This might as well be the new definition of “script kiddie”, and it’s the kids that are literally going to be the ones birthed into this lifestyle. The “craft” of programming may not be carried by these coming generations and possibly will need be rediscovered at some point in the future. The Lost Art of Programming is a book that’s going to need to be written soon.

It's having a good, useful and reliable test suite that separates the sheep from the goats.*

Would you rather play whack-a-mole with regressions and Heisenbugs, or ship features?

* (Or you use some absurdly good programing language that is hard to get into knots with. I've been liking Elixir. Gleam looks even better...)

Someone with product knowledge writes the tests in a DSL

Someone skilled writes the verbs to make the DSL function correctly

And from there, any amount of skill is irrelevant: either the tests pass, or they fail. One could hook up a markov chain to a javascript sourcebook and eventually get working code out.

Can they? Either the dsl is so detailed and specific as to be just code with extra steps or there is a lot of ground not covered by the test cases with landmines that a million monkeys with typewriters could unwittingly step on.

The bugs that exist while the tests pass are often the most brutal - first to find and understand and secondly when they occasionally reveal that a fundamental assumption was wrong.

“The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions. Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained.

It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they arc, or when taken universally.”

What would be the point of coaching an LLM? You will just have to coach it again and again

It’s that John Dewey quote from a parent post all over again.

This is especially true in open source where contributions aren’t limited to employees who passed a hiring screen.

There’s a reason people invest their time with interns.

The goal is to help people grow, so they can achieve things they would not have been able to deal with before gaining that additional experience. This might include boring dirty work, yes. But that means they thus prove they can overcome such a struggle, and so more experienced people should be expected to also be able to go though it - if there is no obvious more pleasant way to go.

What you say of interns regarding checks is just as true for any human out there, and the more power they are given, the more relevant it is to be vigilent, no matter their level of experience. Not only humans will make errors, but power games generally are very permeable to corruptible souls.

But coding didn't become a low wage job, now we're spending GPU credits to make pull requests instead and skipping the labor all together. Anyway I share the parent poster's chagrin at all the comparisons of AI to an intern. If all of your attention is spent correcting the work of a GPU, the next generation of workers will never have mentors giving them attention, starving off the supply of experienced entry level employees. So what happens in 10, 20 years ? I guess anyone who actually knows how to debug computers instead of handing the problem off to an LLM will command extraordinary emergency-fix-it wages.

You and others seem to be disagreeing with something I never said. This is 100% compatible with what I said. You don't just review and then silently correct an interns work behind their back, the review process is part of the teaching. That doesn't really work with AI, so it wasn't explicitly part of my analogy.

I disagree. Receiving a spreadsheet from a junior means I need to check it. If this gives me infinite additional juniors I’m good.

It’s this popular pattern of HN comments - expect AI to behave deterministically correct - while the whole world operates on stochastically correct all the time…

And it should go without saying that LLMs do not have the same investment/value tradeoff. Whether or not they contribute like a senior or junior seems entirely up to luck

Prompt skill is flaky and unreliable to ensure good output from LLMs

You went from “do it again” to “go check the newbies work”.

To get to that stage your degree of proficiency would be “can make out which font is wrong at a glance.”

You wouldn’t be looking at the sheet, you would be running the model in your head.

That stopped being a stochastic function, with the error rate dropping significantly - to the point that making a mistake had consequences tacked on to it.

Why would you need ai for that though? Pull your sources. Run a diff. Straight to the known truth without the chatgpt subscription. In fact by that point you don’t even need the diff if you pulled from the sources. Just drop into the spreadsheet at that point.