I keep hearing from people who find these enormous benefits from LLMs. I've been liking them as a search engine (especially finding things buried in bad documentation), but can't seem to find the life-changing part.
2. To break procrastination loops. For example I often can't name a particular variable, because I can see few alternatives and I don't like all of them. Nowadays I just ask ChatGPT and often proceed with his opinion.
3. Navigating less known technologies. For example my Python knowledge is limited and I don't really use it often, so I don't want to spend time to better learn it. ChatGPT is just perfect for that kind of tasks, because I know what I want to get, I just miss some syntax nuances and I can quickly check the result. Another example is jq, it's very useful tool, but its syntax is arcane and I can't remember it even after years of occasional tinkering with it. ChatGPT builds jq programs like a super-human, I just show example JSON and what I want to get.
4. Not ChatGPT, but I think Copilot is based on GPT4, and I use Copilot very often as a smart autocomplete. I didn't really adopt it as a code writing tool, I'm very strict at code I produce, but it still helps a lot with repetitive fragments. Things I had to spend 10-20 minutes before, construction regexps or using editor macroses, I can now do with Copilot in 10-20 seconds. For languages like Golang where I must write `if err != nil` after every line, it also helps not to become crazy.
May be I didn't formulate my thoughts properly. It's not anything irreplaceable and I didn't become 10x programmer. But those tools are very nice and absolutely worth every penny I paid for it. It's like Intellij Idea. I can write Java in notepad.exe, but I'm happy to pay $100/year to Jetbrains and write Java in Idea.
Respectfully but that's a bit like saying you don't need to learn how to ride a bicycle because you can use a pair of safety wheels. It's an excuse to not learn something, to keep yourself less knowledgeable and skillful than you could really be. Why stunt yourself? Knowledge is power.
See it this way: anyone can use ChatGPT but not everyone knows Python well, so you 'll never be able to use ChatGPT to compete with someone who knows Python well. You + limited knowledge of Python + ChatGPT << someone + good knowledge of Python + ChatGPT.
Experiences like the one you relay in your comment makes me think using LLMs for coding in particular is betting on short-term gains for a disproportionately large long-term cost. You can move faster now, but there's a limit to what you can do that way and you'll never be able to escape it.
Slow down, cowboy. Getting a LLM to generate code for you that is immediately useful and doesn't require you to think too hard about it can stunt learning, sure, but even just reading it and slowly getting familiar with how the code works and how it relates to your original task is helpful.
I learned programming by looking at examples of code that did similar things to what I wanted, re-typing it, and modifying it a bit to suit my needs. From that point of view it's not that different.
I've seen a couple of cases first hand of people with no prior experience with programming learn a bit by asking ChatGPT to automate some web scraping tasks or spreadsheet manipulation.
> You + limited knowledge of Python + ChatGPT << someone + good knowledge of Python + ChatGPT.
Substract ChatGPT from both sides and you have a rather obvious statement.
> Respectfully but that's a bit like saying you don't need to learn how to ride a bicycle because you can use a pair of safety wheels.
How did you learn to ride a bicycle?
The AI is pretty good at answering "I know this is possible, remind me what it's called or what the syntax is."
For a lot of these the reason I want to look it up is I don't use it enough to build muscle memory. If I did, I'd already have the muscle memory. And in practice, it's just a faster version of looking for examples on stackoverflow.
Do you care how a car engine works to drive a car?
You are making a lot of assumptions about someone's ability to learn with AND without assistance, while also making rather sci-fi leaps about our brain somehow being able to differentiate between learning that has somehow been tainted by the tendrils of ML overlords.
The models and the user interface around them absolutely will continue to improve far faster than any one person's ability to obtain subject mastery in a field.
So learning syntax nuances of yet another programming language which I'll forget soon is wasted time. There's some "fundamental" knowledge, like understanding what functional value is, but the specific syntax that Python invented for lambda - that's not something valuable when I use Python few times a year.
All with much lower latency than an HTTP request to a random place, knowing that my data can’t be used to trading anything, and it’s free.
It’s absolutely insane this is the real world now.
Not wanting my data to be sent to random places is what has limited my use of tools like copilot (so I'd only use it very sparingly after thinking if sending the data would be a breach of nda or not)
And I could say this about just about every domain of my life. I've trained myself to ask it about everything that poses a question or a challenge, from creating recipes to caring for my indoor Japanese maple tree to preparing for difficult conversations and negotiations.
The idea of "just" using it to compose emails or search for things seems frustrating to me, even reading about it. It's actually very hard for me to capture all of this in a way that doesn't sound like I'm insulting the folks who aren't there yet.
I'm not blindly accepting everything it says. I am highly technical and I think competent enough to understand when I need to push back against obvious or likely hallucinations. I would never hand its plans to a contractor and say "build this". It's more like having an extra, incredibly intuitive person who just happens to contain the sum of most human knowledge at the table, for $20 a month.
I honestly don't understand how the folks reading HN don't intuitively and passionately lean into that. It's a freaking superpower.
It a super power for the intellectually curious while the highly specialized that thought they were done learning can only see the threat to their intellectual moat. They aren't wrong.
I feel like I level up on a weekly basis practically.
I feel like this has become one of the most taboo things to even wonder about out loud, because it drives a different part of the Venn diagram into a freaking rage. How dare you force me to consider that perhaps I am only slightly above average in a population of billions?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Many of us here would see our jobs eliminated by a sufficiently powerful AI, perhaps some have already experienced it. You might as well. If you use AI so much, what value do you really provide and how much longer before the AI can surpass you at that?
A calculator needs direction on what to calculate because the machine doesn't have agency.
We are going to a higher level of abstraction and at that higher level you probably need a different skill set than before. Humans aren't going to get cut out of the loop but you always have to level up your skills.
I think there is just a generation of tech workers that got lazy and thought they were immune to change some how. I didn't even know anyone that had been on the internet when I graduated high school. Someone older and wiser though told me I would have to constantly reinvent myself, always learn new skills and will have several different careers. They were so spot on. Guess what? Nothing has changed.
There's a lot of people in technical roles who chose to study programming and work at tech companies because it seemed like it would pay more than other roles. My own calculation is that the tech-but-could-have-just-as-easily-been-a-lawyer cohort will be the first to find themselves replaced. Is that a revealing a bias? Absolutely.
Actual hackers, in the true sense, will have no trouble finding ways to continue to be useful and hopefully well compensated.
