[mtc010170]

Hmmm... I'm surprised I'm not seeing anyone else question the validity of this taking "2 hours" Given that it's written on the blog for the product it's using, this reads to me a lot like a pure sales pitch. They want us to believe if you use Patterns (which is neat), your company will be much more cost-effective.

I'm not saying that's bad - that's probably the right thing to do with their company blog, and it's cool nonetheless. But I do get a little tired of people putting stuff out there like this that warps (some peoples) perception around how long things actually take. We wonder why, as an industry, we misjudge timelines on things left and right.

Even if we take it at face value, this is a person who's intimately familiar with this product. So sure, it's easy to set things up when we've done it a bunch of times. If you were doing this, solving the novel problem that you're faced with, is that how long it would take? Plus that's not really what most of us get paid to do. We have to learn on the fly and figure stuff out as it comes.

So rather than have the provocative headline and conclusion, like a lot of other people have commented... this is really something that could amplify that $50/hour employee, not take their job away. And maybe we shouldn't read into the alleged speed so much. YMMV.

[kvh]

Author here, I’ve updated the post. The first draft of this app and blog post took me two hours, but I kept coming back with new ideas and tweaks throughout the week. By the end, I’d certainly spent more than two hours (more like 8?), so you’re right, I just failed to update the post. The main point stands — it’s surprisingly good for the amount of effort put in (although unclear how much more juice you could get out of gpt with more effort. Clear diminishing returns)

[_hcuq]

Couldn’t you have just got ChatGPT to write the post?

[mdcox]

no one wants to automate themselves out of a job, only other people.

[foobarbecue]

I totally automate my roles on projects all the time so I can move on to more interesting things. I guess you mean that no one wants to be fired, but I don't see how that can result from automating one's work.

Also, I HATE doing repetitive things. Some people seem to like it though. To each their own, I guess. Reminds me of https://youtu.be/wNVLOuQNgpo

[blowski]

We all believe our job is so challenging and has such special requirements that it _can't_ be automated. It requires someone with the kind of experience learned with wisdom over a long time. Blah blah blah.

[tremon]

Except for the ones of us who keep automating our jobs so that we can spend our effort on more challenging tasks.

[foobarbecue]

Not all of us.

[banku_brougham]

I am trying to automate my job away, but i'm not succeeding.

[Hellmitioksldf]

Thats actually my strategy;

This makes it so that 1. my quality overall becomes better and my bosses always liked that (doing things per hand are more error prone, not on time etc.)

2. I can go on holiday knowing my company doesn't need me desperate

3. I can spend the free time of actually innovating and bringing more value to the company/product

The problem is not automating yourself out of a job but not being able to leverage the new gained capacity.

[Hedepig]

Despite productivity generally improving over the last few decades, wage compensation has not.

I'm concerned this will continue as a trend with any productivity improvements from these models.

[Hellmitioksldf]

My way helped me succeed. I took my skills and my achievements (which i made in my R&D Time) to another company and got more money and than i did it again and got more money again.

[foobarbecue]

Right. Presented with efficiency gains, firms tend to increase profit, not wages. One way to change that is to give workers more bargaining power through market shifts or unionization.

[sumitkumar]

All the productivity gains are first transferred to the consumer(because of market dynamics) and then(by the market winners) to shareholders. The workers' wage market is not related to productivity but how the company is internally organized is linked to productivity.

[tw1984]

gold. very deep insight into the human nature.

;)

[devmor]

It doesn't seem like you've really replaced anyone with this. You spent 8 hours doing the work that you could have paid an SQL analyst to do in much less.

Unless you're saying that your time is worth less than you'd pay the analyst?

[antihipocrat]

I think the idea is that once built it would be a service that could parse a question, then automatically develop and run any query in response.

Sounds cool until it produces the wrong results.. then you'll need to hire an analyst to check every query just in case.

[skissane]

Put the requests in a queue. Have the bot generate the response. Then forward the response to a human analyst to double-check. A human can surely double-check a response much faster than they can produce one from scratch.

In many professions, it is common to have junior staff members do the grunt work, and then the more senior staff just review their work and either sign off on it, correct it, or send it back to be redone. You could use the same pattern here, replacing the junior staff with an AI, but keeping the senior one.

[kqr]

As if the analyst doesn't get the results wrong! For 1/50 of the price, maybe a few more errors are acceptable, even.

[desert_rue]

Which errors are you okay with?

[shinycode]

Yeah and whose responsibility is it when not catched in time and there this consequences / damage ?

[kqr]

The ones for which I would refer the question to GPT. We are still in control of which questions go to GPT/the intern analyst (less critical ones, where a fraction erroneous are okay) and which go to the resident expert analyst.

[guru4consulting]

If there are extensive test cases with static dataset, this may help with query modifications (optimize query, fine-tune, etc.) Of course, this may not feasible for new queries as you can't have test script until the query is ready.

[jhugo]

They built a bot which can answer any number of questions, each of which would have needed some analyst time. Given that the analyst rotation was an entire day once every N weeks, and the bot took 1 day to make, this is going to pay for itself after 1 week.

This all assumes that the bot doesn't need tweaking for every answer — i.e. it gets at least some answers right without needing modifications to the bot — which appears to be the case based on the examples in the post.

[freejazz]

But, generally and unless there is a glaringly wrong result, only an analyst is going to know if the bot is right or not... what exactly does that gain you?

[kqr]

Maybe it's not a position where it is critical that all answers are 100 % accurate. Maybe getting it right every once in a while is enough to pay for the GPT compute time, but not really for analyst time.

[anentropic]

Seems like the issue would be you'd generally get results that 'look' right but would never know if they were actually right without going through and... analysing them

[moonchrome]

If you're OK with garbage data you don't need ChatGPT - you can probably make up plausible data on your own. Unless you're building some lorem ipsum stuff.

[catothedev]

It gets you a really sophisticated 'auto-complete' feature

[freejazz]

Not really. I'd guess that most people can tell if auto-complete is providing the answer they "wanted".

[xwolfi]

Can we replace a webmaster with 26 chatgpt prompts?

[OOPMan]

I reckon we can replace a shill with less

[sosuke]

I love the time estimates. 2 hours after spending 3 weeks figuring out how to get everything playing nicely together.

[Julesman]

I haven't found GPT this reliable for coding. I've been maxing my hourly usage of ChatGPT since it launched and then switching to CoPilot and I have lots of good things to say about it. But reliability is not one of them.

It has a tendency to ignore instructions, as mentioned, but also to get hung up on certain approaches or to use a different approach each time its asked. I'd guess it's very reliable for text generation. But for code, I'm pretty sure the quality of the result would vary quite a from instance to instance.

This could very well cut the work needed greatly. But it doesn't come close to replacing anyone. ... Yet. Give it two years.

[nmfisher]

I gave up on ChatGPT for code generation because I ended up spending more time tweaking prompts/fixing outputs than if I had just written it myself in the first place. I think this is probably the future of "coding" but it's not quite there yet.

Is CoPilot any better?

[spacebanana7]

The UX of CoPilot is a lot better. It feels like a smarter version of autocomplete.

They're based on the same GPT3 model so the quality of suggested code is similar but the ability to accept/reject suggestions based on tabbing in CoPilot makes it much less hassle to use.

[fisf]

Same here. ChatGPT kept coming up with syntactically plausible Java code. However, it kept using library methods that plainly don't exist for specific fields.

[danielbln]

I've found it to be significantly better at code mutation and documentation.

[onos]

>> They want us to believe if you use Patterns (which is neat)…

What do they do? I can’t tell.

[MuffinFlavored]

> if you use Patterns (which is neat)

Wasn't sure of their proposition/hadn't heard of them.

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