- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Hey cool, an AI can program itself as well as a human can now. Think of how this will impact the programmer job market! That’s got to be like, the biggest implication of this development.
I once asked chatGPT to write a simple RK2 algorithm in python. The function couldve been about 3 lines followed by a return statement. It gave me some convoluted code that was 3 functions and about 20 lines. AI still has some time to go before its can handle writing code on its own. Ive asked copilot/chatGPT several times to write code (just for fun) and it always does this
I have mixed feelings about that company. They have some interesting things “going against the flow” like ditching the cloud and going back to on prem, hating on microservices, advocating against taking money from VCs, and now hiring juniors. On the other hand, the guy is a Musk fanboy and they push some anti-DEI bullshit. Also he’s a TypeScript hater for some reason…
it’s funny that some people think programming has a human element that can’t be replaced but art doesn’t.
Computer programs need lots of separate pieces to operate together in subtle ways or your program crashes. With art on the other hand I haven’t heard of anyone’s brain crashing when they looked at AI art with too many fingers.
It’s not so much that AI can’t do it, but the LLMs we have now certainly can’t.
AAA gamedev here. Had a guy scream at me on here on a different account for several days straight last week that “AI will eventually take your job, too, just wait and see” after I told the guy “all you have to do as an artist is make better quality work than AI slop can produce, which is easy for most professionals; AI is still useful in production pipelines to speed up efficiency, but it will never replace human intuition because it can’t actually reason and doesn’t have feelings, which is all art is and is what programming requires”.
Got told that I was a naive and bad person with survivorship bias who doesn’t understand the plight of artists, as if I’m not one myself and don’t work with plenty of other artistic and technical disciplines every single day. Like, okay, dude. I guess nearly a decade of senior-level experience means nothing. I swear, my team had tried and tossed away anywhere from 5 to 10 potential “cutting-edge AI production tools” before the general public had even heard about ChatGPT because most of them have such strict limited use-cases that they aren’t practically applicable to most things, but the guy was convinced that we had to boycott and destroy all AI tools because everyone was gonna be out of a job soon. Lol. Lmao, even.
it’s just people with no skills and all resentment.
Yep.
Just checked and the mods removed all my comments in that convo, but left the other guy’s up, despite me providing objective evidence and research. The annoying social media circlejerk from resentful losers is so real.
Art doesn’t have to fulfill a practical purpose nor does it usually have security vulnerabilities. Not taking a position on the substance, but these are two major differences between the two.
my point exactly. practical purpose and security are things you can analyze and solve for as a machine at least in theory. artistic value comes from the artistic intent. by intent I don’t mean to argue against death of the author, as I believe in it, but the very fact that there is intent to create art.
Art fulfills many practical purposes. You live in an abode designed by architects, presumably painted and furnished with many objects d’art such as, a couch, a wardrobe, ceiling fixtures, a bathtub; also presumably festooned with art on the walls; you cook and eat food in designed cookware, crockery and cutlery, and that food is frequently more than pure sustenance; and, presumably you spend a fair amount of time consuming media such as television, film, literature, music, comedy, dance, or even porn.
Art can be flawed. Programming is an exact set of instructions for a computer to comprehend in the most literal sense. There isn’t nearly as much room for errors. A hallucination during image generation won’t cause any damage. A hallucination regarding those very specific instructions can cause problems.
Programming is definitely not an exact science.
Armchair amateur here but there’s often a lot of talk about O(n), memory optimization, trash cleanup, compression methods, race conditions, vertex choice in matrices etc…
It reminds me of the neo-plasticists, whose argument was there is no significant difference between painting a farmer next to a pile of hay vs painting a pink square next to a yellow square: both are just arranging representative symbols on a canvas.
I get the idea that it’s only temporary, but I’d much rather have a current gen AI paint a picture than attempt to program a guidance system or a heart monitor
por que no los fucking neither, is what i think.
A person who hasn’t debugged any code thinks programmers are done for because of “AI”.
Oh no. Anyways.
everytime i see a twitter screenshot i just know im looking at the dumbest people imaginable
If you want to see stupider, look at Redditors. Fucking cesspool with less than zero redeeming value.
Not sure about the communities you’re visiting, the subreddits I seldom visit (because enshitification) have rather smart people.
I’m just gonna say I love your username!
Except for those comedy accounts. Some of those takes are sheer genius lol.
Other industries… ?
You can say “fucked” on the internet, Ace Rbk.
Oh no, he’s a cannibal.
It’s better to future-proof your account for when Gilead is claimed.
AI is certainly a very handy tool and has helped me out a lot but anybody who thinks “vibe programming” (i.e. programming from ignorance) is a good idea or will save money is woefully misinformed. Hire good programmers, let them use AI if they like, but trust the programmer’s judgement over some AI.
That’s because you NEED that experience to notice the AI is outputting garbage. Otherwise it looks superficially okay but the code is terrible, or fragile, or not even doing what you asked it properly. e.g. if I asked Gemini to generate a web server with Jetty it might output something correct or an unholy mess of Jetty 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 with annotations and/or programmatic styles, or the correct / incorrect pom dependencies.
AI is great for learning a language, partly because it’s the right combination of useful and stupid.
It’s familiar with the language in a way that would take some serious time to attain, but it also hallucinates things that don’t exist and its solution to debugging something often ends up being literally just changing variable names or doing the same wrong things in different ways. But seeing what works and what doesn’t and catching it when it’s spiraling is a pretty good learning experience. You can get a project rolling while you’re learning how to implement what you want to do without spending weeks or months wondering how. It’s great for filling gaps and giving enough context to start understanding how a language works by sheer immersion, especially if the application of that language comes robust debugging built in.
I’ve been using it to help me learn and implement GDscript while I’m working on my game and it’s been incredibly helpful. Stuff that would have taken weeks of wading through YouTube tutorials and banging my head against complex concepts and math that I just don’t have I can instead work my way through in days or even hours.
Gradually I’m getting more and more familiar with how the language works by doing the thing, and when it screws up and doesn’t know what it’s talking about I can see that in Godot’s debugging and in the actual execution of the code in-game. For a solo indie dev who’s doing all the art, writing, and music myself, having a tool to help me move my codebase forward while I learn has been pretty great. It also means that I can put systems in place that are relevant to the project so my modding partner who doesn’t know GDScript yet has something relevant to look at and learn from by looking through the project’s git.
But if I knew nothing about programming? If I wasn’t learning enough to fix its mistakes and sometimes abandon it entirely to find solutions to things it can’t figure out? I’d be making no progress or completely changing the scope of the game to make it a cookie cutter copy of the tutorials the AI is trained on.
Vibe coding is complete nonsense. You still need a competent designer who’s at least in the process of learning the context of the language they’re working with or your output is going to be complete garbage. And if you’re working in a medium that doesn’t have robust built-in debugging? Good luck even identifying what it’s doing wrong if you’re not familiar with the language yourself. Hell, good luck getting it to make anything complex if you have multiple systems to consider and can’t bridge the gaps yourself.
Corpo idiots going all in on “vibe coding” are literally just going to do indies a favor by churning out unworkable garbage that anyone who puts the effort in will be able to easily shine in comparison to.
It’s a good teacher, though, and a decent assistant.
I take issue with the “replacing other industries” part.
I know that this is an unpopular opinion among programmers but all professions have roles that range from small skills sets and little cognitive abilities to large skill sets and high level cognitive abilities.
Generative AI is an incremental improvement in automation. In my industry it might make someone 10% more productive. For any role where it could make someone 20% more productive that role could have been made more efficient in some other way, be it training, templates, simple conversion scripts, whatever.
Basically, if someone’s job can be replaced by AI then they weren’t really producing any value in the first place.
Of course, this means that in a firm with 100 staff, you could get the same output with 91 staff plus Gen AI. So yeah in that context 9 people might be replaced by AI, but that doesn’t tend to be how things go in practice.
I know that this is an unpopular opinion among programmers but all professions have roles that range from small skills sets and little cognitive abilities to large skill sets and high level cognitive abilities.
I am kind of surprised that is an unpopular opinion. I figure there is a reason we compensate people for jobs. Pay people to do stuff you cannot, or do not have the time to do, yourself. And for almost every job there is probably something that is way harder than it looks from the outside. I am not the most worldly of people but I’ve figured that out by just trying different skills and existing.
Programmers like to think that programming is a special profession which only super smart people can do. There’s a reluctance to admit that there are smart people in other professions.
There are around 50 models listed as supported for function calling in llama.cpp. There are a half dozen or so different APIs. How many people have tried even a few of these. There is even a single model with its own API supported in llama.cpp function calling. The Qwen VL models look very interesting if the supported image recognition setup is built.
I’m not really clear what you’re getting at.
Are you suggesting that the commonly used models might only be an incremental improvement but some of the less common models are ready to take accountant’s and lawyer’s and engineer’s and architect’s jobs ?
I work in QA, even devs who’ve worked for 10+ years make dumb mistakes every so often. I wouldn’t want to do QA when AI is writing the software, it’s just gonna give me even more work 🫠
I’m a senior developer and I sometimes even look back thinking “how the fuck did I make that mistake yesterday”. I know I’m blind to my own mistakes, so I know testers may have some really valid feedback when I think I did everything right :)
That’s what we’re for in the end
even devs who’ve worked for 10+ years make dumb mistakes
everyso, so often.there, I fixed it for you
Thank you for your opinion.
Anyway.
It’s even funnier because the guy is mocking DHH. You know, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Which 37signals obviously uses.
I know from experience that a) Rails is a very junior developer friendly framework, yet incredibly powerful, and b) all Rails apps are colossal machines with a lot of moving parts. So when the scared juniors look at the apps for the first time, the senior Rails devs are like “Eh, don’t worry about it, most of the complex stuff is happening on the background, the only way to break it if you genuinely have no idea what you’re doing and screw things up on purpose.” Which leads to point c) using AI coding with Rails codebases is usually like pulling open the side door of this gargantuan machine and dropping in a sack of wrenches in the gears.
Definitely bait
Personally I prefer my junior programmers well done.
As long as they keep the rainbow 🌈 socks on, I’ll eat them raw.