If you're learning to code now, using an LLM, who's to say that the LLMs won't improve faster than you do? In 10 years will there be a recognisable programming job for most people learning programming now? We're standing on a cliff watching the tide rise, wondering if it'll reach us. People learning programming are down in the sea, trying to climb up out of it.
Years ago taxi drivers actually needed to know their way around their local area. Then we got GPS and mapping apps, meaning Uber could exist and any random dude could be a taxi driver instantly. In future* the drivers will be unnecessary and the cars will be the drivers too. [*timeline 5-50 years]
In the early 2000s there were plenty of jobs for mediocre developers making websites for small companies. Now we've got Facebook, Squarespace & Shopify, that role is gone.
Lots of observations around here recently about how kids are less tech-savvy now, they know how to use appliances - not general purpose computers. Make stuff easy enough that anyone can do it, and nobody will know how it works.
Up till now software was mostly an arms race between competitors because of software’s low marginal cost and high utility. Now with ZIRP over and many of parts of the industry consolidating, I fear enshittification is a sign that the good times are over and we will now be milked to make up for all the profit lost the industrialists lost to the plebs.
If an inexperienced engineer asks for code and the LLM produces something that has sub-par performance, is overly complex, and botches various edge-cases, the engineer may not realise until years later if at all that they could have produced something much better.
Combined with the fact that there are plenty of things that mostly only junior engineers will ask about, and I think you have a problem.
That really hasn't been my experience with StackOverflow for the last 10 years.
That's the fundamental reason why there was such a falling out between Stack Overflow executives and the moderators.
People will say it was just the way they handled the interactions, which was part of it, but I don't believe there was any way to do it in a way that the users wouldn't hate.
Because the basic task for Stack Overflow IS to replace the users answering the questions with AI. They don't have a choice. Because now they are already competing with ChatGPT etc. doing exactly that.
It's true that taking away human answers from Stack Overflow will make it impossible for AI to answer many of those types of questions. But it will still retain fundamental knowledge and skills from other sources. And can be trained on its own debugging experiences as it gets deployed for building software. So although that presents a challenge, it's not insurmountable at all.
By going in that direction, I feel like they put the nail in the coffin. Why would I use their website when I can just ask ChatGPT directly?
I think they had one other option, which was to identify the fundamental limitations of LLMs, and find a way to demonstrate value over and above.
I don't believe there is any such fundamental limitation, especially when you look say two years down the road and don't limit yourself to language-only models or the AI models of today. Already GPT-4 has audio and image input.
Good human programmers today have better abilities and more current knowledge overall than GPT-4. But it's a matter of degree, and a matter of time.
What types of limitations do you suppose? And again, we have to anticipate that these technologies evolve rapidly. LLM is a misleading term in my opinion for a fundamentally multimodal model. And totally new types of models or model integrations will be likely be coming out over the next few years that will make current systems obsolete. Such as combining AlphaZero-type systems with language models.
I don't see the capacity for LLMs to perform novel and creative reasoning tasks. They're limited by virtue of being a pattern-matching system without the ability to make genuine causal or logical inferences.
I wrote here about my recent experiments with ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37583333
I'm vaugely interested to know how GPT4 deals with questions like these, but I'm not willing to pay to find out.
Anyway, it will only be a year or two before things like tree search over problems spaces are explicitly integrated into models or systems similar to this. Deep Mind may have already done something like that.