LLMs should be used for their original purpose: Processing language, not used to generate code. Coding should stay a human activity.
That ability to see the patterns in language, particularly the ability to distill semantic meaning and make (reasonable, if imperfect) translations from one language to a variety of others, is incredibly useful in software development activities, which are basically the task of translating natural language requests into code - usually through a multi-step process of: requirements definition, design specification, application development, test development, and constant review to ensure that all those steps are in-sync, describing the same thing.
continuing to invest in humans
Always.
teaching the craft in ways that help get new programmers up to speed faster.
I’m tempted to make a “better buggy whip maker” crack here…
Anthropic literally trained on copyrighted material without permission and could be prompted to produce author’s material. It’s a bit different than a Student quoting an author.
Yeah, so Anthropic didn’t pay for legitimate textbooks when they went to school, they bought cheap, illegal, Asian photocopies instead… wrong, sure. How do you make it right now? Lobotomize the students who read illegally copied books? Fine their parents for everything they are worth? Or, hold the students liable and garnish their wages in perpetuity?
big corporations are trying to replace their entire staff with just LLMs, which cannot write code, maintain code, and update it properly without a person being involved to audit it.
As Forrest says: stupid is as stupid does.
humans need to fully investigate and verify if the LLM detected an anomaly or not
Yeah, and once detected bugs and vulnerabilities (especially those with proof of concept exploits) are really easy to verify - and people who skip that step deserve all the ridicule and disrespect they can get, because they’re ridiculously disrespecting the people they’re reporting supposed bugs and vulnerabilities to if they haven’t at least verified they’re actual and not hallucinated.
publishing a fix based on human written code alone from there. The LLM cannot be involved further at that point, as deskilling is an ever-present danger with those things.
Here I diverge from your thinking. Deskilling has been an ever-present danger since promotion to management was invented. Some managers retain their skills, others follow the Peter Principle ever upward until they’re beyond their actual abilities. The need for skills remains, and I doubt computer coding knowledge will be vanishing just because it’s gotten easier to do it faster and better than ever before. If anything, I’m learning from the LLMs what’s possible when you have so much extra time on your hands to write unit tests, document trace matricies, keep all the design documents in-sync with the actual state of the code, etc. All the things that we have been learning how to do minimally to avoid wasting time on them, now can be done maximally, and there are benefits - particularly when working with dim-witted LLM agents as front-line coders (who work really really fast.)
CEOs have been brainwashed into believing
many things over the years. Speaking of a role better suited to an LLM…
Perhaps, if humans used them sanely, it wouldn’t be so bad.
You could as easily apply that statement to automobiles, earth movers, concrete plants…
Regarding languages: they never mattered a whole lot - by the time I was out of school I had BASIC, Assembly (several kinds), Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, LISP, probably several more - and it’s all more or less the same, each with their own quirks and special supports. Mostly you just use what works in the environment you’re trying to develop for. Same for libraries and APIs… More recently, I did a fairly sizeable project in Python with Claude, but much more important than anything written in Python were the user-facing requirements. When I was tired of Python taking 2-3 seconds to render a page, I consulted with Claude and we settled on Go as the next logical target. Because the requirements and their tests were fully developed / properly exercised and maintained, the re-code from Python to Go was 100% automated, all done by Claude, and it came out flawlessly - every feature identically implemented, running from the same database, only pages rendered in 0.1 seconds max instead of 2-3. Claude assures me that the Python development went 2-3x faster than original development would have gone in Go… I wonder how true that was, or if Claude is just parroting what it read somewhere; actually, at this stage I’m 95% sure it was parroting, though the models are getting better about quoting actual estimates based on LLM assisted development.
People who share textbooks, buy cheap ones…These students aren’t a profit driven entity
Actually, they are. They are a teeming horde of individual profit driven entities who might not be able to afford an education otherwise. One might even extend that analogy to Anthropic and friends, where it was more realistic for them to ask forgiveness / restitution rather than permission. Illegal, yes. But would staying legal have been the right move?
I wonder about the future of America…
No matter what happens in November, I still wonder about the future of the US, and the world.
As CEOs aren’t programmers, they aren’t really doing anything much beyond
playing God, master and commander of their own little universe - having the final say in every single aspect of the company. The good ones delegate. Not all CEOs are good.
LLMs aren’t sentient, they can’t take the role of a human nor accept responsibility when things go wrong.
No, but they can weigh alternatives and make psychopathically insensitive decisions to maximize profits - which is the implicit job description of CEO.
LLMs are just a faster way of being deskilled as by design,
In the 1990s compilers de-skilled my assembly programming. I’m O.K. with that, I’m sure I could pick it back up if it were necessary, better than I did before for my diverse experience outside assembly programming since then, but it doesn’t seem likely I’ll ever need to.
Google and the other search engines deskilled my library navigation abilities. I used to know how to whiz from card catalog to microfiche to the stacks to requesting an inter-library loan in a half dozen local libraries. If I ever need to go back to doing those things, first I’ll have to learn how they’ve changed in the last 25 years, but meanwhile - search engines are 1000x faster and more efficient. I can’t remember the last time I drove 30 miles, parked downtown and walked in the rain to use a search engine, but I do remember doing that and more to use libraries.
I think it’s time to crack that deskilled buggy whip maker joke now…
even better trust your fucking experts and ask them for their opinions
Self touted experts full of misinformation are nothing new. People have been selling stale and hallucinated “business intelligence” since forever.
a political narrative as well, designed to enable mass disenfranchisement of skilled people.
Like the cotton gin, the spinning Jenny, the power loom, etc. People could and still can pick seeds, spin thread, weave by hand - but why would they pursue that as a career anymore?
I will never give a corporation an inch, as they will steal a mile.
If you really want to change the state of things, there are more effective uses of your time to achieve that end than moaning about it on the internet. You might ask ChatGPT how you can achieve your goals more effectively. I wouldn’t take the responses as marching orders, but you might be surprised if you actually think about the effort vs efficacy ratio of your options.
on a scale that can absolutely terrify ever single politician in power
Do you remember Kent State? I’ll note that the draft has ended and not returned since.
and work towards properly making corporations less foul
Well, you and your “human solutions” have been banging that drum for 50 years (that I know of) and all I see is negative progress. The ChatGPT suggestion was meant as a barb, of course, but in a “try something different” kind of way, because 50 more years of the same old same old bitching about the evil corporations might get you one more AT&T breakup level event, if you’re lucky and the powerful people of the world want it broken up too…
I think you are a little too into the random outputs of programs to be trusted on anything, really.
That ability to see the patterns in language, particularly the ability to distill semantic meaning and make (reasonable, if imperfect) translations from one language to a variety of others, is incredibly useful in software development activities, which are basically the task of translating natural language requests into code - usually through a multi-step process of: requirements definition, design specification, application development, test development, and constant review to ensure that all those steps are in-sync, describing the same thing.
Always.
I’m tempted to make a “better buggy whip maker” crack here…
Yeah, so Anthropic didn’t pay for legitimate textbooks when they went to school, they bought cheap, illegal, Asian photocopies instead… wrong, sure. How do you make it right now? Lobotomize the students who read illegally copied books? Fine their parents for everything they are worth? Or, hold the students liable and garnish their wages in perpetuity?
Yep…
deleted by creator
As Forrest says: stupid is as stupid does.
Yeah, and once detected bugs and vulnerabilities (especially those with proof of concept exploits) are really easy to verify - and people who skip that step deserve all the ridicule and disrespect they can get, because they’re ridiculously disrespecting the people they’re reporting supposed bugs and vulnerabilities to if they haven’t at least verified they’re actual and not hallucinated.
Here I diverge from your thinking. Deskilling has been an ever-present danger since promotion to management was invented. Some managers retain their skills, others follow the Peter Principle ever upward until they’re beyond their actual abilities. The need for skills remains, and I doubt computer coding knowledge will be vanishing just because it’s gotten easier to do it faster and better than ever before. If anything, I’m learning from the LLMs what’s possible when you have so much extra time on your hands to write unit tests, document trace matricies, keep all the design documents in-sync with the actual state of the code, etc. All the things that we have been learning how to do minimally to avoid wasting time on them, now can be done maximally, and there are benefits - particularly when working with dim-witted LLM agents as front-line coders (who work really really fast.)
many things over the years. Speaking of a role better suited to an LLM…
You could as easily apply that statement to automobiles, earth movers, concrete plants…
Regarding languages: they never mattered a whole lot - by the time I was out of school I had BASIC, Assembly (several kinds), Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, LISP, probably several more - and it’s all more or less the same, each with their own quirks and special supports. Mostly you just use what works in the environment you’re trying to develop for. Same for libraries and APIs… More recently, I did a fairly sizeable project in Python with Claude, but much more important than anything written in Python were the user-facing requirements. When I was tired of Python taking 2-3 seconds to render a page, I consulted with Claude and we settled on Go as the next logical target. Because the requirements and their tests were fully developed / properly exercised and maintained, the re-code from Python to Go was 100% automated, all done by Claude, and it came out flawlessly - every feature identically implemented, running from the same database, only pages rendered in 0.1 seconds max instead of 2-3. Claude assures me that the Python development went 2-3x faster than original development would have gone in Go… I wonder how true that was, or if Claude is just parroting what it read somewhere; actually, at this stage I’m 95% sure it was parroting, though the models are getting better about quoting actual estimates based on LLM assisted development.
Actually, they are. They are a teeming horde of individual profit driven entities who might not be able to afford an education otherwise. One might even extend that analogy to Anthropic and friends, where it was more realistic for them to ask forgiveness / restitution rather than permission. Illegal, yes. But would staying legal have been the right move?
No matter what happens in November, I still wonder about the future of the US, and the world.
deleted by creator
playing God, master and commander of their own little universe - having the final say in every single aspect of the company. The good ones delegate. Not all CEOs are good.
No, but they can weigh alternatives and make psychopathically insensitive decisions to maximize profits - which is the implicit job description of CEO.
In the 1990s compilers de-skilled my assembly programming. I’m O.K. with that, I’m sure I could pick it back up if it were necessary, better than I did before for my diverse experience outside assembly programming since then, but it doesn’t seem likely I’ll ever need to.
Google and the other search engines deskilled my library navigation abilities. I used to know how to whiz from card catalog to microfiche to the stacks to requesting an inter-library loan in a half dozen local libraries. If I ever need to go back to doing those things, first I’ll have to learn how they’ve changed in the last 25 years, but meanwhile - search engines are 1000x faster and more efficient. I can’t remember the last time I drove 30 miles, parked downtown and walked in the rain to use a search engine, but I do remember doing that and more to use libraries.
I think it’s time to crack that deskilled buggy whip maker joke now…
Self touted experts full of misinformation are nothing new. People have been selling stale and hallucinated “business intelligence” since forever.
Like the cotton gin, the spinning Jenny, the power loom, etc. People could and still can pick seeds, spin thread, weave by hand - but why would they pursue that as a career anymore?
If you really want to change the state of things, there are more effective uses of your time to achieve that end than moaning about it on the internet. You might ask ChatGPT how you can achieve your goals more effectively. I wouldn’t take the responses as marching orders, but you might be surprised if you actually think about the effort vs efficacy ratio of your options.
Do you remember Kent State? I’ll note that the draft has ended and not returned since.
deleted by creator
Well, you and your “human solutions” have been banging that drum for 50 years (that I know of) and all I see is negative progress. The ChatGPT suggestion was meant as a barb, of course, but in a “try something different” kind of way, because 50 more years of the same old same old bitching about the evil corporations might get you one more AT&T breakup level event, if you’re lucky and the powerful people of the world want it broken up too…
On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog.