[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]

What type of work do you do? I use it for web/app stuff; for embedded, proofs, pl r&d etc it doesn’t really work so that’s still manual. That’s just not what I make most money with.

[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?

[solsane]

It’s quite simple. If you’re doing something niche (ie, it would be difficult to find similar examples online), and deals with highly critical code, it’s probably worthwhile to write it yourself, since there’s a high risk for it to produce bugs.

In my experience this was the case for writing a block driver & some other low level software.

It excels and arguably outperforms in some developers in other cases; app development, CRUD, and CS labs it finds on github. There’s still a risk for bugs, but an acceptable level considering the productivity enhancement IMO.

[tluyben2]

It does in some cases, but modern software dev (in larger teams) is generally way too verbose (for my taste). The 'easier to do' you speak off will be heavily AI augmented, so it'll be the same thing. The verbosity; people want clear and descriptive variable names, function names, comments, docs, tests, etc which is a lot of thinking (naming is hard), plumbing, checking, fixing & typing and AI can do it from a few scraps of human text instead so I don't have to type it anymore.

Even if you are better at or find it simpler to write code (which I often do find), that's not true for 99.xxx% of humanity. I jury startups for incubators etc now and then and this month's cohort are often using chatgpt to do the software for their startup by one of the founders who 'did a little bit of coding in uni', but is not very good. The code they produce I would write far faster and better myself without chatgpt/copilot than they do with chatgpt, but I would do it even faster and better with chatgpt/copilot.