News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Can GPT-4 *Actually* Write Code? by copperx on Friday March 17, 2023 @02:46AM (#35194019)
> Not once was programming something that was a time sink.

Can you please expound on that? Do you mean not hard as in comparison to something else?

Re:Can GPT-4 *Actually* Write Code? by noitpmeder on Friday March 17, 2023 @02:58AM (#35194104)
I think all it shows is that GP has never worked on complicated problems that require anything more than gluing libraries together.
Re:Can GPT-4 *Actually* Write Code? by Jensson on Friday March 17, 2023 @03:09AM (#35194168)
If you do nontrivial coding then GPT wont help you, so that isn't relevant for the discussion.
Re:Can GPT-4 *Actually* Write Code? by noitpmeder on Friday March 17, 2023 @03:16AM (#35194218)
I disagree. GP, by their statement and appeal "I've worked on adtech, crypto, fintech, gamedev, startup founder, ...", implies that he has worked on complicated software issues, and that he thinks GPT is a promising replacement for developers working on those problems.
Re:Can GPT-4 *Actually* Write Code? by Jensson on Friday March 17, 2023 @03:23AM (#35194271)
> implies that he has worked on complicated software issues

No it doesn't, there is a lot of simple "gluing APIs together" to do in all of those. The hard part then is figuring out what you want to do, not getting the code to do it.

Re:Can GPT-4 *Actually* Write Code? by whateveracct on Friday March 17, 2023 @01:59PM (#35200526)
Opposite.

I did a startup for years and the backend was all boring Golang talking to Postgres. I am confident that if GPT had produced identical code it would've been worse. Because shit hit the fan many times due to misunderstandings or other things that cause bugs. Because I wrote the bugs, I was able to fix them. Making coding more of a blackbox and treating coding as menial labor would have definitely caused us to lose customers and miss important deadlines.

Maybe the next way to move the goalposts is "GPT will debug for you someday and be trained on the entire transitive closure of your dependencies."

That sort of thing could actually be useful as a sort of hint, but it isn't replacing devs any more than ripgrep did. To be honest, ripgrep through the source of my deps is already highly efficient and points me to things often.

Re:Can GPT-4 *Actually* Write Code? by whateveracct on Friday March 17, 2023 @06:57PM (#35204008)
I have built plenty of complicated things that were much more than glue. Even for those, coding was far from a bottleneck. Because coding is easy.

In fact, all the complicated software anecdotes I could give were things that ChatGPT wouldn't even touch. In the realm of design and scaling and fault tolerance and other such things.