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Comment by ChrisRR | Hacker News Reader

You can't understand why software that can do in a fraction of a section what a human would do in hours would be valuable?

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ChrisRR--

I would counter this with:

- What value is it to your company to know that the developers who churn into and out of your company... while they're there, they actually know a section of your codebase quite well?

versus the alternative: the degree to which your devs know where your code lives or what it does is low, since they do not engage with it enough.

Sure, one could say: "AI will navigate our codebase for them".

But I think it becomes a bit of a slippery-slope, regarding the question of: "When/to what degree can really we take the developer out of the picture?"

Imagine being a developer, and no one on your team really knows how your product works.

Is AI building your product at that point then? Is that product actually going to exist & be funcitonal?

The software indeed has to do what I do, which is understanding my environment and mentating solutions that are somehow appropriate for either fixing or alleviating any one of the uncountable challenges said environment faces. I cannot even describe what I am doing, only that relatively small parts of the end-result are encoded into symbols called code.

This reminds me of what Bohr said to Oppenheimer - in the movie - when some doubt arose around his mathematical ability: "Algebra is like sheet music. The important thing isn't 'can you read music', it's 'can you hear it'. Can you hear the music, Robert?"

I'm very much wondering if GPT can hear the music, but time will tell if and to what degree this even matters.

But the real question is whether or not an LLM can let someone who can hear the music (they’re an expert in the context, the project, and the business environment) but who can’t read or write the sheet music (can’t code) will be able to make the computer do what it needs to do well enough using the LLM as a sort of person to machine translator to eliminate the need for a person to listen to the subject matter expert and write the code.

Well, in that example the musician makes music and a machine could transcribe it to sheet music. I can see that working and maybe it already does.

What would be the equivalent of “making music” in this case? Talking haphazardly about your business?

I can see this working if something like “making music” is possible without knowledge of said music. Which in actual music is quite possible because it is an intuitive art. Programming.. less so, but I never say never.

You're describing automation. I'm talking about a very specific subset of it: automatically generating human or (human readable) language.

So if the job is to generate articles, technical reports, presentations, emails, marketing materials are the task, then generating human-like text is automating that task.

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