Hacker News Reader

Comment by euos | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been programming since middle school. That would be 30 years. Nothing really changed much. C++ is incrementally more convenient but fundamentally the same. Code editors are same. Debugger are same. Shell is same.

I am certain in 30 years everything will still be the same.

View on HN

The way I write code was fundamentally altered in the last year by GPT4 and copilot. Try having GPT4 write your code, you won’t be so certain about the future of programming afterward I guarantee it.

I am the same, 35 years. I use GPT 4 every day now. It sure is handy. It speeds up some things. It is a time saver but it does not seem to be better than me. It is like an OK assistant.

I would agree, not a fundamental or radical improvement yet.

Will it be? I hope so.

GPT 4 does not produce code that I'm ready to accept. The time it takes to convince it to produce code that I'll accept significantly larger than the time it takes to write that code myself.

GPT 4 is fine for absolutely foreign tasks to me, like write a power shell script, because I know almost nothing about power shell. However those tasks are rare and I generally competent about things I need to do.

I have free Copilot due to my OSS work. This week I disabled it for C++ because it is chronically incapable to match brackets. I was wasting too much time fixing the messes.

I use it for TypeScript/React. But it’s just a more comprehensive code complete. Incremental.

Uh huh, try GPT4 and report back. It’s a generational leap above copilot. I use copilot to auto complete one liners and GPT4 to generate whole methods.

Other than 30 years ago you were writing a whole shitload more buffer/integer overflows. Hell, that's why we've written numerous languages since that point to ensure it's a hell of a lot harder to footgun yourself.

If coding hasn't change much in 30 years, it may mean you have not changed much in 30 years.

Process improved - version control, CI, unit testing. But not the tools. Clang is “recent” but it is still traditional CLI compiler.

I right fundamental software. Chromium, Node. It is good old, largely incremental, C++.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com