[1234throway]

What kind of basic programming does one have to do to fee threatened by chatgpt? This tool does great at regurgitating basic coding but anything a little more complex is a mix of nonsense and confidence. Do people actually write “leet code” on a daily basis?

[tluyben2]

It solves real world problems for me on a daily basis; things I hired people for before. There are things like helping with white papers, emails and blog posts. But, to your point, I can give it a little bit of context, let’s say some old Django code we have running in production and ask it to add or change something, and it does, in seconds. Yesterday I had it mostly generate an api with 23 endpoints for a client project in a language & framework I am rusty at (long time ago) for which people on upwork were bidding 1500$ minimal. Took me less than an hour with chatgpt and including docker & docker-compose.

People don’t need to feel threatened; it is simply already replacing all the mundane programming and writing work we used to do; people who can only do that type of mundane work aka crud work (chatgpt can do it in any language or framework), integration, transformation, plumbing etc are already gone.

A lot of our (very well paid) work is taking data, transforming it, sending to some api, get the result, transform it and move to the next step. A few months ago this was just boring human work, now it’s just copy pasting the spec and out it falls. Sure you might need some fixes (as the article says), but not much and it learns (you add new knowledge to the prompt ‘memory’). I have been working with my own custom client on top of chatgpt for months now; it has a lot of custom prompting and effort to make sure it does as well as it can. This I can throw away in a few months when improvements come from their side.

[bamboozled]

Calling BS on your claim here. You would've had to have spent quite a lot fo time just writing up the requirements that it would've been as easy to do some other way.

It's something I could do with swagger in 5 minutes as well, you don't need an AI to generate boilerplate code.

The difference with using swagger would be, I know the code is correct.

The actual problem might be that you're so rusty, you don't actually ,know what the job entails or is worth? I mean you have clients, and you're pasting code from ChatGPT into source control and people are paying you for this?

[tluyben2]

> You would've had to have spent quite a lot fo time just writing up the requirements that it would've been as easy to do some other way.

I have to do that with human team members as well. People have to either listen or read what has to be done. Like said; it's the same brief I gave human programmers that it had as input.

Edit: not to mention, I have to spend far less on that as well; chatgpt generates better, well written briefs from a few words, including pseudo code, boilterplate + failing tests that should succeed when done and possible directions to attack a problem. It helps human programmers understand hard problems better and solve them faster.

> It's something I could do with swagger in 5 minutes as well, you don't need an AI to generate boilerplate code.

It doesn't just generate boilerplate code, it generates everything. Functional code including all logic, database interactions, api interactions, transformations + tests.

> ,know what the job entails or is worth?

You seem to be triggered, why?

Being rusty at a programming language/framework has zero to do with what it entails or is worth; it will be more or less the same in other languages/frameworks I'm not rusty at. Rusty here means; I forgot some of the language/framework functions to do things (like, make a database model in this particular ORM); that doesn't, in any way, make it difficult to estimate the work.

Not only that; I said others (as in 3rdparty) estimated it from $1500-$3500, not me. I estimated it to far less, even being rusty. But not to as little as I got it done with chatgpt.

> I mean you have clients, and you're pasting code from ChatGPT into source control and people are paying you for this?

Yes, and I tell them how it's done. They don't care how it's done, as long as it's done. This particular client asked me last week how to invest in AI products because of what I showed them (I sent them a PDF with the prompts and responses for doing that particular micro service).

But each their own... My team gained super powers with this (and with copilot as well); if it doesn't work for you, that's fine. In my experience, it's already better than most people I ever worked with (that's probably the client base I work with ; large corps).

[bamboozled]

You seem to be triggered, why?

Because I wish it worked as good as you said it did so I wasn't working right now.

On the other hand, you're the first person I know of who has actually been replaced by an AI (although you don't know it yet) :) Because the second the large corp you work for realizes they can just type the inputs into ChatGPT instead of you, you're contract will be dissolved.

In fact, it sounds like you're being disingenuous charging them for work when in fact they could just be paying OpenAI? What value are you adding ?

[tluyben2]

> you're the first person I know of who has actually been replaced by an AI (although you don't know it yet)

I think there are many; I know I will be, and always known that (my father always told me from when I saw my first computer begin 80s that it will happen some day; as in the 70s/80s they believed it was imminent). I studied AI in the 90s AI winter and didn't think we would get here in my life because of the bleak outlook back then.

I will be replaced as a programmer quite quickly (although there is a lot it cannot do; in the embedded space, it performs horribly for instance; it also cannot find solutions to actual complex problems; most of everyone here is not doing any of that though), but not as a product manager or tech lead. That will eventually happen as well.

> In fact, it sounds like you're being disingenuous charging them for work when in fact they could just be paying OpenAI? What value are you adding ?

Like most clients, they don't know what they want, at all. They have a vague idea and that needs to be translated into a working product. And scale. And be maintainable. Etc etc. That AI cannot do (yet). It'll come, but to code something like 'we want to make a sort of crm mixed with support mixed with uber for outbound sales' and then knowing what to ask and getting that far enough to get to a product that works and adds value is still far off. This thread and article is about coding and I believe that is, for a large part of what people are doing daily now, done.

[bamboozled]

Obviously we're working on very different problems because for 90% of the code I'm working on, I have not been able to use it for any real purpose.

[tluyben2]

> Because I wish it worked as good as you said it did so I wasn't working right now.

It's all in the prompting; I use [0] and a version of [1] with some other tooling to instruct it, add my style and other context in the session and have /chatcommands that add (quite elaborate) prompts to get it to do what I want.

I use different iterations of this playground for many things I do.

[0] https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/chatgpt-api [1] https://github.com/tluyben/chatgpt-playground

[bamboozled]

At what stage does just writing the code (which is getting easier and easier), just become the simpler thing to do?

[nousermane]

Same kind of basic programming that was "threatened" by no-code/low-code solutions before that.

[tluyben2]

It was never to that extend though; chatgpt can change/augment existing code. Nocode/low code solutions cannot do that (in a meaningful way).

[kaba0]

It can’t extend provably correctly, so the benefits are questionable without good safe guards (generating tests would be just as meaningless, so you are left with reviewing very closely everything)

[tluyben2]

Sure, but I do that with code or text written by others anyway.

[raydiatian]

The approach I use is to have it paper out POCs. I think a huge thing that is missing is ChatGPT’s ability to make interactive code. It should theoretically be possible to write a really simple system that:

(1) makes structured requests to chat gpt based on an initial prompt. That request asks ChatGPT for all of the files associated with solving the problem.

(2) ChatGPT produces each file in a structure fashion. This could range from source files to project files like package.json or Dockerfile

(3) take code output and spin up a corresponding stack blitz or other online resource (assuming those have APIs.

I’m shocked and bummed that there’s not more effort to make this a reality yet. We’ve had ChatGPT for a month and this is low hanging fruit (or so it would seem).

[loopdoend]

For all its knowledge it can't solve even the most basic problems accurately - but what do you expect from a language model?

[cheald]

Ever spent any time answering questions on Stack Overflow?