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by obblekk 1040 days ago
I've experienced a very similar feeling.

To me it feels exactly like finding wikipedia in 2005, or getting an iphone + wikipanion in 2008. The frontiers of my mind have been unleashed. A real bicycle for the mind.

Here are some tactics I use to "turn off gpt":

1. It'll be there tomorrow. The great thing about their threaded model is you can easily find the convo and continue it tomorrow. Remind yourself of that consciously (or tape it to your monitor!)

2. You're not behind, you're ahead. 80% of Americans haven't tried chatgpt. 95% of the world maybe.

3. Don't worry about juniors. They'll still be hired because now they'll ramp up faster and produce better code, using the same tool you're using. Same thing that happened when stackoverflow became popular and junior devs stopped "reading the source code" or "reading man pages."

For all the limitations of GPT4, it truly is great at coding. Exciting times.

3 comments

> 2. You're not behind, you're ahead. 80% of Americans haven't tried chatgpt. 95% of the world maybe.

idk if anyone realistically compares themselves to the abstract nebulous "everyone". its likely moreso in regards to their socioeconomic band

It seems like one of those things like VR and crypto, technical solution looking for a problem to solve. After 2 years we have still not found a single good use for it and yet it is supposed to be disruptive. If you think we have, provide me with an example of one app which really has used it so well that it is now comfortably ahead of the competition.
>Don't worry about juniors. They'll still be hired because now they'll ramp up faster and produce better code

So maybe the seniors should be worried, since we/they don't have much barrier to entry that means much more competition.

If you think writing code is the most important, or even the largest part of being a (senior) software engineer - sure. In my experience it's not though. It's being able to communicate clearly, understanding and translating requirements (sometimes to code), knowing boundaries and saying no, deep understanding of systems and knowing how to debug them.

Transitioning from junior to medior (for example) is much more than writing x% better code. It's the process of falling and getting back up. Being stumped and learning when to ask for help (and not just technical, what if the spec is 'wrong'?).

I definitely worry that we are leaving future generations in the dust and that there'll be an experience gap. It's a disservice to take away something from them that we enjoyed ourselves.

No sane company should run on juniors, they're an investment.

Hm, those are good points, but many of those skills transfer from other fields. So a dev with 10 years experience is still worth a lot more than a new grad, but if somebody with 10 years experience in anything (as opposed to just software) can now be a programmer it's still a much smaller barrier.