OpenAI has hired an army of contractors to make basic coding obsolete
semafor.com
semafor.com
For the sake of argument, let's say they succeed at this. They won't, but let's say they do. What does that mean?
It means that instead of specifying the function of software precisely via programming languages developed over many decades of study, thought, and research, you get to specify the function of the software in English, the shittiest programming language I could possibly imagine. If you'd rather build software in English than in a programming language, then you don't really want to build software at all.
Good luck with that.
To be clear, 99.99% of the market for the results of software does not, in fact, "want to build software at all".
Normals don't want to build an app, they want "an app for that" and can't find one. Those are very different wants.
Sounds as though OpenAI is going after the more common want. If they succeed, they won't need luck.
// Effectively, an OpenAI "ProdGPT" could play PdM (product manager), with immediate build/release iterations, which help the person wanting an app iteratively clarify their thoughts (especially the "I'll know it when I see it" types. Now the user could just converse and converge from skeleton concept to "that's it!" in one ProdGPT convo, because the iteration loop is fast. The conversation to figure out what someone wants is the hard part, success would shorten that loop.
"You will get exactly what you wish for" --warning label on the lamp.
AI ToS: offload liability and responsibility on humans proferring their free will to silicon genies.
How did it become acceptable to use such vile "us and them" language in polite conversation?
And then you guys cry foul when these "Normals" cut your job. You'll think it's because of their newfound reliance on AI, but in reality, it's just that you're just a horrible person to work with compared to an AI model.
Getting API arguments to line up is accidental complexity that might be automated.
Understanding business processes and how to construct systems to connect people and electronic systems in a way that makes sense is still a human endeavor.
> If you'd rather build software in English than in a programming language, then you don't really want to build software at all.
Ultimately, the end result is all that most people care about.
I'd bet a lot of money you're wrong about this. It's conceived mostly in some non-verbal thought-like pseudo-language inside someone's brain, and then it's poorly translated into English. It's fleshed out in code. That's when the real details were figured out. Maybe not while actually typing in code -- if very experienced programmers were involved, they fleshed it out using the mental models they learned from their years of programming, in their head, and then they poorly translated that to English, and then they sat down and typed it correctly again without English being involved.
Then again, not everyone is going to follow the same process.
Writing code is low level plebian work. I can convey thousands of lines of functions in a handful of sentences of plain English describing a task or complex high level function.
"Writing down code" is, perhaps, plebian work. Understanding a problem as expressed by humans and being able to connect that to the code to write, though, is where the real work is. Based on my experiences with ChatGPT and Copilot, AI isn't there yet. It's good at the plebian work, which is great, but it's hot garbage at the actually difficult thing.
Amateur, I can do much better. "Build a search engine that's better than Google at everything". Voila, the AI will start spinning up and come back with a very large, very complex system, and all it took was ten words.
No, you can't. Your speech will not cover every edge case; it will not cover exactly how data flows through the system; it will not specify the appropriate data structures and algorithms to use; it will be full of holes and inconsistencies. How do I know this? Because if you could say it in English to that level, then you could simply type it in a programming language even more easily.
Maybe it would take me a week to weed through your imprecise exposition to try to understand what you're actually trying to do, but it certainly does not take a week to type code; typing takes maybe 5% to 10% of my time. About 70% of my time is spent fleshing out the actual precise problem to solve, with the remaining 20% to 25% spent coming up with a good solution to that problem. Your 8-hour speech would not even precisely specify the problem you're trying to solve.
> Writing code is low level plebian work. I can convey thousands of lines of functions in a handful of sentences of plain English describing a task or complex high level function.
If a handful of plain-English sentences result in thousands of lines of code, either those plain-English sentences were unhelpful nonsense like "make me Facebook for dogs", or your code is massively over-complicated.
Honestly what I'm hearing from you is "I don't know how to write code". That's OK. What's not OK is turning your nose up at those people who actually do. You sound like one of those fresh MBA "idea guys" who has a "billion dollar idea" and just need someone to type the code for you for a generous 20%.
Just imagine someone saying "I could easily write a novel if I wanted to, but I'm not going to type it, because typing is for plebs. I'm an ideas man. I'll say what happens in the story, and I'll get some peon to actually type it into a novel." The person who says that is not "too good to be an author", they are a wannabe-author.
The thing is I don't see why ai couldn't do all that too. If it has decisions to be made that affect the outcome it can prompt me for input on them. Writing is slow. Not sure why I would bother with it tho if I can bang through the whole process by interacting at a concept/theory level instead.
I look at AI like a new compiler. I mean I could write machine level assembly and if I was a wizard who knew it in and out I'm sure it would be super efficient. But we basically don't do that for 99% of cases, we write in some other language and we use a compiler. AI is like a compiler for my plain ass basic bish English to code. Might be a bit rough round the edges now but I'm sure it'll be suitable for the vast majority of coding in a very short amount of time.
I say this as someone who has looked at AI generated code and was not impressed though, so this is probably still a long way off.
Another problem that I'm personally more concerned about is that this way of coding will allow for so many security flaws to be built into the code. Even if it builds something that matches your expectations for the prompt, what's stopping it from generating something vulnerable to attacks that leak all your users' data? Humans already struggle enough with this, and we're feeding all our flawed codebases into these models.
Would your view change if the language wasn't English? German or Mandarin or something?
We're not talking about millions of lines of code anymore, that'll be hundreds of billions of lines of code.
Then you'll get private cloud AIs that solve enterprise-scale AI spaghetti code for an enterprise budget...
Some consultant will to come in to tame the AI because employees just kept stacking more and more and more and more code on top of itself to add new features. Features interact with one another and behaviour of older code changes. You end up with some kind incomprehensible singularity spaghetti.
Will be fun to be an AI-driven product maintainer in the future!
Vertical integration.
it's called infosys/accenture/...
OpenAI could become a fully automated business ouroboros.
For me, I love engineering, and I'm very experienced at it. But I use Copilot/ChatGPT constantly now, every single day, for writing code that I know how to do, but is very "grunt" level code that I'd rather not have to spend time writing.
It's incredibly solid at that! I would not go back to not having this tech. I would happily pay $200+/month for access without blinking. It saves me much more than that in an hourly rate. Not because the code it's writing is hard code that actually would take me hours to write in theory. But because, as a human, I'm going to take a lot longer to write that simple code because I really don't want to have to do it. It's below my pay-grade. I'd rather spend my time on the more interesting / difficult code.
I fully believe this effort will work.
Person> I need to find files on my computer I don't need delete them all.
AI> sudo rm -rf
Person -- Crap what is going on with my computer. Lets unplug it. Plugged back in. Now it won't turn on... Gotta call IT support now.
Most of programming is just typing stuff you already know. If there is a machine that will do that for me, my god.