the big thing to me is programming isn't hard
I've worked on adtech, crypto, fintech, gamedev, startup founder, BigCo. Not once was programming something that was a time sink.
Makes me feel like GPT is marketing to the incompetent or something.
I've worked on adtech, crypto, fintech, gamedev, startup founder, BigCo. Not once was programming something that was a time sink.
Makes me feel like GPT is marketing to the incompetent or something.
Absolutely. The common constant I can see in people who are really blown away by GPT's performance at [task] is that they are bad at [task].
Programmers who describe their job as copying from StackOverflow think it's great at coding. People who don't read fiction think it's great at writing fiction, and so on.
But it's certainly far better than humans who are not skilled at those tasks, and that is what I find to be very impressive. I just didn't realise that these models could be this good, and they're not even as good as they will be.
I guess if you were expecting something that's going to be as good as those who are skilled in a particular field, you'll be unimpressed -- but I wasn't even expecting mediocrity.
I'm saying that most people I see who are impressed by it for any given task are people who are not well-equipped to judge performance on that task.
Programming is generally not hard. Producing 5x - 10x as much programming output at the same quality is quite hard. And keeping the most interesting 10% for yourself while offloading the 90% that is basically just typing? That’s what people are excited about.
Can you please expound on that? Do you mean not hard as in comparison to something else?
No it doesn't, there is a lot of simple "gluing APIs together" to do in all of those. The hard part then is figuring out what you want to do, not getting the code to do it.
I did a startup for years and the backend was all boring Golang talking to Postgres. I am confident that if GPT had produced identical code it would've been worse. Because shit hit the fan many times due to misunderstandings or other things that cause bugs. Because I wrote the bugs, I was able to fix them. Making coding more of a blackbox and treating coding as menial labor would have definitely caused us to lose customers and miss important deadlines.
Maybe the next way to move the goalposts is "GPT will debug for you someday and be trained on the entire transitive closure of your dependencies."
That sort of thing could actually be useful as a sort of hint, but it isn't replacing devs any more than ripgrep did. To be honest, ripgrep through the source of my deps is already highly efficient and points me to things often.
In fact, all the complicated software anecdotes I could give were things that ChatGPT wouldn't even touch. In the realm of design and scaling and fault tolerance and other such things.