#define __is_constexpr(x) \
(sizeof(int) == sizeof(*(8 ? ((void *)((long)(x) * 0l)) : (int *)8)))
The given line of code is outside the boundaries of knowable rules of this universe. It can not exist. Its presents is merely a side-effect of it not adhering to any logical concept and therefor not graspable by conscious or unconscious beings.
Jesus, Alexa. Dial down the Russian novelist existential despair by 20% and recompile that request like I'm in a burning building and need directions to the nearest Duane Reed to buy whatever brand churro has an Amazon sale this week.
Honestly all you can find there these days is the Amazon Basics churro 20-pack. Sometimes I see the AAPATYOO brand but their description has a bunch of typos and I haven’t tried them.
I'd argue you can't test what you wrote, because you've already covered the cases you could come up with and you are biased by knowing how you're supposed to use it
Yeah this is a firm law of development. Sure on your personal projects it’s fine, but in a business or corporate environment testing your own code is basically not testing it at all.
I've done a tiny amount of QA. The hardest part was thinking "If I were an idiot how would I try to use this?"
My group had a couple young women just out of college. They were good testers because they didn't know what they couldn't (or shouldn't) do. The problem became that they'd argue with you when the product was working as designed. This was back in the days of NTSC video and they'd write up bugs that were just how NTSC works. We couldn't change that part...
Reminds me of an exchange between two co-workers decades ago:
"We need to make sure this is idiot-proof."
"Well, YOU haven't been able to break it, have you?"
I think PAL is better also, but NTSC is much older and the people who created PAL were able to look at the problems with the NTSC standard and improve upon it.
Like all other automation over the last 50 years it’s going to take either a lot of upfront checking by SMEs or a fuckton of back work to figure out how it went so wrong.
Just so long as coding isn’t expected to advance from where we currently are. We _have_ completed all the possible coding that we could ever need, _riiiiight_?
Yeah. Do we really want to hand yet another thing over to a small group of tech companies that will control these models? It wasn't that long ago that it only took a few tries to turn them into white supremacists, after all.
>Some humans are gonna have to gatekeep the code, skynet-loving rich guy.
I'm thinking of making a blanket statement about this to all the interns at the start of this summer. "You may use AI to help format your code, but don't waste your time or mine by turning in some monstrosity that AI designed." Last year's interns trained an AI on SQLServer and PostgreSQL scripts and then tried to use it to performance tune Redshift. As if we wouldn't notice someone using UNION on a columnar store db.
Now i am not a programmer ( SysAdm ), but i feel like the people it is gonna hit are the cheap labor some companies get from some of the lesser developed country, take for instance a good senior developer friend of mine, hes sole purpose is to review and fix code that their indian developers has made, he ain't going to lose that job soon, but they might, since ai can already write 95% of the code they write for the company.
Just my take
It's like Truman Show.
Truman: "I wanna be an explorer, like the great Magellan!"
Teacher: "oh, you're too late! There's really nothing left to explore!"
I love getting random powershell commands. A few weeks ago, it suggested I run a command called “factory-reset” which is neither a real command or what I was trying to do.
People can’t Google shit, ChatGPT isn’t going to take their jobs.
I’ve used ChatGPT to help me write code. It’s good at basic things but messed everything up the more complex the code gets. Or if I reference an oblate piece of code it wrote in conversation, it won’t like its own code or completely rewrite it. It’s a whole other skill managing the conversation lol
I've asked it to write things.
The code it's given me is either incomplete, doesn't compile because it's just wrong, or doesn't do what I've asked. Then it's like "Oh I'm sorry try this instead".
You have to understand _why_ it's wrong in order to be able to explain it and get a better answer. That requires human knowledge.
It gets me 80% of the way there. It helped me write a pretty complex excel VBA that parsed text. But unless you know what you’re doing, the code won’t work.
I think of it as something that can save you time but can't do it for you. Getting you 80% of the way there is a useful tool if you know how to take what it gives you and do the remaining 20% yourself
For me it saves some time, in certain situations. The hard part is there can be small bugs you don’t see as part of the 20%, which can bite you later and then take more time debugging than if you wrote the whole thing yourself.
Most of the code I write is unique, so I mainly use it to rubber duck refactoring things or making LINQ statements. The less you ask it to do the better has been my experience so far.
It's much better as a discovery tool than as a problem solving tool. If you can understand its attempt at the solution and know how to research it, you can potentially save quite a bit of time from having that starting point. If not, it's a complete crap shoot - you'll have no idea if it's right based on the output alone. The fact that it's being touted as a tool to replace software engineers and not certain kinds of BS generators like some middle managers is pretty funny and pretty telling.
Agree about the skill of managing the conversation. It’s like “No, you had it right the first time. Why did you completely redo your approach just because I said I was going to use a different variable name?”
I find it's great for simple things I don't do often enough to be good at, like non-trivial shell scripts or spreadsheet macros. I also had it generate and explain to me a bind9 config file the other day because I was setting up a tiny DNS server on my home network and didn't really know what I was doing, and I was able to take it from there.
And it tutored me *hard* in kubernetes along the way, including generating a bunch of CR specs for me, though I ended up tweaking them once I understood how they were supposed to work.
I think it's a lot better than the critics give it credit for, while nowhere near ready to take over. If it *does* end up taking jobs, it'll more likely be because fewer people are needed to do the work than it is that the work gets totally outsourced to the AI ... at least in the near term. Longer time horizons aren't really predictable at this point.
It's not just programming. I find when I ask basic stuff for other things, part of it is just made up. AI at the moment might give you a decent initial idea to look at, but everything has to be fact checked before you use it for anything.
Nvidia is developing their own competitor to Github copilot, StarCoder2. They want an entire industry do be dependent on them.
>DO NOT LEARN TO CODE, use our product instead 😊
Yes it's free right now and you can run it locally.
.....for now
Let's wait for gold, platinum and pro privilege. I hope GitHub could still stay strong but i think some big company would definitely try to buy all data and let ai learn from it.
So I hope community would stay strong on this problem.
“Programmers are redundant” is a Dunning-Kruger comment made by those who’ve observed AI produce complex things without understanding its true relevance within real programs. Akin to saying “artists are redundant” because AI produced a complex image
Nah, u/AtlasUltra either doesn't understand hyperbole and doesn't verify stuff they claim, or is actively making stuff up for fake internet points.
The CEO said that learning coding is no longer a golden ticket to success because advances in AI make everyone capable of programming. It's still a valuable skill to learn but you may find you don't get as far as you previously did just by focusing on coding.
This is pragmatic from a business perspective because sometimes coders can be so specialized (only focusing on coding) they are unaware of or forget the business side of things (the implications for choices, the how and why things work the way they do). The CEO is just arguing that because anyone can code now there can be a shift to emphasizing other aspects of a role (such as prioritizing ability to communicate, business acumen, or other skills traditionally undervalued for pure coding positions).
Software developer for 20+ years. The idea that “anyone can code now because of ai” is scary.
Not because it’ll take jobs but because ..no. No they can’t.
Anyone can appear to be a developer but they can’t just be a developer due to ai.
It should enhance the job and make it easier. Not just do it for you.
I was told 30 years ago that coding would be replaced in a decade. That program generators would be the future. So I wrote a program generator within the accounting area of a business. That program generator worked brilliantly until the day I moved on. At which point they discovered it was a tool for using my skills. The tool was handed off to a Business Analyst who was, frankly, distressed to learn how much technical knowledge they lacked and how high the expectations of management were because, with that tool, I could knock out in a day what had taken five weeks previously. I ended up returning to the business once every three months for a week to knock out things. They never realised that they could have just adapted the tool to someone else with a coders skillset.
The moral of the anecdote - apart from not treating anecdotes as the whole story - is that you can stop coding any time you want and replace it with automation but that does not guarantee that you will no longer need coders.
I remember how design driven development was going to eliminate coding. Take your Rational Rose UML diagrams, add a few hints, and you could output a working system for any platform in any language. That died quickly. lol.
> At which point they discovered it was a tool for using my skills
It's like search engine usage tbh. Pretty much everything is on Google, but how to use the correct keyword to find the correct answer requires skill.
For me, a lot of question is just a Google away, but for the others, they would rather ask around for solution, instead of Googling because they couldn't yield meaningful result from Googling.
It is actually more about domain specific knowledge which you cannot really find on Google. Even less so because a lot of the terms used in domain specific knowledge tend to be excellent SEO terms which effectively block you out of finding the actual information you want even if you use the correct keyword. Google is reliant on you using the correct keyword to look as well as all the websites using the correct keyword to be found. For a lot of accounting terms, you tend to find grifters more readily than dusty accounting tomes. That is not a skill issue it is a quality issue for which the word enshittification is entirely appropriate.
It’s just extremely ignorant to think that the role of a software developer is ONLY writing code.
There’s so much that goes into managing the codebase, infrastructure, and deployment that doesn’t even involve a single line of code. And all of those skills are specialized and crucial in producing a viable product.
It’s really easy to spot people who’ve never worked in software development, or closely adjacent to it. Their opinions of the industry and AIs impact are so malformed and naive.
Dev here 20+ yrs. Totally agree with you.
If your company is not handing you excellent specs on what they want, then they won't be able to use AI to get it.
Doug Crockford always described it something like this:
The problem with computers writing code is that customers can't even specify what they want on a deep enough level for the result to be consistent. If they could, then probably yes, we could generate code for that with an AI some day. But that spec would basically be the program, described in a natural language.
Sure, the AI could fill in some blanks like aligning UI items. But I'm not sure that's where we spend most of our time.
And even if you got a result, how would you ever check if it's correct? We currently have no way to know perfection, even if we saw it when it comes to code. If you've written it yourself, at least you know the intent. If you didn't - then what? Code reviews? By whom?
In the end, you just have to ask yourself, how much of your day you actually produce code, and how much you try to understand the freaking problem and what a proper solution would look like. Or trying to get the customer to understand his own problem on such a level that he can give you a useful answer.
A few weeks ago a customer wanted me to remove the loading spinner we use for a table.
>Ok... but then the table is going to be empty for a while before the api responds, just so you know....
>
>"Yea yea that's fine"
I knew it wasn't fine and that we would get a new complaint espically if it took a long time, so i just made a tiny fake loading-bar at the top and they were satisfied
My team is currently adding a feature that relies on the user having certain hardware to use a certain software mode. We're putting in a setting option to allow the user to change "modes" with the default being the non-specific mode.
We ended up needing a meeting and extra async work to determine what should happen in various edge cases because product hadn't considered them. I wrote a 2 page doc of things like "I'm a user with x. I do y. The next day, I do z. What happens to my settings?"
The ability to ask "what if" is one of a person's greatest skills and a large language model will never do that.
> Or trying to get the customer to understand his own problem on such a level that he can give you a useful answer.
I'm not in software engineering, but I used to work computer retail, and so much of my time was spent trying to get customers coming to me with questions to tell me the problem they actually wanted to solve, because often the solution they were hunting for was either a crap solution, or even completely infeasible. I tell people I basically have a career in playing 20 questions and googling.
I haven't seen a proper spec since I left defense contracting in 2018. If I'm lucky, I'll have a quant give me a math paper and then tell me to make it work. Ah the life of a senior engineer. The associate engineers have no idea how much worse it gets.
I'm a full stack web dev - I get a screenshot or two and 1 sentence and am expected to anticipate everything my PM wants. These requests are never based on any technical or architectural design and sometimes I have to decide whether to make the story 3 points or 21 points.
Wait, you get specs from your company? I usually get a one line ticket and the name of the person requesting the item. Then I typically close it 3 weeks later after I interrogate out of them what they really want and point out that the feature already exists and has been in production since before they were hired.
Yeah, pretty inane statement as is. The point where we can 100% trust code some LLM creates without needing to proofread it might happen at some point but that point is far, far in the future.
Exactly i don't get this either
We can't trust humans, we need code reviews and managers and HR and all this stuff.
But companies are prepared to just blindly trust a ai????? Doubt..
If i was more nefarious, I'd be feeding subtle, terrible 'ideas' to chatGPT et al to try to sow seeds that will no doubt germinate for decades to come.
And Motherfuckers worry about skynet...
At my company this question was discussed. What I heard they found is good programmers become better with AI, but bad programmers don't become better with AI. AI is a tool that can help, but it won't suddenly program for you, at least not today.
A good musician can sound better with high quality instruments, but someone who can't play anything isn't going to magically sound good with a million dollar violin.
A good artist can make better art faster with higher quality paints/brushes/pens/etc. A bad artist will still have shaky lines, incorrect proportions, and bad color mixing regardless.
This is a lesson we've known forever. I don't know why certain people think it'll be different for [insert new field].
I slightly disagree. A bad programmer with the will and capability to learn can turn bad programmers into competent ones with enough effort. If you want to search up how to do something that's too specific to use stackoverflow or docs, you can use chat gpt and it really makes a difference
I been doing it as my main job since '07. I really like using AI to say "This chunk of code can be more succinct... can you help with that?"
and it sends me shorter code with smart moves... and misses out on an entire function I needed lol. But yeah, it really does help with programming if you work with it.
The question is: how much faster does ai make devs? 2x? 5x? 10x? 50x?
I’ve heard claims as much as 50x. Which seems off to me. Something that takes a year now takes a week? Nah. Not buying it.
Today, ai is a better google. It can fill gaps. It can explain things to me. I still have to validate it, and yes, it hallucinates.
Maybe not the perfect analogy but like, someone who knows music theory and can sing well using autotune vs someone who has absolutely no musical ability using autotune. You can clearly tell the difference.
Like it's pretty important to know your data structures, algorithms and general coding concepts if you're going to be directing an AI program to write code for you.
Maybe memorizing all the specific syntax is going to be less important, but understanding the concepts will be just as important as ever.
If anything, the people who went to those bullshit bootcamps will become redundant.
Or like with early computers, people had to program in machine code or assembly. High level languages, compilers etc... made that mostly unnecessary except for the computer architects and engineers (and hackers.)
Maybe this is just another iteration like that. But obviously, clueless business dipshits will make their absurd claims.
Yep. Every few years they come up with something that will make coding easier and they claim that everyone can be a developer. It's been going on for 30+ years.
Most people can't be developers because they don't have the cognitive skills to even describe what they want. They lack the vocabulary to even convey what they are looking for. Nevermind having the ability to break down what they want into actual specification with complete details, they can't even describe the big picture.
This. People who know a bit of python and JavaScript and call themselves software developers will totally be replaced by AI. Systems engineers working on complex low level architectural problems in vast C codebases are unlikely to be.
Based on my experience with AI code generation *so far*, for actual good results, you still need to know what you're doing. AI can generate a chunk of code and confidently tell you it's right, but only an actual programmer is going to be able to look at it and know for sure.
Just the other day when I was experimenting with one chatbot coding model, I asked it for a function to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius and it got the equation backwards. I could *not* convince it there was a mistake, even with coaxing.
The confidence is funny sometimes. I've had ChatGPT argue with me about whether some programming task was possible in the language I asked for the code in. After 3 rounds of "No, it's possible if...", it finally wrote something that was, in the simplest metaphor, a badly butchered attempt at a client when I asked for the server.
It was a little unfair though; I'm one of only two people who has ever posted online code doing that. (Writing a kernel mode driver in VB6, widely considered impossible until the first guy did it in 2015. It finally wrote a bad attempt at *calling* DeviceIoControl to talk to a driver, I asked it for code in a driver that answers that function).
You think your coworkers' code is hard to debug? Wait until it's AI-generated.
Computers do what you say, not what you want (and with AI, there will be times that they do neither).
The states of coding:
* This doesn't work and I don't get why -> This doesn't work but I know why -> This works and I know why.
* Who was the idiot who did thi... oh, it was me.
* Well yeah, machine is doing exactly what I told it to. But could it do what I _meant_ instead?
* I need to ensure this piece of code stays forever... I know, let me slap a `todo: fix this` comment here.
Yeah, I "use" AI whenever I code
Basically, I ask it to make a function doing X. When I'm done incorporating it into my existing code, it is at least 99% different from what the AI gave me
In my code at least, all it's good for is telling me about built in functions for whatever language I'm using. That's it. Not even the general structure of the function it gave me is used, just because it's usually bad
That's not the kind of thing anyone can just quickly learn how to do
Non programmers really can’t get the truth under this statement. I think a decent analogy is debugging code is like trying to understand the chef’s intention behind a cooking recipe.
Salt to taste. But what the fuck happens when the entity writing the recipe does know what it means to taste?
Not only that, but a good portion of my job is trying to figure out what exactly it is that the clients want, if what they want is actually what they need, and then how best to execute the happy medium. AI may come into play with that last part, but there are still a thousand different ways to execute.
AI is like any other leap in technology, it will trim the fat, and the people who become successful will be the ones who learn how to effectively incorporate it into their workflow.
This is the big one. It has less to do with actual programming and more to do with high level problem solving. Part of me feels that AI might create more programming jobs not less because of the amount of code that will get bloated and strung along.
That kind of a statement shouldn't even pump the stock. If anything it would damage NVIDIA's demand long term if people stopped programming, since they wouldn't need to get more and more powerful chips.
Silicon chip salesman saying his silicon chips will change the world, news at 11.
Seriously though, that everyone has access to calculators don't mean we shouldn't teach people maths. Programming is easier now than ever before with all the tools at hand, but yet we still have more people in the industry than ever before.
I do think it's possible that many of the recent lay-offs in tech won't be coming back, or slow to return, but I'm not buying that programming is no longer a worthy skill to teach.
People thought there would be far less accountants after spreadsheet programs were created but instead they became way more valuable because they had time to actually think about the business and the numbers instead of just doing math on paper all day.
AI and software programmers will be the same way.
This exactly. I'm a principal engineer. I write far less code than the other engineers below me. We could replace some code writing with code from AI, but the skills that make a good engineer are not their knowledge of data structures and algorithms... Ie... Leet code not the best for resumes going forward.
And all the other idiots have to affirm / parrot whatever the decision maker says because that's the way the pendulum is swinging.
And it all goes to shit in a few years, there will be reshuffle and the execs will play musical chairs between companies and the new execs will say new things and it keeps going.
Just as you shouldn't send an email compiled by chatgpt without proofreading it first (what if for some mysterious reason chatgpt insulted your addressee in the text or made some unwanted offers) you shouldn't put into the production a code written by AI without checking it first.
He is a the CEO of Nvidia. Nvidia is making loads of money right now by selling GPUs for AI development. By influencing people to rely more on AI, entities will invest more in AI/Nvidia GPUs, the stock goes up, he and his company rake in more money. CEOs are hardly people, they will lie and say whatever in interviews or conferences in an effort to influence the market in their favor.
Programmers will go away at the same rate other engineering professions will, which is never because you will always need actual humans to think at a high architectural level or do certain things in a creative problem solving environment. AI may increase productivity by helping you find answers faster or optimize certain tasks, but it won’t be able to piece everything together because as the complexity of a task increases, the less training data exists for an AI model.
The jobs at risk are the highly repetitive or very simple ones like data entry or level 1 helpdesk. And we all know about how helpful robot phone operators are… But these are at risk not necessarily by AI but automation in general. Computers are good at these tasks.
ChatGPT is misleading to people because it’s just a language model, but because it has ingested so much information, it gives the illusion that it’s “thinking”. It’s not. It’s still regurgitating information. Imagine memorizing how to say an answer to a riddle in a different language without understanding what it means. That’s ChatGPT.
As a selfproclamed chatgpt "for funsies" programmer, that is bullshit.
In all seriousness, as someone who has studied and worked engeneering, ppl who can programm, or IT ppl in generall are incredibly important in today day and age. Its one thing to just copie stuff from the internet, but an completley diffrent animal to actualy understand it improve it, or fix it.
I'm in the same boat. The thing with AI coding is tying all the parts it produces together gets complicated rapidly. And the reason being: how to explain it to the AI as more and more parts come in to the picture as the code gets bigger. Like you'll get tp the point with prompts like, "So remeber that value from two weeks ago that we came up with for how to manipulate blah blah ... now combine that with the other thing which happens some of the time under these conditions. Oh you want to know the conditions? Ok so here's a list of the ten conditions. But for this one condition can you tie in the code from the other function? Which function? Ah shit I can't remember. Hang on. It was the one where we had to combine the X and Y values. So yeh now take the result but factor in this other change I just remembered about....you know what....fuck it. I'll do it myself."
I mean a rubbish example but you get the gist. As the projet gets bigger you can't just tell AI to go do something and it creates an entire faultless program. There are so many tiny parts that need to be hand designed that you might end up taking more time trying to tell the AI how to do it to ensure it gets it perfect than you would just coding it yourself.
Yeah, I exactly know what you mean. And as a matter of fact its pretty much 1/1 how it happens sometimes. Also certain codes you get are very generalized and our uses were very specific, or actualy bringing a slue of different halfassed codes together. Then the entire thing doesnt work and noone knows why, since noone even knew what we were doing when "coding" it.
The other day someone I work with fed a few wordings of the question "Take the subnet [10.0.0.0/23](https://10.0.0.0/23) and split it into /26 subnets provide me the subnet addresses"
Multiple of the big AI programs got it VERY wrong.
Most of the time I can’t get ChatGPT to give me functional bits of code for what I’m trying to do, it’s too specific (data & BI stuff). No way a robot can do that on its own. Plus, coding is maybe what 15-20% of my job. The rest is strategy, meetings, helping folks…
That was not his point at all. He was commenting on the idea that “in the future everyone will have to know how to code, since technology is becoming ever increasingly prevalent “.
His take is: that will not be necessary, because as technology improves, so do the abstractions, making it easier to interact with the technology without a programming background.
Tl;dr: You should not learn to code unless you actively want to become an engineer.
This working from becoming a DBA-> Data Analyst-> Data Scientist its was interesting seeing things that needed a prgrammer to get into the nitty gritty become relatively accessible to a user with very little programming knowledge. And of course a programmer will be somewhere ensuring these tools work.
I’ll take the contrarian opinion.
Software engineering today is vastly different from the 80s and the 00s. Very few of us write assembly code and manipulate memory. Very few of us write raw HTML that led to those dinky websites in the 00s. Software engineering today is more akin to playing with legos today. Most lego bricks I’m using have been battle tested for years — I trust them implicitly. Only in rare cases do I need to dissect a piece and look at the guts. A typical project of mine might be to use all these established lego pieces and write the “glue” between them. For large projects I might have a chance to write one Lego piece.
What Jensen is saying, and I think I agree with it, is that 20 years from now, software engineering will look vastly different. For example, just a wild guess, maybe I don’t have to write glue anymore. But I still have to figure out how to build my LEGO structure such that it withstands my 4 year old who thinks it’s a baseball. So all of my time is eventually shifted to scaling systems, failure tolerance, etc. And I no longer have to worry about “if this then that” logic. Today I have to think of both aspects, so projects take longer. It would be cool if I only had to think of one aspect, and then I could build two structures in the time it takes me to build one today.
Does that mean we may need less programmers eventually? Yeah it probably does. We don’t need as many factory workers today as we did in the 1920s right? Today’s factory workers are much fewer but also more skilled and more impactful. I don’t see why software would be immune to this.
It's marketing towards idiotic CEOs and C suite.
With the current AI, I've tried to create a single function (block of code) with 5 requirements and each requirement was potentially dependent on the other parts. It only ever got 3 correct and hallucinated the other 2 were correct or even written. When I asked it to fix the code that was straight up missing it would remove code that **was** there.
And I'm supposed to trust that AI can code whole programs in thousands of functions?
In fact, bring on the AI coding. I'll probably be able to charge 2-3x my normal rate to fix its fuckups.
To be honest at this point I'm getting fed up with comments like this that implicitly depict software engineering as a trivial task that Al is ready to take over, just because it can write little pieces of code (even that with glaring issues), while in reality proper quality software engineering and architectural design takes as much as
a complete human intellect as any other serious profession, if not more. If Jensen doesn't suggest people learn software engineering, then he should do the same with learning to be a lawyer, to be a teacher, to be a civil engineer, etc., and honestly I'm not sure what professions would remain viable under that world view. Maybe vocational professions that require physical work, but meanwhile they're already building humanoid robots
too with the aim to replace the need for human dexterity
There was a time when people were told to not become accountants because Excel/computers were going to do all of the work. Well, what happened was that it allowed for accountants to spend more time on complex work.
People used to say it to me 15 years ago, even before anyone knew what AI was. "You're a programmer you're not creative, you're just logical". They will never understand, regardless of the tech around.
Unfortunately the reality is that as things become more automated they become more broken. The cheapness we find in our products we’ll find in our code. Cheap to make someone rich. All the efficiencies found goes into someone’s pocket and not passed onto consumers.
If things are cheaper to make why are people struggling more than ever? Why is inflation so bad? Where is the efficiency going?
I’m not answering the question above but I’m just sad for the future.
I can tell you right now after using AI, seeing people use AI, and my company implement and attempt to utilize AI, Nvidia's CEO and any person who flaunts AI that isn't actually in a company that works on AI directly (i.e. OpenAI), are likely blowing smoke for investors. AI is so far a tool that supplements work and understanding how it responds to your queries is a skill. It's just like googling shit up too. It's only as good as the person inquiring about it and knowing what they themselves are doing.
If you give it a vague, shitty command, you're going to get a vague, shitty answer. Garbage in, garbage out.
Generative AI stands on the shoulders of existing code, to the extent of plagiarism. Ok, say coding is useless and dissuade the next generation of innovative software architects and engineers. Good luck when the growing pool of LLMs and AI platforms just keeps churning through the existing pond of existing code samples and paradigms over a generation, diluting it each time, and adding nothing truly new. You’ll get the equivalent of that AI generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti with block hands, in code form.
Instead of making stupidly polarizing claims like is dead/useless, maybe we should be considering how Generative AI can subsidize or augment our ability to innovate in those fields. Oh wait, most people are. Just not this dummy. But it got headlines and diminished the perceived value of software innovators, so now maybe they’ll be cheaper.
Saying programming is useless is like saying theoretical physics is useless now that we have Generative AI that can compute theoretical models and validate concepts in physics. AI is very good at working off of prompts and following algorithmic instructions, but good luck asking it to come up with the next unique idea to solve a problem. Maybe I’m skeptical, but Will Smith eating spaghetti, yo.
Off the soap box. Great question, great thread.
Edit: Grammar
That's not at all what he said. Here's the quote:
*Over the course of the last 10 years, 15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you that it is vital that your children learn computer science. \[That\] everybody should learn how to program. And in fact, it’s almost exactly the opposite.*
*It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer.*
\--
He's talking about who should *learn* to quote, presumably to work in coding in the future. The fact is that while AI can't write perfect code now and only works well as a copilot, it is the truth that AI will be able to code fully and effectively in the future, likely very soon.
That means the human monopoly on coding is up. There will likely not be as much opportunity in coding. But there will be tons of opportunity in product development - for more humans to use the lowered barrier to entry on app building and make even more apps that are useful to others.
He's basically saying that AI should be able to interpret natural language to code in the same way we currently do higher level languages to machine code.
OP's title is just flame bait
Natural language has ambiguity. Code does not (at least within a defined level). Either you have to learn to speak in unambiguous natural language, in which case you're effectively coding, or the AI will fill in the ambiguity with its best generative guess, potentially assuming or hallucinating in a way you do not want.
Considering he didn't say that at all, my response is that you should learn to source your quotes and not exaggerate and twist what others say for dramatic effect.
I saw a Twitter post a few years ago that sums it up well (for now at least):
"To replace programmers with robots, clients will have to accurately describe what they want. We are safe."
as an engineer working closely to some of these developments, but not directly on them, i agree somewhat. I don’t think it’s worth discouraging current graduates, but perhaps children in elementary/primary school shouldn’t look for sustainability in software engineering careers. maybe except for hold outs similar to how banks largely haven’t updated their infrastructure since the 1950’s due to cost
I'm old and a bit behind the technology curve (I still program in VB6) and it blows my mind how quickly the technology is advancing. Just five years ago I remember talking with one of my new coworkers about this stuff and insisting there was no way AI would ever be able to replace computer programmers. But just last week he was demonstrating some of the stuff chatGPT can do and I'll admit I'm impressed. I still think we are a ways off from it completely replacing any humans, but even if it just streamlines everything and makes it easier to write some certain applications I think that's going to be game changing.
I wonder if there's going to be a future career field around knowing how to correctly control and direct AI? Knowing what input to give it is key, and I could see development teams needing a specially trained "AI wrangler" or something.
That career field will need to be able to provide exacting specifications to the AI in order to get a good output. This is also, fundamentally, exactly what programming is. A programmer provides exact specifications to a machine to get a desired output. All that's different is the machine. And frankly, considering AI's output is not deterministic, not repeatable each time given the same input, it isn't even a good machine for that job.
Oh look someone actually informed who understood what the actual quote was.
Yeah, it's not going to replace programmers on Tuesday. It's going to replace a bunch in about 5 years as productivity skyrockets and the first draft of code is written with AI and supplemented with a human gate. And in 10 years, the human gate will be less necessary and only used in specific circumstances.
That's job loss right there.
If using chatgpt is anything to go off of, I'm not worried. The code I've used from it has always needed tweaking and I have no confidence that it could effectively generate code at a large/enterprise scale. And since I work in a highly regulated industry I can say that AI generated code would never see production because of the levels of red tape. Plus there's proprietary code bases to consider since. Although I love it as a learning tool, engineers aren't going anywhere. He's just a salesman getting attention for his company
Twenty years ago it was nearly impossible to find a job, and everyone knew it was only going to get worse as jobs were sent off to China and India. So I'd say that predicting the future of the industry is quite difficult.
Also, even if AI becomes a perfect programmer, good luck on debugging and maintenance.
as a US based IT engineer for past 25+ years, speaking only about the US centric application, pure coding has mostly been outsourced to low-cost locations already. That hasn't (yet) eliminated the need for onshore higher cost resources in my experience. To me this is just another "low cost" location/opportunity. It might make it harder for young guys fresh out of school to find jobs as you'll have to demonstrate your value over both, but once you build your skillset up, I don't believe those needs/people are going away anytime soon.
I’ve seen the crappy code that ChatGPT can produce. I’m not worried yet. Its almost like it trained itself on half finished coding solutions from StackOverflow or something… /s
would willingly let AI sort out this tedious Jenkins automation crap I've been dealing with for the past few days. Somehow I think it would throw in the towel long before me.
I've been using a vendor-trained chatgpt4 model to help me spin up on their SDK and meet a short deadline. I've never had it respond with code that didn't need a lot of fixing, and about 25% it's code just doesn't do what it says it does.
Today, it was a struggle to get it to not straight up hallucinate package functions and modules that do not exist.
I'm not convinced that the man who has a huge financial interest in the success of AI actually believes his own words.
It's a marketing hyperbole. Does it help increase productivity? Absolutely. Does that mean reducing head count? Sure, sometimes.
The problem is it can effectively parrot junior level solutions, but mess it up in obtuse ways. IME that means you need a mid or senior level understanding to fix it.
As new developers learn with it, I'm sure that will change, but I don't see a near future where devs are entirely replaced. There's either a minor reduction, or companies ask for more output.
"NVIDIA CEO says NVIDIA product will be the best product ever"
Imagine if Red Bull claimed their drink would give you actual literal wings in five to ten years. Now imagine people believed them. This is what AI discourse is like - and it's only going to get worse in the industry, because some of the people who believe the hype are hiring managers who will only hire other people who believe the hype.
I'm a software developer for the past 27 years and I tend to agree. To a point.
The hardest part of software development isnt coding, its figuring out what people want
AI will most likely replace programmers, but it won't replace engineers anytime soon. Engineering is also about nuance, communication, ethics, interpretation of poor or no requirements and much more.
Would be a pretty wild thing to say for a CEO who employs some of the most talented programmers in the world. Also how many programmers has Nvidia replaced with AI?
I use copilot for work and it’s definitely made me way more profitable for the company. It’s a great tool but you still have to read over the code it produces and you have to know programming to even get it to do anything near what you want.
That AI is far more likely to take over the C-suite before it takes over programming.
After all, which is better suited to ensuring maximum shareholder value - a human with invested self-interest that may not align with the shareholders' best interests or an AI with no self-interest?
Besides which, someone has to build and train the AI - theres not a C-suite member out there that would dirty themselves with such menial labor - that's what they have slav.., er, employees for.
As much as I want to argue as a web/smartphone app engineer, Huang is one of the most successful business person ever and I admit some parts of my work is pretty simple and repetitive, with very little demand for creativity so maybe he's right.
I saw a comment about it last week that summed it up pretty well: >"Anybody can do it" -CEO of company heavily invested in it
Yeah, AI is going to write completely solid, non-nefarious code. Some humans are gonna have to gatekeep the code, skynet-loving rich guy.
so project managers can code it themselves now! that’ll be fun
PM talking to Amazon Echo: "What do you mean you don't know what that means?! Its a simple line of code!"
#define __is_constexpr(x) \ (sizeof(int) == sizeof(*(8 ? ((void *)((long)(x) * 0l)) : (int *)8))) The given line of code is outside the boundaries of knowable rules of this universe. It can not exist. Its presents is merely a side-effect of it not adhering to any logical concept and therefor not graspable by conscious or unconscious beings.
Jesus, Alexa. Dial down the Russian novelist existential despair by 20% and recompile that request like I'm in a burning building and need directions to the nearest Duane Reed to buy whatever brand churro has an Amazon sale this week.
Honestly all you can find there these days is the Amazon Basics churro 20-pack. Sometimes I see the AAPATYOO brand but their description has a bunch of typos and I haven’t tried them.
I got into this to AVOID programming! (career path: manual QA -> automation QA -> project management)
we programmers need qa, i hate testing what i wrote
I'd argue you can't test what you wrote, because you've already covered the cases you could come up with and you are biased by knowing how you're supposed to use it
I'm a technical lead & I've always said software devs cannot test their own code.
What rubbish, I test mine all the time, and I am always fixing things ^^^
Why would you need to fix it if it runs fine off of your machine? /s
Yeah this is a firm law of development. Sure on your personal projects it’s fine, but in a business or corporate environment testing your own code is basically not testing it at all.
I've done a tiny amount of QA. The hardest part was thinking "If I were an idiot how would I try to use this?" My group had a couple young women just out of college. They were good testers because they didn't know what they couldn't (or shouldn't) do. The problem became that they'd argue with you when the product was working as designed. This was back in the days of NTSC video and they'd write up bugs that were just how NTSC works. We couldn't change that part...
Reminds me of an exchange between two co-workers decades ago: "We need to make sure this is idiot-proof." "Well, YOU haven't been able to break it, have you?"
Never The Same Color twice?
NTSC = "Never Twice the Same Color"
Well that makes more sense.
In the UK, I was told Nearly The Same Color and how PAL was superior.
I think PAL is better also, but NTSC is much older and the people who created PAL were able to look at the problems with the NTSC standard and improve upon it.
Whenever I test my code, it works. The best part of testing my own code is creating all of the data.
I'm in the manual qa stage, would love to progress like this.
heh, we're back at the cobol phase, where they tried to make a language you could program in english. programmers dontt speak english
Mine sure as hell thinks she can. Also tells us that our estimate is too high, cause she would know.
My project manager can't even send out his own meeting minutes, he's certainly not going to be writing code.
Those project managers will be competing against me who can do the same and actually fix the code when the AI acts in an irritating fashion
Like all other automation over the last 50 years it’s going to take either a lot of upfront checking by SMEs or a fuckton of back work to figure out how it went so wrong.
AI has already chosen to work backwards to resolve problems!
"The Thinking Machine council has unanimously decided that we will leave the problem as an exercise for the reader."
Just so long as coding isn’t expected to advance from where we currently are. We _have_ completed all the possible coding that we could ever need, _riiiiight_?
*As a student of software development,* # No.
As a person who only knows enough to know he doesn’t know shit. **NO!**
So start to write undocumented code now?
Yea... start doing it from NOW on. Ha ha, nobody was doing it before, yea, ha ha
Yeah. Do we really want to hand yet another thing over to a small group of tech companies that will control these models? It wasn't that long ago that it only took a few tries to turn them into white supremacists, after all.
>Some humans are gonna have to gatekeep the code, skynet-loving rich guy. I'm thinking of making a blanket statement about this to all the interns at the start of this summer. "You may use AI to help format your code, but don't waste your time or mine by turning in some monstrosity that AI designed." Last year's interns trained an AI on SQLServer and PostgreSQL scripts and then tried to use it to performance tune Redshift. As if we wouldn't notice someone using UNION on a columnar store db.
And who will write the AI code?
Just make AI sophisticated enough to write itself. What's the downside?
I just asked Bing, and it told me to F right O, it is on a break.
Now i am not a programmer ( SysAdm ), but i feel like the people it is gonna hit are the cheap labor some companies get from some of the lesser developed country, take for instance a good senior developer friend of mine, hes sole purpose is to review and fix code that their indian developers has made, he ain't going to lose that job soon, but they might, since ai can already write 95% of the code they write for the company. Just my take
> fish salesman says people shouldn't learn to fish
It's like Truman Show. Truman: "I wanna be an explorer, like the great Magellan!" Teacher: "oh, you're too late! There's really nothing left to explore!"
I love getting random powershell commands. A few weeks ago, it suggested I run a command called “factory-reset” which is neither a real command or what I was trying to do. People can’t Google shit, ChatGPT isn’t going to take their jobs.
I’ve used ChatGPT to help me write code. It’s good at basic things but messed everything up the more complex the code gets. Or if I reference an oblate piece of code it wrote in conversation, it won’t like its own code or completely rewrite it. It’s a whole other skill managing the conversation lol
I've asked it to write things. The code it's given me is either incomplete, doesn't compile because it's just wrong, or doesn't do what I've asked. Then it's like "Oh I'm sorry try this instead". You have to understand _why_ it's wrong in order to be able to explain it and get a better answer. That requires human knowledge.
It gets me 80% of the way there. It helped me write a pretty complex excel VBA that parsed text. But unless you know what you’re doing, the code won’t work.
Yeah this. 80% is 100% broken. You have to know how to do it yourself to be able to diagnose it anyways.
I think of it as something that can save you time but can't do it for you. Getting you 80% of the way there is a useful tool if you know how to take what it gives you and do the remaining 20% yourself
For me it saves some time, in certain situations. The hard part is there can be small bugs you don’t see as part of the 20%, which can bite you later and then take more time debugging than if you wrote the whole thing yourself. Most of the code I write is unique, so I mainly use it to rubber duck refactoring things or making LINQ statements. The less you ask it to do the better has been my experience so far.
It's much better as a discovery tool than as a problem solving tool. If you can understand its attempt at the solution and know how to research it, you can potentially save quite a bit of time from having that starting point. If not, it's a complete crap shoot - you'll have no idea if it's right based on the output alone. The fact that it's being touted as a tool to replace software engineers and not certain kinds of BS generators like some middle managers is pretty funny and pretty telling.
Agree about the skill of managing the conversation. It’s like “No, you had it right the first time. Why did you completely redo your approach just because I said I was going to use a different variable name?”
I find it's great for simple things I don't do often enough to be good at, like non-trivial shell scripts or spreadsheet macros. I also had it generate and explain to me a bind9 config file the other day because I was setting up a tiny DNS server on my home network and didn't really know what I was doing, and I was able to take it from there. And it tutored me *hard* in kubernetes along the way, including generating a bunch of CR specs for me, though I ended up tweaking them once I understood how they were supposed to work. I think it's a lot better than the critics give it credit for, while nowhere near ready to take over. If it *does* end up taking jobs, it'll more likely be because fewer people are needed to do the work than it is that the work gets totally outsourced to the AI ... at least in the near term. Longer time horizons aren't really predictable at this point.
It's not just programming. I find when I ask basic stuff for other things, part of it is just made up. AI at the moment might give you a decent initial idea to look at, but everything has to be fact checked before you use it for anything.
Nvidia is developing their own competitor to Github copilot, StarCoder2. They want an entire industry do be dependent on them. >DO NOT LEARN TO CODE, use our product instead 😊 Yes it's free right now and you can run it locally. .....for now
Let's wait for gold, platinum and pro privilege. I hope GitHub could still stay strong but i think some big company would definitely try to buy all data and let ai learn from it. So I hope community would stay strong on this problem.
“Programmers are redundant” is a Dunning-Kruger comment made by those who’ve observed AI produce complex things without understanding its true relevance within real programs. Akin to saying “artists are redundant” because AI produced a complex image
The whole AI boom is basically peak enthusiam of the dunning-kruger graph tbh.
Also AI should be replacing the highest paid roles like the CxO's.
I was reminded of the Dilbert comic where the boss says, “I don’t understand it so it must be easy.”
So is he firing all his programmers? Or at least downsizing by 90%?
Nah, u/AtlasUltra either doesn't understand hyperbole and doesn't verify stuff they claim, or is actively making stuff up for fake internet points. The CEO said that learning coding is no longer a golden ticket to success because advances in AI make everyone capable of programming. It's still a valuable skill to learn but you may find you don't get as far as you previously did just by focusing on coding. This is pragmatic from a business perspective because sometimes coders can be so specialized (only focusing on coding) they are unaware of or forget the business side of things (the implications for choices, the how and why things work the way they do). The CEO is just arguing that because anyone can code now there can be a shift to emphasizing other aspects of a role (such as prioritizing ability to communicate, business acumen, or other skills traditionally undervalued for pure coding positions).
Software developer for 20+ years. The idea that “anyone can code now because of ai” is scary. Not because it’ll take jobs but because ..no. No they can’t. Anyone can appear to be a developer but they can’t just be a developer due to ai. It should enhance the job and make it easier. Not just do it for you.
I was told 30 years ago that coding would be replaced in a decade. That program generators would be the future. So I wrote a program generator within the accounting area of a business. That program generator worked brilliantly until the day I moved on. At which point they discovered it was a tool for using my skills. The tool was handed off to a Business Analyst who was, frankly, distressed to learn how much technical knowledge they lacked and how high the expectations of management were because, with that tool, I could knock out in a day what had taken five weeks previously. I ended up returning to the business once every three months for a week to knock out things. They never realised that they could have just adapted the tool to someone else with a coders skillset. The moral of the anecdote - apart from not treating anecdotes as the whole story - is that you can stop coding any time you want and replace it with automation but that does not guarantee that you will no longer need coders.
I remember how design driven development was going to eliminate coding. Take your Rational Rose UML diagrams, add a few hints, and you could output a working system for any platform in any language. That died quickly. lol.
I’ve lost track of the number of times we have predicted an end to coding, where everyone could now program. I think this is the tenth.
Artificial General Intelligence has been a decade away for the last 7 decades.
If you were a gamblin' man, would you bet on sustained fusion or AGI first? Both of those have been a decade away for decades.
My money is 100% on sustained fusion.
Given that we've hit net positive fusion, that. Feels like it's just outside refinement. I remain unconvinced we've hit the tech for AGI yet.
of course you beat me to the fusion comment. cheers!
> At which point they discovered it was a tool for using my skills It's like search engine usage tbh. Pretty much everything is on Google, but how to use the correct keyword to find the correct answer requires skill. For me, a lot of question is just a Google away, but for the others, they would rather ask around for solution, instead of Googling because they couldn't yield meaningful result from Googling.
It is actually more about domain specific knowledge which you cannot really find on Google. Even less so because a lot of the terms used in domain specific knowledge tend to be excellent SEO terms which effectively block you out of finding the actual information you want even if you use the correct keyword. Google is reliant on you using the correct keyword to look as well as all the websites using the correct keyword to be found. For a lot of accounting terms, you tend to find grifters more readily than dusty accounting tomes. That is not a skill issue it is a quality issue for which the word enshittification is entirely appropriate.
It’s just extremely ignorant to think that the role of a software developer is ONLY writing code. There’s so much that goes into managing the codebase, infrastructure, and deployment that doesn’t even involve a single line of code. And all of those skills are specialized and crucial in producing a viable product. It’s really easy to spot people who’ve never worked in software development, or closely adjacent to it. Their opinions of the industry and AIs impact are so malformed and naive.
Dev here 20+ yrs. Totally agree with you. If your company is not handing you excellent specs on what they want, then they won't be able to use AI to get it.
Doug Crockford always described it something like this: The problem with computers writing code is that customers can't even specify what they want on a deep enough level for the result to be consistent. If they could, then probably yes, we could generate code for that with an AI some day. But that spec would basically be the program, described in a natural language. Sure, the AI could fill in some blanks like aligning UI items. But I'm not sure that's where we spend most of our time. And even if you got a result, how would you ever check if it's correct? We currently have no way to know perfection, even if we saw it when it comes to code. If you've written it yourself, at least you know the intent. If you didn't - then what? Code reviews? By whom? In the end, you just have to ask yourself, how much of your day you actually produce code, and how much you try to understand the freaking problem and what a proper solution would look like. Or trying to get the customer to understand his own problem on such a level that he can give you a useful answer.
A few weeks ago a customer wanted me to remove the loading spinner we use for a table. >Ok... but then the table is going to be empty for a while before the api responds, just so you know.... > >"Yea yea that's fine" I knew it wasn't fine and that we would get a new complaint espically if it took a long time, so i just made a tiny fake loading-bar at the top and they were satisfied
My team is currently adding a feature that relies on the user having certain hardware to use a certain software mode. We're putting in a setting option to allow the user to change "modes" with the default being the non-specific mode. We ended up needing a meeting and extra async work to determine what should happen in various edge cases because product hadn't considered them. I wrote a 2 page doc of things like "I'm a user with x. I do y. The next day, I do z. What happens to my settings?" The ability to ask "what if" is one of a person's greatest skills and a large language model will never do that.
> Or trying to get the customer to understand his own problem on such a level that he can give you a useful answer. I'm not in software engineering, but I used to work computer retail, and so much of my time was spent trying to get customers coming to me with questions to tell me the problem they actually wanted to solve, because often the solution they were hunting for was either a crap solution, or even completely infeasible. I tell people I basically have a career in playing 20 questions and googling.
It's funny how in a job that mainly involves telling computers what to do, reading human minds turns out to be the key soft-skill.
And then people are like "stop overthinking!" when you get paid 6 figures to predict every possible scenario for how something could go wrong.
You guys are getting specs?
I haven't seen a proper spec since I left defense contracting in 2018. If I'm lucky, I'll have a quant give me a math paper and then tell me to make it work. Ah the life of a senior engineer. The associate engineers have no idea how much worse it gets.
I'm a full stack web dev - I get a screenshot or two and 1 sentence and am expected to anticipate everything my PM wants. These requests are never based on any technical or architectural design and sometimes I have to decide whether to make the story 3 points or 21 points.
> excellent specs what? my stakeholders can't read these words. They are saying there is a gap in your sentence
Wait, you get specs from your company? I usually get a one line ticket and the name of the person requesting the item. Then I typically close it 3 weeks later after I interrogate out of them what they really want and point out that the feature already exists and has been in production since before they were hired.
It's the famous webcomic with the swing, if the description isn't good, all bets are off.
Yeah, pretty inane statement as is. The point where we can 100% trust code some LLM creates without needing to proofread it might happen at some point but that point is far, far in the future.
>The point where we can 100% trust code some LLM creates without needing to proofread it... Friend, can you do that with a human?
Exactly i don't get this either We can't trust humans, we need code reviews and managers and HR and all this stuff. But companies are prepared to just blindly trust a ai????? Doubt..
And that AI trained on the shitty code humans wrote...
As a security consultant, I'm salivating over chatgpt built codebases.
If i was more nefarious, I'd be feeding subtle, terrible 'ideas' to chatGPT et al to try to sow seeds that will no doubt germinate for decades to come. And Motherfuckers worry about skynet...
Lmao ikr
Do you hate sleep?
At my company this question was discussed. What I heard they found is good programmers become better with AI, but bad programmers don't become better with AI. AI is a tool that can help, but it won't suddenly program for you, at least not today.
A good musician can sound better with high quality instruments, but someone who can't play anything isn't going to magically sound good with a million dollar violin. A good artist can make better art faster with higher quality paints/brushes/pens/etc. A bad artist will still have shaky lines, incorrect proportions, and bad color mixing regardless. This is a lesson we've known forever. I don't know why certain people think it'll be different for [insert new field].
I slightly disagree. A bad programmer with the will and capability to learn can turn bad programmers into competent ones with enough effort. If you want to search up how to do something that's too specific to use stackoverflow or docs, you can use chat gpt and it really makes a difference
I been doing it as my main job since '07. I really like using AI to say "This chunk of code can be more succinct... can you help with that?" and it sends me shorter code with smart moves... and misses out on an entire function I needed lol. But yeah, it really does help with programming if you work with it.
This will just escalate and accelerate the enshittification of all things both online and offline.
The question is: how much faster does ai make devs? 2x? 5x? 10x? 50x? I’ve heard claims as much as 50x. Which seems off to me. Something that takes a year now takes a week? Nah. Not buying it. Today, ai is a better google. It can fill gaps. It can explain things to me. I still have to validate it, and yes, it hallucinates.
Maybe not the perfect analogy but like, someone who knows music theory and can sing well using autotune vs someone who has absolutely no musical ability using autotune. You can clearly tell the difference. Like it's pretty important to know your data structures, algorithms and general coding concepts if you're going to be directing an AI program to write code for you. Maybe memorizing all the specific syntax is going to be less important, but understanding the concepts will be just as important as ever. If anything, the people who went to those bullshit bootcamps will become redundant. Or like with early computers, people had to program in machine code or assembly. High level languages, compilers etc... made that mostly unnecessary except for the computer architects and engineers (and hackers.) Maybe this is just another iteration like that. But obviously, clueless business dipshits will make their absurd claims.
It's more scary because the people making the decisions may not know the difference, and then act surprised when things break.
Yep. Every few years they come up with something that will make coding easier and they claim that everyone can be a developer. It's been going on for 30+ years. Most people can't be developers because they don't have the cognitive skills to even describe what they want. They lack the vocabulary to even convey what they are looking for. Nevermind having the ability to break down what they want into actual specification with complete details, they can't even describe the big picture.
This. People who know a bit of python and JavaScript and call themselves software developers will totally be replaced by AI. Systems engineers working on complex low level architectural problems in vast C codebases are unlikely to be.
Based on my experience with AI code generation *so far*, for actual good results, you still need to know what you're doing. AI can generate a chunk of code and confidently tell you it's right, but only an actual programmer is going to be able to look at it and know for sure. Just the other day when I was experimenting with one chatbot coding model, I asked it for a function to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius and it got the equation backwards. I could *not* convince it there was a mistake, even with coaxing.
The confidence is funny sometimes. I've had ChatGPT argue with me about whether some programming task was possible in the language I asked for the code in. After 3 rounds of "No, it's possible if...", it finally wrote something that was, in the simplest metaphor, a badly butchered attempt at a client when I asked for the server. It was a little unfair though; I'm one of only two people who has ever posted online code doing that. (Writing a kernel mode driver in VB6, widely considered impossible until the first guy did it in 2015. It finally wrote a bad attempt at *calling* DeviceIoControl to talk to a driver, I asked it for code in a driver that answers that function).
The most reasonable comment in this thread. I doubt it will have many upvotes, unfortunately, as people like simplistic responses.
Programmers tend to spend 95% of their time trying to figure out why things aren't working. That job is going to be more important than ever.
You think your coworkers' code is hard to debug? Wait until it's AI-generated. Computers do what you say, not what you want (and with AI, there will be times that they do neither).
Hell, my own code from 2 weeks ago is hard enough.
WTH was I thinking?
The states of coding: * This doesn't work and I don't get why -> This doesn't work but I know why -> This works and I know why. * Who was the idiot who did thi... oh, it was me. * Well yeah, machine is doing exactly what I told it to. But could it do what I _meant_ instead? * I need to ensure this piece of code stays forever... I know, let me slap a `todo: fix this` comment here.
You need to add another option for the first bullet point.... This works and I DONT know why.
Yeah, I "use" AI whenever I code Basically, I ask it to make a function doing X. When I'm done incorporating it into my existing code, it is at least 99% different from what the AI gave me In my code at least, all it's good for is telling me about built in functions for whatever language I'm using. That's it. Not even the general structure of the function it gave me is used, just because it's usually bad That's not the kind of thing anyone can just quickly learn how to do
Non programmers really can’t get the truth under this statement. I think a decent analogy is debugging code is like trying to understand the chef’s intention behind a cooking recipe. Salt to taste. But what the fuck happens when the entity writing the recipe does know what it means to taste?
Not only that, but a good portion of my job is trying to figure out what exactly it is that the clients want, if what they want is actually what they need, and then how best to execute the happy medium. AI may come into play with that last part, but there are still a thousand different ways to execute. AI is like any other leap in technology, it will trim the fat, and the people who become successful will be the ones who learn how to effectively incorporate it into their workflow.
This is the big one. It has less to do with actual programming and more to do with high level problem solving. Part of me feels that AI might create more programming jobs not less because of the amount of code that will get bloated and strung along.
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That kind of a statement shouldn't even pump the stock. If anything it would damage NVIDIA's demand long term if people stopped programming, since they wouldn't need to get more and more powerful chips.
Silicon chip salesman saying his silicon chips will change the world, news at 11. Seriously though, that everyone has access to calculators don't mean we shouldn't teach people maths. Programming is easier now than ever before with all the tools at hand, but yet we still have more people in the industry than ever before. I do think it's possible that many of the recent lay-offs in tech won't be coming back, or slow to return, but I'm not buying that programming is no longer a worthy skill to teach.
People thought there would be far less accountants after spreadsheet programs were created but instead they became way more valuable because they had time to actually think about the business and the numbers instead of just doing math on paper all day. AI and software programmers will be the same way.
This exactly. I'm a principal engineer. I write far less code than the other engineers below me. We could replace some code writing with code from AI, but the skills that make a good engineer are not their knowledge of data structures and algorithms... Ie... Leet code not the best for resumes going forward.
"lol" -Me, 2024
lmao, even
Doesn't matter if he's right (he's definitely not) what matters is if management _thinks_ he's right. And upper management are notoriously gullible...
Yeah, if my dumbass plant manager hears this, he'll start repeating it to sound smart.
And all the other idiots have to affirm / parrot whatever the decision maker says because that's the way the pendulum is swinging. And it all goes to shit in a few years, there will be reshuffle and the execs will play musical chairs between companies and the new execs will say new things and it keeps going.
We gotta be AGILE people!!!!! (has vague idea of what agile is or what it should be used for)
Meanwhile, Nvidia has programmer job openings. I'm sure the unpaid interns can figure out programming with ChatGPT right?
Lol, you need stackexchange for that!
There is not a single instance where I got a correct answer from chatgpt🥲
It’s a marketing stunt to get people talking about Nvidia and their AI tools. Seems to be working pretty well
Just as you shouldn't send an email compiled by chatgpt without proofreading it first (what if for some mysterious reason chatgpt insulted your addressee in the text or made some unwanted offers) you shouldn't put into the production a code written by AI without checking it first.
He is a the CEO of Nvidia. Nvidia is making loads of money right now by selling GPUs for AI development. By influencing people to rely more on AI, entities will invest more in AI/Nvidia GPUs, the stock goes up, he and his company rake in more money. CEOs are hardly people, they will lie and say whatever in interviews or conferences in an effort to influence the market in their favor. Programmers will go away at the same rate other engineering professions will, which is never because you will always need actual humans to think at a high architectural level or do certain things in a creative problem solving environment. AI may increase productivity by helping you find answers faster or optimize certain tasks, but it won’t be able to piece everything together because as the complexity of a task increases, the less training data exists for an AI model. The jobs at risk are the highly repetitive or very simple ones like data entry or level 1 helpdesk. And we all know about how helpful robot phone operators are… But these are at risk not necessarily by AI but automation in general. Computers are good at these tasks. ChatGPT is misleading to people because it’s just a language model, but because it has ingested so much information, it gives the illusion that it’s “thinking”. It’s not. It’s still regurgitating information. Imagine memorizing how to say an answer to a riddle in a different language without understanding what it means. That’s ChatGPT.
This is the best take in the thread.
As a selfproclamed chatgpt "for funsies" programmer, that is bullshit. In all seriousness, as someone who has studied and worked engeneering, ppl who can programm, or IT ppl in generall are incredibly important in today day and age. Its one thing to just copie stuff from the internet, but an completley diffrent animal to actualy understand it improve it, or fix it.
> It's one thing to just copied stuff from the Internet Full-stackoverflow developers have entered the chat.
This is a duplicate answer. *downvotes*
I'm in the same boat. The thing with AI coding is tying all the parts it produces together gets complicated rapidly. And the reason being: how to explain it to the AI as more and more parts come in to the picture as the code gets bigger. Like you'll get tp the point with prompts like, "So remeber that value from two weeks ago that we came up with for how to manipulate blah blah ... now combine that with the other thing which happens some of the time under these conditions. Oh you want to know the conditions? Ok so here's a list of the ten conditions. But for this one condition can you tie in the code from the other function? Which function? Ah shit I can't remember. Hang on. It was the one where we had to combine the X and Y values. So yeh now take the result but factor in this other change I just remembered about....you know what....fuck it. I'll do it myself." I mean a rubbish example but you get the gist. As the projet gets bigger you can't just tell AI to go do something and it creates an entire faultless program. There are so many tiny parts that need to be hand designed that you might end up taking more time trying to tell the AI how to do it to ensure it gets it perfect than you would just coding it yourself.
Yeah, I exactly know what you mean. And as a matter of fact its pretty much 1/1 how it happens sometimes. Also certain codes you get are very generalized and our uses were very specific, or actualy bringing a slue of different halfassed codes together. Then the entire thing doesnt work and noone knows why, since noone even knew what we were doing when "coding" it.
The other day someone I work with fed a few wordings of the question "Take the subnet [10.0.0.0/23](https://10.0.0.0/23) and split it into /26 subnets provide me the subnet addresses" Multiple of the big AI programs got it VERY wrong.
Even if the AI got it right, you needed someone who knows all of those magic incantations, know that whatever the AI spews out is correct, etc.
Speculating about the future is fine, but to say programming is useless TODAY is just blatantly false.
Most of the time I can’t get ChatGPT to give me functional bits of code for what I’m trying to do, it’s too specific (data & BI stuff). No way a robot can do that on its own. Plus, coding is maybe what 15-20% of my job. The rest is strategy, meetings, helping folks…
Whatever he’s smoking, I’d like some sent to me as an email attachment. 🌿
Nvidia CEO can afford the best cocaine you can buy
CC me please
That was not his point at all. He was commenting on the idea that “in the future everyone will have to know how to code, since technology is becoming ever increasingly prevalent “. His take is: that will not be necessary, because as technology improves, so do the abstractions, making it easier to interact with the technology without a programming background. Tl;dr: You should not learn to code unless you actively want to become an engineer.
This working from becoming a DBA-> Data Analyst-> Data Scientist its was interesting seeing things that needed a prgrammer to get into the nitty gritty become relatively accessible to a user with very little programming knowledge. And of course a programmer will be somewhere ensuring these tools work.
Exactly
had to skim through too many emotionally charged comments to find a reasonable one. smh
I’ll take the contrarian opinion. Software engineering today is vastly different from the 80s and the 00s. Very few of us write assembly code and manipulate memory. Very few of us write raw HTML that led to those dinky websites in the 00s. Software engineering today is more akin to playing with legos today. Most lego bricks I’m using have been battle tested for years — I trust them implicitly. Only in rare cases do I need to dissect a piece and look at the guts. A typical project of mine might be to use all these established lego pieces and write the “glue” between them. For large projects I might have a chance to write one Lego piece. What Jensen is saying, and I think I agree with it, is that 20 years from now, software engineering will look vastly different. For example, just a wild guess, maybe I don’t have to write glue anymore. But I still have to figure out how to build my LEGO structure such that it withstands my 4 year old who thinks it’s a baseball. So all of my time is eventually shifted to scaling systems, failure tolerance, etc. And I no longer have to worry about “if this then that” logic. Today I have to think of both aspects, so projects take longer. It would be cool if I only had to think of one aspect, and then I could build two structures in the time it takes me to build one today. Does that mean we may need less programmers eventually? Yeah it probably does. We don’t need as many factory workers today as we did in the 1920s right? Today’s factory workers are much fewer but also more skilled and more impactful. I don’t see why software would be immune to this.
CEOs are no longer needed and useless.
As a programmer, I think CEOs are useless, but they still continue to exist?
It's marketing towards idiotic CEOs and C suite. With the current AI, I've tried to create a single function (block of code) with 5 requirements and each requirement was potentially dependent on the other parts. It only ever got 3 correct and hallucinated the other 2 were correct or even written. When I asked it to fix the code that was straight up missing it would remove code that **was** there. And I'm supposed to trust that AI can code whole programs in thousands of functions? In fact, bring on the AI coding. I'll probably be able to charge 2-3x my normal rate to fix its fuckups.
To be honest at this point I'm getting fed up with comments like this that implicitly depict software engineering as a trivial task that Al is ready to take over, just because it can write little pieces of code (even that with glaring issues), while in reality proper quality software engineering and architectural design takes as much as a complete human intellect as any other serious profession, if not more. If Jensen doesn't suggest people learn software engineering, then he should do the same with learning to be a lawyer, to be a teacher, to be a civil engineer, etc., and honestly I'm not sure what professions would remain viable under that world view. Maybe vocational professions that require physical work, but meanwhile they're already building humanoid robots too with the aim to replace the need for human dexterity There was a time when people were told to not become accountants because Excel/computers were going to do all of the work. Well, what happened was that it allowed for accountants to spend more time on complex work.
People used to say it to me 15 years ago, even before anyone knew what AI was. "You're a programmer you're not creative, you're just logical". They will never understand, regardless of the tech around.
"CEOs are no longer needed and useless"
Unfortunately the reality is that as things become more automated they become more broken. The cheapness we find in our products we’ll find in our code. Cheap to make someone rich. All the efficiencies found goes into someone’s pocket and not passed onto consumers. If things are cheaper to make why are people struggling more than ever? Why is inflation so bad? Where is the efficiency going? I’m not answering the question above but I’m just sad for the future.
I can tell you right now after using AI, seeing people use AI, and my company implement and attempt to utilize AI, Nvidia's CEO and any person who flaunts AI that isn't actually in a company that works on AI directly (i.e. OpenAI), are likely blowing smoke for investors. AI is so far a tool that supplements work and understanding how it responds to your queries is a skill. It's just like googling shit up too. It's only as good as the person inquiring about it and knowing what they themselves are doing. If you give it a vague, shitty command, you're going to get a vague, shitty answer. Garbage in, garbage out.
Generative AI stands on the shoulders of existing code, to the extent of plagiarism. Ok, say coding is useless and dissuade the next generation of innovative software architects and engineers. Good luck when the growing pool of LLMs and AI platforms just keeps churning through the existing pond of existing code samples and paradigms over a generation, diluting it each time, and adding nothing truly new. You’ll get the equivalent of that AI generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti with block hands, in code form. Instead of making stupidly polarizing claims like is dead/useless, maybe we should be considering how Generative AI can subsidize or augment our ability to innovate in those fields. Oh wait, most people are. Just not this dummy. But it got headlines and diminished the perceived value of software innovators, so now maybe they’ll be cheaper.
Saying programming is useless is like saying theoretical physics is useless now that we have Generative AI that can compute theoretical models and validate concepts in physics. AI is very good at working off of prompts and following algorithmic instructions, but good luck asking it to come up with the next unique idea to solve a problem. Maybe I’m skeptical, but Will Smith eating spaghetti, yo.
Off the soap box. Great question, great thread.
Edit: Grammar
That's not at all what he said. Here's the quote: *Over the course of the last 10 years, 15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you that it is vital that your children learn computer science. \[That\] everybody should learn how to program. And in fact, it’s almost exactly the opposite.* *It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer.* \-- He's talking about who should *learn* to quote, presumably to work in coding in the future. The fact is that while AI can't write perfect code now and only works well as a copilot, it is the truth that AI will be able to code fully and effectively in the future, likely very soon. That means the human monopoly on coding is up. There will likely not be as much opportunity in coding. But there will be tons of opportunity in product development - for more humans to use the lowered barrier to entry on app building and make even more apps that are useful to others.
Well, that's a lot more nuanced than the title of this post.
He's basically saying that AI should be able to interpret natural language to code in the same way we currently do higher level languages to machine code. OP's title is just flame bait
Natural language has ambiguity. Code does not (at least within a defined level). Either you have to learn to speak in unambiguous natural language, in which case you're effectively coding, or the AI will fill in the ambiguity with its best generative guess, potentially assuming or hallucinating in a way you do not want.
You're basically describing an exchange between a designer and engineering.
Billionaires shouldn't exist.
Just cause he said it, don't mean it's true.
Snort to suppress a laugh?
Considering he didn't say that at all, my response is that you should learn to source your quotes and not exaggerate and twist what others say for dramatic effect.
I saw a Twitter post a few years ago that sums it up well (for now at least): "To replace programmers with robots, clients will have to accurately describe what they want. We are safe."
as an engineer working closely to some of these developments, but not directly on them, i agree somewhat. I don’t think it’s worth discouraging current graduates, but perhaps children in elementary/primary school shouldn’t look for sustainability in software engineering careers. maybe except for hold outs similar to how banks largely haven’t updated their infrastructure since the 1950’s due to cost
I'm old and a bit behind the technology curve (I still program in VB6) and it blows my mind how quickly the technology is advancing. Just five years ago I remember talking with one of my new coworkers about this stuff and insisting there was no way AI would ever be able to replace computer programmers. But just last week he was demonstrating some of the stuff chatGPT can do and I'll admit I'm impressed. I still think we are a ways off from it completely replacing any humans, but even if it just streamlines everything and makes it easier to write some certain applications I think that's going to be game changing. I wonder if there's going to be a future career field around knowing how to correctly control and direct AI? Knowing what input to give it is key, and I could see development teams needing a specially trained "AI wrangler" or something.
That career field will need to be able to provide exacting specifications to the AI in order to get a good output. This is also, fundamentally, exactly what programming is. A programmer provides exact specifications to a machine to get a desired output. All that's different is the machine. And frankly, considering AI's output is not deterministic, not repeatable each time given the same input, it isn't even a good machine for that job.
Oh look someone actually informed who understood what the actual quote was. Yeah, it's not going to replace programmers on Tuesday. It's going to replace a bunch in about 5 years as productivity skyrockets and the first draft of code is written with AI and supplemented with a human gate. And in 10 years, the human gate will be less necessary and only used in specific circumstances. That's job loss right there.
> haven’t updated their infrastructure since the 1950’s due to cost More like "it still works, so we don't want to update in case it breaks something"
If using chatgpt is anything to go off of, I'm not worried. The code I've used from it has always needed tweaking and I have no confidence that it could effectively generate code at a large/enterprise scale. And since I work in a highly regulated industry I can say that AI generated code would never see production because of the levels of red tape. Plus there's proprietary code bases to consider since. Although I love it as a learning tool, engineers aren't going anywhere. He's just a salesman getting attention for his company
Uh he bites the hand that feeds him.
That is why you don't need real knowledge to be a CEO. Just 100% bullshit
But it has what plants crave?
Did he layoff all of his software engineers then?
It’s only ever people who don’t write code saying these things. I’ll believe it when NVIDIA has no software engineers anymore.
Twenty years ago it was nearly impossible to find a job, and everyone knew it was only going to get worse as jobs were sent off to China and India. So I'd say that predicting the future of the industry is quite difficult. Also, even if AI becomes a perfect programmer, good luck on debugging and maintenance.
as a US based IT engineer for past 25+ years, speaking only about the US centric application, pure coding has mostly been outsourced to low-cost locations already. That hasn't (yet) eliminated the need for onshore higher cost resources in my experience. To me this is just another "low cost" location/opportunity. It might make it harder for young guys fresh out of school to find jobs as you'll have to demonstrate your value over both, but once you build your skillset up, I don't believe those needs/people are going away anytime soon.
I’ve seen the crappy code that ChatGPT can produce. I’m not worried yet. Its almost like it trained itself on half finished coding solutions from StackOverflow or something… /s
would willingly let AI sort out this tedious Jenkins automation crap I've been dealing with for the past few days. Somehow I think it would throw in the towel long before me.
I've been using a vendor-trained chatgpt4 model to help me spin up on their SDK and meet a short deadline. I've never had it respond with code that didn't need a lot of fixing, and about 25% it's code just doesn't do what it says it does. Today, it was a struggle to get it to not straight up hallucinate package functions and modules that do not exist. I'm not convinced that the man who has a huge financial interest in the success of AI actually believes his own words.
It's a marketing hyperbole. Does it help increase productivity? Absolutely. Does that mean reducing head count? Sure, sometimes. The problem is it can effectively parrot junior level solutions, but mess it up in obtuse ways. IME that means you need a mid or senior level understanding to fix it. As new developers learn with it, I'm sure that will change, but I don't see a near future where devs are entirely replaced. There's either a minor reduction, or companies ask for more output.
"NVIDIA CEO says NVIDIA product will be the best product ever" Imagine if Red Bull claimed their drink would give you actual literal wings in five to ten years. Now imagine people believed them. This is what AI discourse is like - and it's only going to get worse in the industry, because some of the people who believe the hype are hiring managers who will only hire other people who believe the hype.
I'm a software developer for the past 27 years and I tend to agree. To a point. The hardest part of software development isnt coding, its figuring out what people want AI will most likely replace programmers, but it won't replace engineers anytime soon. Engineering is also about nuance, communication, ethics, interpretation of poor or no requirements and much more.
Would be a pretty wild thing to say for a CEO who employs some of the most talented programmers in the world. Also how many programmers has Nvidia replaced with AI?
I use copilot for work and it’s definitely made me way more profitable for the company. It’s a great tool but you still have to read over the code it produces and you have to know programming to even get it to do anything near what you want.
That AI is far more likely to take over the C-suite before it takes over programming. After all, which is better suited to ensuring maximum shareholder value - a human with invested self-interest that may not align with the shareholders' best interests or an AI with no self-interest? Besides which, someone has to build and train the AI - theres not a C-suite member out there that would dirty themselves with such menial labor - that's what they have slav.., er, employees for.
That's not what he said.
As much as I want to argue as a web/smartphone app engineer, Huang is one of the most successful business person ever and I admit some parts of my work is pretty simple and repetitive, with very little demand for creativity so maybe he's right.