What I Think About AI Taking Your Jobs

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[@sanchittiwari7690]

When i see my classmates getting their stuff done really fast using AI i get really scared, but when i see them struggling with some of the most basic things like reversing an array then it makes me really hopeful for my future

[@Muslim_qui_doute]

yeah I think that noob programmers are gonna get replaced, the ones who only know a lil of HTML and CSS is going to be replaced, the ones who are maintaining these AI systems and large Systems aren't

[@LiveType]

Reversing an array? How? Using what method for what purpose? Surely you can't be talking about something like reversed_array: List[int] = array[::-1]?

[@sanchittiwari7690]

@@LiveType I'm in college and this was asked in my JAVA exam, we had to reverse an array in linear time and constant space, many students couldn't answer this easy question

[@ruirodrigues2938]

@@LiveType He probably is

[@LiveType]

@@sanchittiwari7690 Ah, well that's a slightly more challenging function to write than array[::-1] now is it? Dual pointers are scary. But you are correct that if you "learn how to code" without knowing basic data structures and algorithms, you have failed somewhere along the lines. This I very much agree with and is why even with the increase of AI tools that make things way way easier/faster, it still takes skill to create something like an AI cover that actually sounds good without basically "stealing" someone else's work on the matter.

[@Zilharr]

At this point, he purposefully "forgets" alerts so he can meme. That's my conspiracy theory for the day.

[@prateekm1995]

1

[@xunjin8897]

He needs a command to disable notifications by mods, it's gonna work 🫠🫠🫠

[@alialshammari56]

This time it was funny

[@derpysean1072]

No it is not, you will join Alex in the pond of gay frogs.

[@BeachFrontSolutions]

I’m okay with it, the “forgot to turn off notifications” is often my favourite part!

[@armax00]

To me it sounds very similar to how UML based tools have worked so far: start having to maintain or change it, good luck understanding what the tooling did.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

yep!

[@danielvaughn4551]

One thing I always like to say is that the difference between writing code and maintaining it, is the difference between raising your hands and keeping them in the air indefinitely. Even if AI helps you build a new project, it’s a very different thing to maintain it.

[@scally9341]

that’s actually a really good point. if AI helps you build a code base rapidly, it might become harder and harder to maintain it because NOBODY KNOWS THE CODEBASE past a certain point. It’s hard to make creative decisions on something you don’t really understand. Plus, understanding someone else’s code is usually harder than building your way up to equally complicated code, so reading the code of an AI bot is probably more of a headache than it’s worth…

[@totof2893]

That's exactly the same trap people fall in with "magic" framework like Java Spring. You build from scratch quickly. But when you have new complex requirements, needs to scale and tweak the framework, it is the beginning of hell. Never trust a framework or a methodology with short term project because there is a tendency to make starting easy for quick adoption, but sacrifice is done for long term maintenance and evolution.

[@danielvaughn4551]

@@totof2893 same with Firebase. Especially since Firebase is marketed towards FE devs that “don’t want to think about the backend”. Cue some of the most horrifying architecture you’ve ever seen lol.

[@cristianoo2]

​@@scally9341sorry but nobody never knows the code base unless they've worked with it. The problem of using those AI tools is that people are forgetting to learn. If you don't learn, then you'll never be able to maintain it.. for now, we have a population of good programmers from the 90' 00's, 10's, but as we perish from age, it will become a huge problem

[@PepeCoinMania]

its kind of impossible maintaining large code bases without any knowledge

[@Jigahaganaga]

I teach the first year of programming at a university here in Australia. I am deeply worried about what it is going to do to the next generation of programmers. I am having to beg and plead with students to not use it to generate their code. (luckily we have multiple interviews, one for every assessment item where we'll ask them to demonstrate their understanding of the code, i.e ask them to use a loop they did for the given assignment problem in a dif context etc and exams to catch at least egregious uses to filter out the worst kind of students, who'd prefer to cheat rather then do the work). I had to get my ass kicked, for years to make any progress learning it before it I finally got those clicking moments. I worry many students are just not going to reach that first or second click point and lie to themselves that they know what they are doing and not interrogate things further. I've also already had to assure multiple GOOD but not yet GREAT students they have any potential prospects. We've also had students argue with professors on their research area citing chat gpt saying the opposite and refuse to back down. It's a shitshow.

[@TheNewton]

compsci/software pedagogy is broken though by your own story. Those clicking moments should not take years for anything but the deepest subjects. Just because the process and tools were bad for you is no reason for students to lag behind in the same way. chatgpts etc place in education is an iteration tool, a fancy debugger. Not working out how to integrate such tools into compsci is a disservice to students.

[@Nick_fb]

@@TheNewton American programming doesn't really fit the Australian mindset/Spirit by default. Australian mindset prefers to glue two (or n) related concepts together and make a whole unified thing of it. The American habit of breaking objects down into smaller chunks and flying at break-neck speed over lots of mid-depth concepts is a foreign idea to Australians. The problem is a way deeper than pedagogy. ChatGPT is just another exacerbation of the pre-existing differences.

[@Jigahaganaga]

@TheNewton Sure, if they understood it. We check understanding at my uni in the interview process not just knowledge. If they used chatgpt and understood it well enough to explain it to us and refactor it as a student would without we'd have no problem with it, hell that'd be great my job would be much easier! But they don't, the chat gpt students are using a ternary with no idea what it is, they think an arrow function is just some weird symbols the wrap their code in. We don't ask for complex refactors or complex demonstrations of understanding. More stuff like ok you've used a class here, can we make another class that is for a person instead with a first name and last name and these 3 methods level thing. You've used .map here, how would we do that as a for loop etc. They can't do that without gpt but supposedly it's helping them learn better. I just don't buy it based on what I am seeing with the 100's of students I interface with.

[@steveoc64]

@Jigahaganaga - simple solution mate ... get them to submit code in Zig instead of JS or Java or whatever. Even GPT-4 paid edition is completely useless at generating working Zig code. It doesn't have enough info (especially since the current dev branch is radically different to the current release branch, and requires reading documentation).

[@awesomebearaudiobooks]

But wasn't it the same when people used to write Assembly before C appeared? I mean, when compared to people who write in assembly, people who write in C are basically cheating and being lazy. Just 30 years ago, the compiler wasn't that great, so code written in C was almost always slower than code written just in Assembly. But now, because now the compiler is so good, people usually don't write Assembly at all. Almost all the assembly code converted from C nowadays is usually faster than the code written even by the most advanced engineers. And then we got Java, and GoLang, and it became even easier. People who write in Java and Golang are also "cheating" when compared to people who write in C, and are "egregious" when compared to people who would write only in Assembly. But did the apps actually become worse? No. Apps only became better, more functional, more robust, and all of it without sacrificing speed that much. If compilers had improved and made our lives so much better in the last couple of decades, what makes you think AI LLM's wouldn't? Also, it's not just software development. I mean, people nowadays are way worse hunters than people 200 years ago. And when compared to hunters 10000 years ago, many of the hunters of 200 years ago are lazy noobs, while modern hunters are just retarded kids. But did it make the life of average people worse? No, to the contrary, life became better. The problem with AI is not that it will make us more stupid or more lazy. The problem is in who owns it and who is going to control it. Just as you don't need to know how to hunt to eat a stake, there's no existential threat in not learning about low-level implementations. I mean, some of the engineers who created some of the most useful software of this decade probably never wrote anything substantial in Assembly in their entire lives, and yet they made the humanity more prosperous than ever before. I could be wrong, of course, that is just my opinion.

[@StdDev99]

I had an opposite freak-out when copilot was first released. I thought WOW I have a magic programming genie that grants wishes! I could just make any app I want on demand! But then I got disappointed after using it. I had my hopes high again for ChatGPT but it also went down with disappointment. Same cycle for GPT-4 and I felt bamboozled for falling for all the overhyping that came before it. So now I know it's all just marketing. Anybody talking about AI news and AI getting "supercharged" and "what a time to be alive" is just a lying salesman getting your hopes high for nothing.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

yep

[@tisaname8490]

What were you trying to make?

[@StdDev99]

​@@tisaname8490 One of the simplest stuff was a simple client-side digital circuits simulator where the user has an empty board and can drag logic gates to the board, connect them, and run the circuit. I mean, if someone told me that, I would immediately know what to build and will have no further questions. I would even conclude that this requires to have undo/redo, copy/paste, and load/save features. Even if it wasn't mentioned in the request. And would conclude that since there's a load/save, there must be a versioning system for the saved format in case of we got new requirements later. But it ranted about how that's too complex and I should learn this and that. So I tried to simplify the problem and asked to just make a div and a bunch of other smaller divs that I could drag to the board. It gave me something that behaved so weird. I kept saying that it didn't work and it kept apologizing and correcting. In the end I had to understand the code and fix it myself. Which is a LOT longer that it would have taken me to write it from scratch. It definitely saves a lot of time if I use it as a tutorial generator. If I don't know how to use a framework or a library, I just ask for a simple example and take it from there.

[@Leeway4434]

> "what a time to be alive" is just a lying salesman getting your hopes high for nothing Such a pessimistic take. Fact of the matter is AI is a hammer and not everything is a nail, but there are a lot of nails out there. GPT4 and copilot have made my day-to-day and side projects more enjoyable for me, but maybe I'm just lucky and I have a lot of nails around me?

[@StdDev99]

@leeway191 I might have exaggerated a little bit. But they don't have to overhype too much and shove terms like "supercharged" and "game changer" at every minor update. You don't see Sam Altman doing that btw. It's all just the 3rd party marketing.

[@haskellelephant]

This just in, Pakistani programmer comes up with a cheaper bid than a German programmer in preliminary rounds of a software project. I think the whole "seems mostly complete" assessment underestimates the effort required to make a project go from mostly complete to viable. The last 20% of a project might take 90% of the effort. If there is any takeaway here, it might be that using no-code + chatGPT can make for cheap impressive demos.

[@TheNewton]

it's just mangled prototyping vs development comparison.

[@Rebound1234]

I've noticed that the people most likely to think that AI will replace everything are those with no experience in coding, very limited understanding of how this technology works or vested interest in fearmongering about it. That being said, I don't think it's a threat yet but we are at the point where the wheel is spinning and is about to hit the asphalt. The progress is only going to get faster and we'll have to see what the future holds for us.

[@0marble8]

I actually think LLM progress is going to get slower, because from what i understand it is mathematically just a function that gives you the most likely word given the previous input, it cant really do actual logical thought. To get something better, a completely different approach is going to be needed

[@ruirodrigues2938]

@@0marble8 From what I read, the current LLM is literally the state of the art and they just made it "bigger", not better. I think the progress has nearly flatlined for this strategy and they are trying to find new ways to "improve" the best they got. Its literally a word calculator that "guesses" the next word. That's why Prompt Engineering is pretty much just feeding has much information and as clear and concise has possible in order for this calculation to give the highest percentage output.

[@NihongoWakannai]

@@0marble8 LLMs are not the limit of machine learning. The fact that LLMs were even capable of things like coding was a complete surprise, they weren't even built for that purpose and yet can do an OK job. Just wait until companies are able to train ML bots on actually producing code specifically. It's like if a blacksmith tried to make a hammer but then people start buying the hammers to fight with because they're better quality weapons than the cheap swords they own. Imagine if that blacksmith actually tried to make a proper weapon next time.

[@parlor3115]

@@ruirodrigues2938 From what I read, it's the opposite of what you guys understand. AI research is exploding in popularity and, with so many resources invested in the technology, the remaining limitations are bound to be broken. The only issue that I can see stifling progress in this field is hallucinations. And even then, it still wouldn't undermine it's impact on future prospects.

[@ruirodrigues2938]

@@parlor3115 You remind me of those doomsayers, THE END IS COMING! REPENT YOUR SINS! What limitations? Are you talking about AGI? Or Altman doom preaching not explaining the technical side of AI/AGI. All AI popularity is literaly binded to chatGPT Engine, they consume it via API and voila, AI for everyone. I still have to know about a use case in my company where they asked us to use AI of any sort, the only thing we have is chatGPT and CoPilot

[@madlep]

“We got chatgpt to write the code!” how do you know it works? “We got chatgpt to write the tests for the code too! 100% coverage!” Ummm…

[@mnl6042]

but the same argument can be made with programmers, given the case that the same programmer writes the code and the tests

[@user-qx7bc9dz5p]

@@mnl6042 Have you tried to get SQL db from chatGPT? That is unusable asf

[@wchorski]

if you're promting an LLM expecting a fully functioning program then you're doing it wrong. I've found the best way to use it is to break down the problems into the smallest chunks. (example, it really helped me write a date comparison functions). Honestly, it's the perfect "scripting duck" because it forces me to think about how to ask a question

[@TheNewton]

i can totally see "scripting ducky" as a real product, or at least a stackoverflow april fools

[@fenkraken]

Once I get close to retirement age and start a consultancy gig I am just gonna charge any company that used "prompt engineers" as their main delivery mechanism five times more than usual price. That's my take on it.

[@lowwastehighmelanin]

Smart.

[@parlor3115]

Assuming you can get there before AI fully replaces programmers

[@NihongoWakannai]

TBH that's probably fair just for the headaches they will give you in trying to consult for them

[@RYOkEkEN]

this man is not going to be replaced by chat gipiti

[@BlackwaterEl1te]

Ab Advany be like "Please invest in my no-code company".....

[@klam539]

Also "please follow, so I can pitch my product 2 weeks from now"

[@jl6723]

I have used AI. My main usage for it is commenting code, generating some simple ideas, basic HTML or design (mainly because I suck at that), and generally bouncing ideas against it. AI is only as good as the programmer who uses it and knows the jargon and such a programmer will likely find themselves doing things that is better than the AI. The main thing that brings anxiety is if AI continues to improve linearly from its previous rate, we may be in trouble at sometime in 5-6 years. I don’t believe that it is linear improvement, but I can’t say what the improvement rate is.

[@johnyepthomi892]

At that point even Hamid needs to go.. bah bye Mr No Code.

[@T1Oracle]

It's not good, it just copies the stuff it finds and makes errors it can't fix.

[@froggy3496]

You need AI to write comments? Lol

[@TheNewton]

@@froggy3496 We want to create code not write comments. 30 seconds: Chatgpt summarize ALL blocks of code for me. 5 minutes: hand typing out every comments because comments are a business requirement regardless of how obvious and self descriptive of their function the code is : /* loops over the products */ for product in products..... Why WOULDN'T you work on automating that. But WAIT Don't stop there: also bring in exact quotes and references from internal technical documents ,emails and tickets. And do it as a pre-checking hook just like linting or formatting. You manually write comments? LOL

[@PorthoGamesBR]

"Hamid make tests back-to-back no bugs" Hamid - ChatGPT, does the code you wrote have any bugs? ChatGPT - No bro trust me

[@angelenriquechavezponce1629]

It's really comforting to see prime go out of his way to make it clear that the jobs that are going to be replaced (if ever) are our jobs and not his. His sarcasm makes him truly unique.

[@CrYpt001]

Because his job is to sell shovels for the AI gold rush .

[@AndrewTSq]

Only problems is that managers that just listen to microsoft tht this will replace workers

[@sleekism]

@@CrYpt001 wait who are you referring to?

[@royarnefylkesnes]

I think alot of the time saving Hamid could show for, was due to the nocode solution. That was the cost of 135 a month by the way. Nocode solutions can make you build things in minutes and hours and include both backend and frontend. I once built a lowcode solution for a internal project and our developers ended up beeing 10x faster on all the basic to medium complex CRUD operations. Identifying and automating repetetive task is very powerfull and saves a project alot of time/cost

[@TheNewton]

yup nocodes good for prototyping internal automations but performance is always a stumbling block.

[@iamreinder]

And ownership is also a big deal with no code solutions. I can imagine that will also become a big deal with AI, in one way or another you’re giving up business knowledge and strategic advantages over your competitors.

[@IvanRandomDude]

Well, no-code changes the equation. It's like saying dev with 3 years of exp can integrate authentication using Firebase in 2 days while dev with 20 years of exp needed 2 months to write custom one. No shit Sherlock, almost as if using 3rd party services speeds up the development.

[@binitrupakheti4246]

Surprised nobody brought this point up. The entire point of no code is it's just werks until it doesn't and it sucks ass.

[@IvanRandomDude]

@@binitrupakheti4246 Indeed. SaaS has been a thing for a while now. Surprising, Shopify dev with 2 years of exp can create e-commerce platform 1000x faster than dev with 20 years of exp who writes everything from scratch.

[@dipanjanghosal1662]

I mean 4 years experience is still quite a lot of experience. Beyond a certain number of years, you'll get diminishing returns if you're working on one particular technology/stack. I'd like to see how a completely inexperienced person fares against any experienced person with these "no-code" tools.

[@Mooooov0815]

Despite not being extremely experience, I can tell a lot of stories about no code/low code tools. Every one of those tools has been designed with a usecase in mind. Even if you look at those wannabe universal app builders like Bubble, they all have base assumptions in mind what their users are going to build. As long as you stay within the boundaries of what these App builders/tools expect you to do, it feels like you’re flying. That is until you take a step outside this boundary, even it it’s just a tiny one, you’ll hit a brick wall. As soon as you leave the path those tools have laid out for you, you will end up fighting the tool all the time, slowing you down significantly. The apps those builders are designed to handle best are usually extremely basic CRUD apps. As a general rule of thumb, where people in a large company would have built a spreadsheet with a ton of macros inside, low/no code tools are a good option. For anything else, just use actual f*ing code. What makes these comparisons even more absurd: they usually build some sort of pretty basic CRUD app (as one does) and use vs . If you‘d compare this low code stuff to an experience rails/Django/Laravel engineer (some sort of pro code framework that’s highly productive), the engineer would almost certainly beat the low code one in terms of quality and be on par when it comes to delivery time. In addition to that, if you have actually have code you won’t be completely f*cked when your low code tools of choice decides to raise prices and you have future room for expansion (oh, it’s also easier to hire for an actual programming language than for some low code app) Disclaimer: I became so frustrated with low code development (I don’t even know how I ended up doing that stuff) that I quit the job and am now a FE developer

[@winb_]

They wouln't fare at all, because in order to implement these things you do need to know what you're doing, and where to put different pieces, as well as how to stitch it all together, Primeagen did touch on the biggest problem with this, maintainability, readability and quality, also chatgpt doesn't think about system design. These are all things that the "new" engineers fresh out of university do not understand, they don't know much about these deeper topics (not their fault) so when they see ai create code, to them this will just work the same in a big company, it's just not.

[@NoX-512]

4 years is nothing, unless it’s 4 years of job experience and you had 5 - 10 years of programming experience before getting a job.

[@Dennis-gg9yv]

this, just imagine the 19 years old experienced one with also good proompt engineering knowledge, he would kill it.

[@Krapvag]

if this story wasn't completely made up I'd also like to see what code was 100% covered

[@tenthlegionstudios1343]

AI for me is great for asking questions that are super specific and technical. Like when learning rust, looking for docs and simple examples are great. But I actually learn the concepts myself and then code them. It is invaluable for learning new topics for me. For actually writing code I only use it a little.

[@Nick-id1yk]

Except when it's something more technical and gpt just makes it up. Can be catastrophical when it gets the default running order of threads for a list wrong and you don't know that because you are "learning".

[@anlumo1]

I've used ChatGPT4 output as the starting point for a project. For that, it worked pretty well, even though not much of the original code remains in the version that actually did what I wanted. It's really important to actually understand the code ChatGPT produced, otherwise you won't catch obvious bugs and shortcomings early enough. For example, I had to change a lot of code to be async, because I needed an inner function to make async requests. ChatGPT didn't know about this, so I had to work through the whole codebase to fix that. It just doesn't have enough memory to write the whole code, and that fails especially when connecting multiple parts.

[@3DWithLairdWT]

I use Chat GPT to decode the C++ error logs in Visual Studio. I don't trust the code it creates, but I do love how it can read compiler errors back into fairly plain English for debugging

[@TylerKehne]

I think it's really good at C++ in particular. I've come to rely on it to understand complexities in the language.

[@Nick-id1yk]

​@@TylerKehneI asked it about common c++ errors from my lecture. Gpt did not find a single one.

[@Mirvelik]

Prime, but one of the most important questions here: how to support the code/product after the first and the second approaches? This is the point! Because yes, all these no-code tools are only about predefined features but not about customization/iteration/changes which every serious business needs. In this way, I am as a programmer not worried about the amount of work in the feature. Even more, my guess is there will be much much more

[@Woeden]

For AI to take over Software Engineers they need to go to meetings and understand what the client wants. We are safe.

[@Mark-kt5mh]

A language model can literally do that better than most engineers

[@___echo___]

I think the issue here might be is that companies will instead pile more work onto their Software engineers and give GPT-4 access along with it, not that it will replace them... this just might end up being awful for programmers growth

[@m7xTV]

​@@Mark-kt5mhabsolutely not. LLMs need good prompts to work properly. And trust me most clients are not at all capable of giving that.

[@TheNewton]

Software engineers need to just put chatgpt between themselves and managers and clients as a first tier discovery tool. Getting actual to describe technical detail accurately is impossible when the people talk like others can read their mind and expectations that will only exist in the future.

[@RYOkEkEN]

@@___echo___ nailed it

[@ChatGTA345]

As a somewhat senior/experienced eng, I can say like most people, clients vastly prefer interacting with a human on an emotional, metaphysical or whatever else level, than with some crypto AI of the day

[@isocuda]

The way it's written, ignoring technical points, just "feels like ad read" or "you got anymore of that venture capital?"

[@ybabts]

I find that its really good for learning and understanding concepts because it can give examples and you can ask it questions.

[@wormholecowboy]

@ThePrimeTime You've talked a lot about learning fundamentals in your videos. Sometimes you'll even randomly give some advice on some random things that you should know how to do. Would you consider making a dedicated video that outlines the fundamentals of being a good programmer as you see it? Things that people should know before engaging in all the abstractions?

[@SimonBuchanNz]

It's probably just all the things you will learn in any half decent C book/course: reverse a string, memory management, creating some data structures, maybe some network programming. That sort of thing. I doubt there's any absolute list, as it's more about the general familiarity with how programs and the machine works than the specific skills being useful themselves: you will literally never need to implement reversing a string or implement a red black tree, unless you're writing the standard library of a new language; but learning how to do so will make it so you can do just about anything with documentation and patience.

[@wormholecowboy]

@@SimonBuchanNz Thanks man, that's helpful. Haven't dove into C yet, but I'll make that more of a priority. Also, love your profile pic, RIP Marty.

[@TheNewton]

he's got like ~3 channels and many videos across them where he goes over articles about "good programming". like the clean-code talk by Casey Muratori, and the vids of making lexers. For soft-dev type stuff see talks by people like unclebob.

[@SimonBuchanNz]

@@TheNewton could not unrecommend these enough, other than a "here's what nonsense sounds like, learn to ignore these people". Yes, often what they say makes sense. That's the problem. They're giving you this mix of (to an expert) obviously correct and obviously nonsense rules from on high without justification, and a new programmer just takes them all on as gospel.

[@VuTuanIT]

The fundamentals are the answer of 3 questions regarding what you are doing: What is it? How it work? How to do it in basic? Then you will get into “How to do it right?”

[@gauravkelkar8824]

This reminds me of 1 month back... My boss got into the gippity 4 hype and wanted to "accelerate" the ongoing 3 month sprint by retraining part time overworked interns in 1 week. So the guy wasted 50$ with big brain proompts, and is setting up the Gippity in our broken CI CD. It's not even funny, it's just bizarre. Also fuck you Bobby for reprogramming my boss's mind

[@parlor3115]

Mine is on the verge of doing this

[@alexlowe2054]

Mind programming is the true most important skill.

[@dipanjanghosal1662]

This is what happens when product managers weren't programmers themselves

[@gauravkelkar8824]

@@dipanjanghosal1662 The guys a salesman at heart. Hes got this grand idea about how hes going to infiltrate and exploit the market, blah blah blah, but doesnt event have a vision on what product he wants from the devs

[@razorswc]

Ugh same...even after mentioning examples of GPT getting things completely wrong, he still thinks it is the greatest. He even got another manager using it. 😅

[@user-iw3xw5ze8p]

I use gpt a lot, but for improving what I already coded or improving code review. I'm working as frontend using Angular but my previous experience with it was only small personal projects. It works pretty well when I want to be more concise with rxjs operators or other small code snippets. I just paste a small function and ask if it can be improved using some specific rules

[@heytherehowdy]

As a new coding person, I've used it more for learning concepts and general practices. Ie understanding Interfaces, Classes, and Compiling concepts. I also have several mentors that assist me when I ask questions. I have NOT used it to write my own code. I would rather learn it myself. I also used it to help me find some practice project ideas for coding. With this, I actually felt it was not as effective, as it gave me a list of some really great ideas, but they were so general, that It did not really put an emphasis on the code practice part. I guess I could have been more descriptive on what I wanted, but meh....

[@colespofford]

As someone learning to become a dev, I am convinced that the primary skill difference that programmers have is their ability to continuedly work on hard problems without an obvious end in sight. As I have learned and improved I have noticed that this is the number 1 skill that separates people. The projects programmers will work on with AI will get more complicated and 90% of humans are too lazy/give up on things easily. Also I am astonished with people's lack of ability to communicate what they want and their ability to think divergently enough to think of ways they can even use AI effectively. I am using GPT-4 as a learning assistant, if you don't understand the code it makes and you just copy and paste bigger projects become impossible. So I am learning as I go, asking it to explain everything and trying to do as much as I can myself. But I 100% believe I am learning how to be a good programmer at least twice as fast probably 3-5 times faster than I would prior to GPT.

[@jorgenkosche6902]

Yeah, that is one usage I see too, with ChatGPT I can learn new stuff better and deeper than with the classical way (and to be clear, I can still read documentation and do tutorials and do let ChatGPT generate code and explain it to me on top). For coding itself: I like to understand all code, so that I can maintain it. So I use ChatGPT kinda as a partner in Pair Programming. One that read every book and all the code on Github, but has little experience in doing bugs and fixing them. I don't use the AI as unsupervised coder.

[@daedalus5070]

This thread is a common form of bad Indian marketing. Seen similar for years as a PM, companies offering services like "build your app in 1 week". They pay some fairly inexperienced devs in India and you get something back that looks like the design but they wont give you source code or when you go through it they are just hiding errors etc lol. Everytime we used them, one of our engineers had to fix ~30% of the whole project anyway. Use AI to help you understand something you don't, then make notes and write it yourself. Still stuck, ask GPT again or ask it to write a general implementation and massage it yourself. Devs in third world countries have no shame in getting it to write everything, slap it together and then hide anything bad for a cheap price.

[@sreeramambalam5041]

It is great for learning theory concepts in programming. I have been learning the networking protocols through free version of chatgpt which made me learn so quickly i can ask it any stupid questions which i fear asking others(this is real thing among many people)

[@JohnBryant-ng3xz]

I love this video prime, thank you so much for making this. I’ve been thinking similar things for a long time and am really worried about everyone entering the industry. I think the hype and claims around AI are being blown way out of proportion, and I think that’s mostly because of the marketing behind it. There are a million articles and videos going around it saying things like it’s going to take our jobs, and they are all blowing up because they light up the fear center in our brain. We click them over and over again because they present a direct threat to our livelihood. But if you have any real experience in industry you’ll quickly realize these tools are not at all a replacement. I find that sometimes they surprise me in what they can generate, but most of the time using them feels like I am just correcting a bot which is not an enjoyable way to work. LLMs are fundamentally token predictors. They predict the next token based on their training data. The main thing that makes them useful is their training data. Anything anyone tells you otherwise is marketing. LLMs can’t strategize, they have no conceptual abilities, they don’t have any mental models or abstract reasoning capabilities. That is not a replacement for a programmer where our entire job is dealing with mental models and abstraction.

[@anonapache]

I use Jippidy 4 with plugins (both nearly since release) and i have to say, i use it really often as an advanced search engine to gain knowledge faster, then i read all links it used to refine the knowledge. For getting a first prototype (aka. spaghetti code) i use it also, but more as a type of pair programming. When spaghetti code works, i also refactor the whole garbage with Jippidy and tell it what paradigms to use. This works for me and i am gaining speed out of it. The things where it fails or i don't use it at are the overall picture/architecture of a program and the small but highly complex things (like how do i have to set the types or in more general the message to an dbus interface). But this areas where Jippidy fails, are the parts that i really enjoy the most! Because of this experience i am not longer feared of AI taking over my job, but am grateful that this tool assists and completes my skills. If i had to search through all the stuff via search engine and filter out crap, i would easily spend 10x more time. I get easily overwhelmed by many information at once and Jippidy filters it all for me.

[@k98killer]

I think that to fully evaluate this case study, we would need to see the figma designs and the project specifications.

[@TheMagnus156]

My take about chat GPT and AI overall is that it's a very good tool for learning the basics for an example if you want to do something in new language, GPT can kind of translate your ideas how you did them in other language to new one. But that means you need to know how to code already at least in something and it can also help you with very easy tasks. If you need to improve a large project the thing is useless. First of all it doesn't always write code correct and secondly it can never understand the business logic behind your app. But I do use these AI tools a lot to improve myself because it's basicly a fast lookup for documentation and it can even do examples for functions, data structures and give you some idea how to use them. If you are using these tools for your large scale app and just copy paste the code, Id be very worried about it.

[@FusionReflex]

I would not underestimate the power of LLMs, I have been using GPT from day one, and while it is not the best at doing straight up code, it's really good at boilerplate code, especially for new frameworks / packages that you don't know how to use yet, in order to get you started. I was able to create a chord generation AI in 2 weeks from scratch, scraping, model building, training and deployment, all with the help of GPT, however GPT won't be able to do the work for you, it's much more powerful when you have domain knowladge and can spoonfeed info into the prompt. Like for this project I already had a lot of AI experiance and I have extensive music theory / music production skills. This said I highly doubt LLM's will be able to replace programmers in the next couple of years, they are really good at sovling "small" bite-sized problems but when you add the context of an entire code base they quickly fall apart due to memmory constraints along with the complexity of larger code bases. T.L.D.R learn to use LLM's to speed up your workflow or get left behind.

[@h3rteby]

You completely skipped the other half of it though, the no-code. I'm a dev with 8 years of experience and I'm somewhat of a believer in it. So many of the typical relatively simple form-heavy bespoke "business apps" could be done faster and more reliably with "no-code" systems. I have a lot of respect of Excel as well.

[@mk3suprafy]

Its scope. You can only have it do one small piece at a time, currently, you have to guide it and finish things out but it is great for refactoring help and different perspective.

[@hld3738]

I use GPT to give me some ideas for things when I was stumped. There was one problem I had and it kept giving me things that would never work. The funny thing was I would tell it that it doesn't work and give it any error I would get, and it would explain to me why it doesn't work. In the end I had to find the answer myself, but it was interesting. I was really worried hearing people talk about how much better each update was. After using it for a while I think it is helpful, like a Google upgrade. I also imagine there is going to be some, probably not insignificant, diminishing returns for for future updates.

[@MichaelLazarski]

how does chat gpt write an app in a no code env? Can it drag and drop now ? Also whats with the 139 vs 20 on server costs? How does this scale ?

[@jjpp1993]

As a data scientist it is very helpful for simple helper functions that do regex and some preprocessing tasks. But it is not a sr developer in the sense that you can blindtrust whatever it outputs, you have to make sure it works, not only in an IO basis, but also in an algorithmic way.

[@LiveType]

Your experience very closely matches mine. The illusion of massively increased velocity. My first experience with gpt-4 the day it came out was pasting in ~2k lines of C code from a bunch of different files to try to identify a bug and it found it and fixed it when I couldn't. At least nowhere close to as fast. I was speechless. It was the first time I have ever even remotely felt "threatened" by a new tool coming out. Now granted there was a new subtle bug introduced that made a different function stop working, but gpt-4 also fixed that once it was discovered. Afterwards though, just like how I now only allow copilot to complete a single line and absolutely no more, I now only let gpt-3.5/4 write boilerplate that essentially avoids me a few google searches for documentation/stackoverflow after getting seriously seriously bit in the ass by a subtle architecture problems it introduced right off the bat. Required a full rewrite of 6 different files just like you said, that gpt-4 could only really mildly speed up. Now part of this is likely user error. "You're using it wrong" and all that. I have gotten significantly better since then, but the hesitancy to trust it to write large chunks of code very much still exists. GPT-4 is a script kiddy that only about 80% of the time saves you google searches, but increases velocity by 3-5x making you think it's this unbelievable tool that will replace people (GPT-4 won't but future version very likely will reduce the total need for developers to create something) when very real limitations exist that are very easy to miss in the moment. Overall, after my first usage of it on a rather large project, my conclusion was that it won't really "replace developers" but it will make the amount of "stuff" being made out there increase by 20x with increasingly large and unmaintainable code bases created by 1 or 2 people. This is the future I see. Is that a good thing? Hard to say, but more cool stuff is always welcome.

[@mattymerr701]

>100% test coverage The test coverage: return true;

[@animaai_mai]

anything under 300 lines and you can get away with a proompt and copy paste but if you get into more complex things you have to be very descriptive and already understand what you want to do. if you are a beginner that ends up being a brick wall. Its good to save stuff in a vector and get gippety to review it though - embeddings are the best thing ever.

[@behrad9712]

Thank you so much!🙏

[@bradyfractal6653]

Chat GPT is trash once a problem is non trivial. 0% chance it can make a change that doesn’t break 10 things in a 100k loc repo. Context window limitations and pure attention. It can hardly handle multiple files or variables communicating across systems. We will need an entirely new paradigm for it to be able to be even a little competent at what I do.

[@ShiloBuff]

This is such a good watch. I am still worried for the next 10 years and think its very possible for AI to take over my software development job. But I do think experience is a huge factor. I just worried I will need experience in "creating AI" just to keep the job I want. But just like Copilot, its just a extra hand to increase productivity. But that may be a whole body in the future.

[@tom_stephen]

I'm very happy that I'm also an artist beside being a programmer. It hit me way earlier how awful to work with AI is, and while GPT isn't as flawed as image generators (which could be compared to binary executables generators, totally useless), it definitely hits the same issues. It deprives people from good mindset and will to learn, and unlike vis-coding tools or Python, doesn't let you get a great snippet of what's lying under it, but rather gives you that magic feeling which leaves you with literally nothing. I won't say that it never helped me, but from all times I've used it, it was useful maybe for 10% of what I asked it, and the most I've taken out of using AI was actually as a "rubber duck talking" scenario. So something I could've done with literally any substitute. And how much it tempts to come back to get some short solution, it reminds me of chatroulettes, where you get the same boring people over and over again, but you hope something changes with next iteration. Pro-tip: it never does, so stop it.

[@T1Oracle]

These companies don't care if the AI can't do it as well, they just see the price tag and start firing.

[@krzmaciek6010]

And maintenance costs are 60-80% of project expenses.

[@landscapesandmotion]

So elixir has doc comments that can generate tests based on inputs and outputs. It would be awesome for AI to look at the docs comments for each function and then build out tests and then do some fuzzing on inputs. That would be a huge time saver.

[@Verssales]

To be honest the market will fix it self, as prime and chat said, in the short term it's going to be chepar at long term it's going to be expensive. Most companies that have a long term view probably will still search for code and archtect guys and not someone that now how to make questions. From personal experiencie, I already worked on projects that were brought to our company because the original company after some time even they weren't able to understand their code and add new features, so imagine this scenario with a bunch of AI minions that can't remember what they added to the code base. This will, probably create a market for experienced programmer companies where they solly porpuse is to fix this AI generated projects.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

likely

[@DNA912]

oh yea. I use it for documentation / learning. My prompts are usually something like "I'm developing a 'X' in the language/framework 'Y', and I need to do 'Z'. What tools or methods could I use to achieve this?" then after I get some alternative I ask it more or I start googling for more robust documentation. I mainly use it to point me in the right direction.

[@carlossoriano4010]

It’s a learning tool more than anything. You have to use it to accelerate the expansion, organization and optimization of your knowledge base.

[@unitedstatesofpostamerica7559]

I’ve used ChatGPT at my job. I think it does two things well generates text and catches bugs in existing code. For new code I haven’t had much luck, it doesn’t understand your system or environment and is also simply wrong in many cases.

[@lennysmileyface]

I like using it to read documentation or make quick GUI programs.

[@d3vilm4ster]

Thank you!

I’m using ChatGPT for stuff that I don’t yet understand, and to ask questions, ask for possible improvements, ask it to rewrite with different patterns for comparisons, and bounce ideas. Not really for writing code.

[@Kinggenton]

but i dooo love it for giving me the documentation help !!!! i love it its speeds my productivity

[@LuckyPkerz]

3 years? Nah. 10-15 years? Yep. Gentlemen, start preparing right now.

[@marcelsantee1809]

Prepare how?

[@capsey_]

When I first used ChatGPT, I used it a lot and it seemed very useful. Now, I often write prompt, see the beginning of the answer, slightly rewrite it, read the answer and then go to google to find actual answer

[@Phasma6969]

My eyes feel so greasy whenever I see an article and they're actually trying to sell something.

[@patrickcameron2950]

I think AI will be amazing at education and onboarding. I'd love it if my company used a private AI to index our code base so I could ask it questions about structure.

[@bartech101]

I've seen this about week ago and had exactly same thought. Conflict of interest.

[@bartech101]

And I also believe Hamid and Alex do not exists, as this fake project.

[@thegamingfrontier3079]

It occurred to me with everyone having to alter prompts to get the correct code could've been more effectively used to train a junior dev who would actually learn from the mistakes and improve overall over time.

[@Cursed_Crystal]

I have used chatgpt but its only for examples of thing and it describing that examples for me so i can know how to write that thing. I have seen my colleagues at university use it to write entire apps but i would like to know how to write something instead of using gpt to create entire thing while knowing less. Im also using it to create roadmaps and to help with language learning

[@mikapeltokorpi7671]

Before today I would have said, that Alex would have job in the future. But you have to adapt. Which means using generative models cleverly. You can't 100% skip Copilot or similar tools, but you have to verify the code, still. At the same time 100% code coverage is (always) a hyperbole. And you have to verify the tests, too.

[@hakuna_matata_hakuna]

but also to play the devil's advocate , we had a botcamp where we startdcoff with C an they gave us a project to implement an interpreter after teaching us pointers and loops , we were all clueless we could barely get a starting point , if it were today i would have done that project because of how useful it canbbe at initial boilerplate and unblocking when you eventually hit a wall

[@rhetttheehitman9771]

Remember when blockchain was supposed to "replace money" and there were so many stories about the ease of sending money with the blockchain? In the end it was nothing but people PAMPING and shilling their bags. Let's talk about rug pulls: When there's a bug with the A.I-generated code that is draining a company for $10k/minute (yes, that's a real rate/number) but the A.I is saying that the logic is good and that there are no errors, have fun with the costs. I have a feeling that companies who are going to go all in on A.I like this are going to be caught holding the bag the same way. Those A.I pump and dumps are going to be legendary. That being said, this is why getting that CS degree was 100% worth the effort because not only does it give that overall flexibility to jump in and out of domains within the field (for example it's closer to getting an MS for machine learning). It overall looks good to employers from other fields (and maybe convince them you can do machine learning stuff because you took some classes).

[@TheNewton]

Horrible analogy, the difference is this is having ACTUAL market effects and everyday people are getting exposed to it and can directly interact with. LLMs based tools are being put directly into windows. This is a thing that is happening for good or ill. "Let's talk about rug pulls: When there's a bug with the A.I-generated code that is" Either regulation, or mandatory code-audits of generated code will probably be a norm. And that's just a money example, wait till a scenario that causes death, or a Hyatt-regency level of disaster now that's gonna be wild.

[@abadvany]

Thanks for sharing :) Maybe ill take time to address some of the raised points on twitter!

[@willloving6014]

Gpt is the invention of the screwdriver or power drill for the computer scientist, not replacing anybody but dramatically improving efficiency imo.

[@GrimClock]

I think what I’ve realized is that we can only imagine this stuff in our current economic output. I think if anything the bar for what software should be able to do will rise and then we would still need devs.

[@brandenpalmer6741]

Anyone notice how Dev A was from a lower COL country and lower pay tier, while Dev B was from a higher COL country and higher pay tier?

[@orkfarseer8965]

The people spouting this stuff always fall into one of two categories: They know almost nothing about programming OR They have a vested interest in the success of their "AI" tool Also the task they gave them was "make a front-end UI based on this figma design"? When you get to 19 years experience in the software industry, why would you be making React websites lol.

[@IvanRandomDude]

Well, if you were FE developer for 18 years I don't see what else you can do in 19th year? xD

[@orkfarseer8965]

@@IvanRandomDude How is it possible to be a software developer for 19 years and only do front-end?

[@rookie549]

@@orkfarseer8965 Maybe they enjoy front-end development?

[@user-fr2fm3ri3w]

@@orkfarseer8965 Dude it’s not a progress thing it’s a specialization thing. It’s like asking how can an architect be an architect for 20 years and not home an engineer.

[@boggledeggnoggler5472]

If you are comfortable programming, chatgpt is amazing at helping with languages you're not familiar with. I was able to make a program in applescript to open files in vim in 15 minutes. Doing the same by reading applescript would have taken longer and been more effort, so i probably just wouldnt have done it

[@dym8408]

What happened to the other video released today?

[@lmollea]

Agree with your points (the keyword in the tweet was "all looked working at first glance" - did they do a whole round of acceptance testing?). Few points I am worried about: - as you said, ChatGPT robs you of experience. Let's say that is good as a very junior developer. So it'll be hard to justify training some junior developers into seniors, because it takes a few years "while ChatGPT is effective immediately". I already hear some stupid manager reasoning this way - there's no chance, we MUST see some spectacular failings on this front. Hope it's not going to be on planes or medical equipment. - AI generated code generally has understanding of the _programming_ language, not of the business rules behind them. You need to spec very carefully and - as you said - you're mostly inclined to throw away the code and rewrite. Am expecting maintenance to shoot through the roof. First iteration is cheaper, because you build from scratch, each iteration will cost the same (provided we don't get evolution in this sense). - AI generates "statistically average code". Not "good code". Not sure this is really true, but my worry stands. Less efficiency (more hardware and consumption), less security, less resiliency. - How do you operate a system that no one understand its code? - Good engineering skills is generally paired with good ability to translate problems into code. Or put it in another way - describing the problem. You probably get where I'm going. We'll also get a lot of bad engineer boasting that with AI they can be fast (and being hired for that), then not being able to deliver because they do not have a good skill in dissecting problems properly.

[@pif5023]

My direct experience so far has been a bit lackluster. I have activated Copilot but my company required turning off the automatic suggestion. Turns out I never felt the need to hit it for a suggestion. When I code I already know what to write. Haven’t tried ChatGPT though. I would probably use that more but it still depends on how it integrates into my code design flow. As of now I can’t feel the need and I have to go out of my way to use it. I naturally towards Model Driven Designs and for those you just need to think better not faster. I don’t need complex algorithm but better designed data structures and data flows that are closer to the business problem space. Can ChatGPT do this? I am scared though that my company will tag me as resistant to the tech.

[@TheNewton]

Just use it to generate alternative approaches and the tests to go with them.

[@darkdudironaji]

Wasn't this posted last week?

[@saikiranj807]

No Code => No Tests => 100 % Test Coverage, check mate

[@grug_smash_keyboard]

I agree with the points you brought up here, but what code generating tools bring to the table is that they decrease the cost (money and time) to rewrite code to so absurdly low that it begs the question should we even spend time thinking about developing extensible, maintainable software, since in the future you can just scrap off the old one and generate a new version. Granted, whatever we have right now is not on par with human developers in terms of code quality and addressing issues, but this will change down the road and its too early to decide if it will replace developers or not. I believe that very smart people (or even the AI itself) are going to capitalise on this and they will come up with new industrial practices, new paradigms, new tools and new languages that outperform whatever we have now. Lastly, you dont need AI to decimate the demand of developers for the claim 'AI will replace human developers' to be true. Its like asking if JS had replaced PHP, it certainly didn't, but who else is using PHP?

[@kevinkkirimii]

chatgpt is good at giving hints or correcting buggy code (not all the time) or generate boiler plate code however you still have to do the coding to get what you really want unless you don't care.

[@nathanpotter1334]

This take on Jippity is so spot on 😆

[@shadamethyst1258]

9:40 okay this is a very interesting thing to think about Hamid's story. How will they ever debug it? How will they ever fix it? Especially with a full team that does nothing but generating code. Imagine them typing "Please remove the security vulnerability XYZ in this code" and GPT not removing it or making it worse. That'll be fun. You can tip your security researcher friends to take a closer look at this guy's software. They'll have a field day :)

[@jwbonnett]

I've used it, I find myself correcting and refactoring the hole thing all the time! But as he works for an agency, they just want products, with not much put into them. It's the same in other industry, a lawyer got in big trouble for not checking what GPT said.

[@Rockyzach88]

ChatGPT is not going to rob you of your experience if you are using it to augment your experience. Acting like it's an alien disease to the typical programming experience is reactionary. You literally mentioned documentation. ChatGPT is great for learning about programming, how a function works, why a pattern is interesting, etc. Yes, thinking it should just give you the answers to your code is insane and stupid, but it has great value for understanding computer science, programming, and software engineering. It's a tool that if you so please, can be learned. I personally think it is a great tool as someone learning right now.

[@jkennethking]

The program ChatGPT generates cannot be incorrect by definition if you can't write a precise specification. Natural language isn't precise enough for many programming tasks.

[@peter8261]

Nobody comes with receipts on Twitter. Where is this project being hosted? Can we see it? Can we experiment with it and analyze it to see if it really was done as well as we're being told? Is the project future-proofed in any way? Like, there are so so so so so many things that are of mission-critical importance here that are just being completely brushed under the rug. I do not know how Prime manages to have the patience to deal with this insanity and read these posts. He's such a better man than I am.

[@ms4k_]

Its similar to Google i think, instead of getting books on web foundation to learn how to center a div you just.. Google it. And now instead of looking for a video tutorial on youtube you ask some chatbot to do the web scaping for you, shortening the filtering process to get to where you need. Without much practice the content of the book would just leaves your head anyway as well as googling the result of something. Learning how to google, or in this case how to prompt is the same thing as learning how to google and extract necessary information from the pages long docunent with 20 links or so for some similar-named stuffs, or the 2 hour long youtube video explaining it that get to the point mid way through. With some improvements it would get even better along with adoption then it will become essentially, new Google.

[@adambickford8720]

We could 'scaffold' a full crud site from a db schema 20 years ago with ruby on rails (or generate the db from the objects). And yet, its not even really a player these days despite that 'productivity'.

[@nickwoodward819]

I have now perfected sitting with my ear below my shoulder. My back thanks you.

[@JoePetrakovich]

I've had the same experience with trying to use gpt. Taking the same amount of time to read and do it myself would turn out better and I'd have a better grasp of what's going on.

[@demolazer]

It seems to me that now is the perfect time to embark on a software dev career. The senior people in 10-20 years are going to be nore valuable. I believe the most that will happen any time soon is that software is built with smaller teams as AI generates much of the grunt work.

[@DudeWatIsThis]

2:16 Perfect timing

[@raul_ribeiro_bonifacio]

I'm not afraid of it taking my job. I'm afraid of people forcing me to use it when I know It's bad.

[@kattoman7548]

how Hamid can support the code when it crashes?

[@wizardDESTRU]

i use it when i am willing to wait on his response on something knew i dont know much yet, research and then it finds me some doc and hopefully gets the links right....

[@patgarner]

good talk