now.

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