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Comment by anonzzzies

1 day ago

HN will be the last place to admit it; people here seem to be holding out with the vague 'I tried it and it came up with crap'. While many of us are shipping software without touching (much) code anymore. I have written code for over 40 years and this is nothing like no-code or whatever 'replacing programmers' before, this is clearly different judging from the people who cannot code with a gun to their heads but still are shipping apps: it does not really matter if anyone believes me or not. I am making more money than ever with fewer people than ever delivering more than ever.

We are very close.

(by the way; I like writing code and I still do for fun)

Both can be correct : you might be making a lot of money using the latest tools while others who work on very different problems have tried the same tools and it's just not good enough for them.

The ability to make money proves you found a good market, it doesn't prove that the new tools are useful to others.

  • No, the comment is about "will", not "is". Of course there's no definitive proof of what will happen. But the writing is on the wall and the letters are so large now, that denying AI would take over coding if not all intellectual endeavors resembles the movie "Don't look up".

> holding out with the vague 'I tried it and it came up with crap'

Isn't that a perfectly reasonable metric? The topic has been dominated by hype for at least the past 5 if not 10 years. So when you encounter the latest in a long line of "the future is here the sky is falling" claims, where every past claim to date has been wrong, it's natural to try for yourself, observe a poor result, and report back "nope, just more BS as usual".

If the hyped future does ever arrive then anyone trying for themselves will get a workable result. It will be trivially easy to demonstrate that naysayers are full of shit. That does not currently appear to be the case.

  • What topic are you referring to? ChatGPT release was just over 3 years ago. 5 years ago we had basic non-instruct GPT-3.

    • Wasn't transformer 2017? There's been constant AI hype since at least that far back and it's only gotten worse.

      If I release a claim once a month that armageddon will happen next month, and then after 20 years it finally does, are all of my past claims vindicated? Or was I spewing nonsense the entire time? What if my claim was the next big pandemic? The next 9.0 earthquake?

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  • But the trend line is less ambiguous, models got better year over year, much much better.

    • I don't dispute that the situation is rapidly evolving. It is certainly possible that we could achieve AGI in the near future. It is also entirely possible that we might not. Claims such as that AGI is close or that we will soon be replacing developers entirely are pure hype.

      When someone says something to the effect of "LLMs are on the verge of replacing developers any day now" it is perfectly reasonable to respond "I tried it and it came up with crap". If we were actually near that point you wouldn't have gotten crap back when you tried it for yourself.

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