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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

I think your parent is on to something: it won't be the programmers trusting GPT a little too much, it will be the PMs, and there won't be a programmer :-)

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I see an Idiocracy inspired future for programming.

People claim that AI can write code so they start firing programmers. Universities stop software engineering programs as there is no one taking the courses. People stop writing blogs or stackoverflow. Software engineers either move to other fields or start living offgrid. No new innovation or new line of code written by human.

Meanwhile, software quality get worse by each passing day and there’s no one to fix. AI poisons it’s own well by generating shitty code and now even simple tasks are taking 30 seconds. People say, “In the good old days, we used to get response in under 1 second”. Just like how they talk about cars and their durability in the good’ol days.

It seems like you're assuming that the only way for it to get better is more human-written code. Also, why would software quality get worse over time, as opposed to stagnating at worst? Attempting to use it for more complex applications?

There is already so far beyond enough data available online for an AI to be a super-human senior software engineer/architect/whatever. Because there's enough for the humans, and an AI can do it better in theory. It just needs to be a good enough model.

Barring the most extreme edge cases, it's never going to be worse than it is right now.

Yeah, but we don't have that kind of tech yet. When someone figures out how to build something that learns like a human does--where, even though all the books I ever read sucked, I am still a better programmer than any of those authors ever were and notably better than I was yesterday despite not reading anything new--then the world is going to change in a fundamental and potentially devastating way... but while that day might come literally tomorrow, it also isn't obvious it will ever come, and just because GPT exists doesn't imply it is going to happen. GPT is not that, though, and no matter how much data you throw at it it isn't going to become that without a fundamentally different architecture.

Because AI doesn’t have it’s own mind. It’s gonna put some bugs here and there, sooner or later, and then it’s gonna repeat that same thing everywhere, after enough iteration the bug will be so prominent that it’s gonna be a pain in the neck for user (also the premises of almost every AI bad Sci-fi movie/book). It’s a blackbox. It’s like infection spreading.

And because of the corp greed. Cheap solution will always triumph good solution, so I am pretty confident that they will remove the guardrails way sooner that they should. I mean Facebook literally fanned the flames in Myanmar[1] so my bet is on corp greed this time too.

1. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

The biggest difference between a beginner and a veteran is systematic problem solving. Software development has already been reduced to bashing libraries together like rocks... It still is very effective, but frustrating to the end user. If software development gets reduced to brute forcing a prompt until it starts to look like it's working, then we might as well call it a day and promote the users to eternal QA.

It's already becoming a strain to review ChatGPT code committed by others, who try to save time by using it instead of thinking for a moment and then coming up with a proper solution to a problem.

>>it will be the PMs

IMO PM's are the clueless bunch of the whole set up. Often they are just making up things as they go and making it right through 'authority'.

PM's remind of me of early days of Sudoku craze when people thought they can put in any numbers in any squares and then later on puzzle would automagically rearrange itself to help them win. Backtracking never clicked for such people.

Once you are beyond simple toy apps, and have to build large engineering artifacts in iterations and realise it can't be from scratch in every iteration. The real fun begins.

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