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by ljm 640 days ago
This is pretty extreme advice to offer in response to news that a model that can better understand programming problems is coming out.

In fact, it's more encouragement to continue. A lot of issues we face as programmers are a result of poor, inaccurate, or non-existent documentation, and despite their many faults and hallucinations LLMs are providing something that Google and Stack Overflow have stopped being good at.

The idea that AI will replace your job, so it's not worth establishing a career in the field, is total FUD.

1 comments

The advice is unrelated to the model and related to the last year's worth of development. In any case I am advising a relook which is perfectly warranted for anyone pre-university or in university.
This is a really odd take to have.

By the "past year's worth of development" I assume you mean the layoffs? Have you been in the industry (or any industry) long? If so, you would have seen many layoffs and bulk-hiring frenzies over the years... it doesn't mean anything about the industry as a whole and it's certainly a foolish thing to change career asperations over.

Specifically regarding the LLM - anyone actually believing these models will replace developers and software engineers, truly, deeply does not understand software development at even the most basic fundamental levels. Ignore these people - they are the snake oil salesmen of our modern times.

I assume the poster meant how much progress the models have made. Roughly late high school capability to late college-ish. Project forward five years.
Predicting exponential functions is a fool’s errand. The tiniest error in your initial observation compounds real fast and we can’t even tell if we’re still in the exponential phase of the sigmoid.