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Comment by benterix | Hacker News Reader

> I've found that I haven't written a line of code in weeks

Which is great until your next job interview. Really, it's tempting in the short run but I made a conscious decision to do certain tasks manually only so that I don't lose my basic skills.

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ChatGPT voice interface plugged into the audio stream, with the prompt:

- I need you to assist me during a programming interview, you will be listening to two people, the interviewer and me. When the interviewer asks a question, I'd like you to feed me lines that seem realistic for an interview where I'm nervous, don't give me a full blown answer right away. Be very succinct. If I think you misunderstood something, I will mention the key phrase "I'm nervous today and had too much coffee". In this situation, remember I'm the one that will say the phrase, and it might be because you've mistaken me by the interviewer and I want you to "reset". If I want you to dig deeper than what you've provided me with, I'll say the key phrase "Let's dig deeper now". If I think you've hallucinated and want you to try again, I'll say "This might be wrong, let me think for just a minute please". Remember, other than these key phrases, I'll only be talking to the interviewer, not you.

On a second screen of some sort. Other than that, interviewers will just have to accept that nobody will be doing the job without these sort of assistants from now on anyway. As an interviewer I let candidates consult online docs for specific things already because they'll have access to Google during the job, this is just an extension of that.

This made me laugh. I can't deny it isn't already happening. But wow people work so hard to avoid working hard.

And I wrote this as a knee-jerk reaction after reading the parent, I imagine people will be putting way more effort if it can get them a great job. And to be honest, if they can fool you, they can most likely do the job as well. Most of the industry tests at a higher skill level than what they actually require on the day to day anyway.

It's almost inspiring, isn't it?

It's not about avoiding hard work - the audience on HN skews wealthy due to heavy representation of skilled devs in their 30s+, but the average person does not earn anything close to FAANG salaries. Even most devs in general don't earn like that. The interview process being fairly well understood in general, any advantage that can possibly get a person from $60k/year to generationally-life-changing $300k/year will be used eventually.

I think the point is to avoid pointless hard work.

I recently interviewed a number of people about their SQL skills. The format I used was to share two queries with them a couple days ahead of time in a google doc, and tell them I will ask them questions about those queries during the interview.

Out of maybe twenty people I interviewed this way, only three of them pointed out that one of the queries had a failing error in it. It was something any LLM would immediately point out.

Beyond that: the first question I asked was: "What does this query do, what does it return?" I got responses ranging from people who literally read the query back to me word by word, giving the most shallow and direct explanation of what each bit did step-by-step, to people who clearly summarized what the query did in high-level, abstract terms, as you might describe what you want to accomplish before you write the query.

I don't think anyone did something with ChatGPT live, but maybe?

Not everyone is doing coding interviews. Some might struggle with a particular language due to lack of muscle memory, but can dictate the logic in pseudocode and can avoid pitfalls inferred from past experience. This sort of workflow is compatible with LLMs, assuming a sufficient background (otherwise one can't recognize when the output diverges from your intent).

I personally treat the LLM as a rubber duck. Often I reject its output. In other cases, I can accept it and refactor it into something even better. The name of the game is augmentation.

I sometimes get the idea from statements like this - and HN's focus on interviewing in general - that people are switching jobs a dozen times a year or something. How often are most people switching jobs? I've had 5 jobs in the last 20 years.

I'm old, and well-paid for my geographic region (but for various mostly stupid reasons utterly broke). No amount of value created (at least, for my skill level) will protect me from ageism and/or budget cuts.

This. I’ve been using elixir for ~6 months (guided by Claude) and probably couldn’t solve fizz buzz at a whiteboard without making a syntax error. Eek.

Who cares? If I'm hiring you to make a product, I care that the higher order logic is correct, that the requirements are all catered for, and that the code does reasonable things in all cases. Things I don't care about are FizzBuzz, programming on whiteboards, and not making syntax errors.

This is how companies fail. 5 years down the line no one is able to change anything in the system because it's so poorly architected (by being a bunch of Claude copypastes cobbled together) that it takes one month to do a one-day task (if it's even possible).

I guess we should change our hiring practices to optimize for FizzBuzz and getting all the syntax right first try.

I can see how you got that impression from my comment (if you ignore how I mentioned architecture), so let me elaborate:

It's the opposite. FizzBuzz and getting the syntax right is what LLMs are good at... but there's so much more nuance at being experienced with a language/framework/library/domain which senior engineers understand and LLMs don't.

Being able to write Elixir assisted by an LLM does not mean you can produce proper architecture and abstractions even if the high level ideas are right. It's the tacit knowledge and second-order thinking that you should hire for.

But the thing is, if someone cannot write Elixir without syntax errors unless using an LLM, well, that's a extremely good proxy that they don't know the ins and outs of the language, ecosystem, best practices... Years of tacit knowledge that LLMs fail to use because they're trained on a huge number of tutorial and entry-level code ridden with the wrong abstractions.

The only code worse than one that doesn't work is one that kinda works unless your requirements change ever so slightly. That's a liability and you will pay it with interests.

To give a concrete example: I am very experienced with React. Very. A lot. The code that LLMs write for it is horrid, bug-ridden, inflexible and often misuses its footgun-y APIs like `useEffect` like a junior fresh out of a boot camp would, directly contradicting the known best practices for maintainable (and often even just "correct") code. But yeah it superficially solves the problem. Kinda. But good luck when the system needs to evolve. If it cannot do proper code that's <500 lines how do you expect it to deal with massive systems that need to scale to 10s of KLOC across an ever-growing twine?

But management will be happy because the feature shipped and time to market was low... until you can no longer ship anything new and you go out of business.

Ah, sorry, I read your comment as disagreeing with me, now I see it's the opposite. Exactly, LLMs (for now) are good at writing low-level code, but we need someone to work on architecture.

I had an idea the other day of an LLM system that would start from a basic architecture of an app, and would zoom down and down on components until it wrote the entire codebase, module by module. I'll try that, it sounds promising.

You need to prep for job interviews anyway. I'd rather spend the majority of my time being productive.

Job interview? You might be surprised at the number of us who don’t code for a job.

I'd bet most people on this forum program professionally.

I would take that bet.

Me too.

Somebody tested people on Hacker News to evaluate programming competency.

This was part of a larger evaluation comparing the Hacker News population to people on Reddit programming subreddits.

Here is a very heated discussion of the result:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293522

It appears that Hacker News is perhaps NOT populated by the programming elite. In contrast, there are real wizards on Reddit.

Surprising, I know.

Not surprising given how bad the takes here are and how many of the users here are dumb kids right out of college who are aspiring founders.

Unnecessarily negative. Maybe rethink it.

Not surprised there would be a “heated” discussion as a result of this one link, that measured only those who engaged it, and how? I opened the link, hit Submit just to see what would happen… now the percentage of HN users who are competent programmers is even fewer than before, by that metric.

I’ve made the decision to embrace being bad at coding but getting a ton of work done using an LLM and if my future employer doesn’t want massive productivity and would prefer being able to leetcode really well then I unironically respect that and that’s ok.

I’m not doing ground breaking software stuff, it’s just web dev at non massive scales.

You future employer might expect you to bring some value through your expertise that doesn't come from her LLM. If you want to insist on degrading your own employability like this, I guess it's your choice.

For the most part, businesses don't care how you deliver value, just that you do. If programmer A does a ticket in 3 days with an LLM, and programmer B takes a week to do the same ticket, but doesn't use an LLM, with programmer B choosing not to out of some notion of purity, who's more employable?

Productivity is not the only aspect of our profession that matters, and in fact it's probably not even the most important part. I'm not suggesting we get stuck or handcraft every aspect of our code, and there are multitudes of abstractions and tools that enhance productivity, including everything from frameworks to compilers.

What I'm saying is what the original comment is doing, having the LLM write all their code, will make them a less valuable employee in the long term. Participating in the act of programming makes your a better programmer. I'd rather have programmer B if they take the time to understand their code, so that when that code breaks at 4am and they get the call, they can actually fix it rather than be in a hole they dug with LLMs that they can't dig out of.

You don't need to call them at 4am, you can keep a git log of the prompts that were used to generate the code and some professional 4am debugger can sit there and use an LLM to fix it.

Probably not a practical option yet, but if we're looking at the long term that is where we are heading. Or, realistically, the even longer term where the LLM self-heals broken systems.

Lol, yeah the prompt is definitely going to help clarify what the code actually does.

While a git log of prompts seems like a novel idea to me, I don't believe it would work - not because of temperature and LLMs being non-deterministic and the context window overflowing, but because at a certain level of complexity LLMs simply fail, even though they are excellent at fixing simple bugs.

See, if you work in AI, say, as an AI researcher, asking them not to be allowed to use AI models in the interview is basically not an option.

Also, often folks in this space are better at cheating than you will be at detecting them. Don't believe me? https://bigvu.tv/captions-video-maker/ai-eye-contact-fix

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