Ask HN: What (programming) skills will still be relevant in a year? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What (programming) skills will still be relevant in a year?

8 points_jae_15 comments

I am data scientist who also has some intermediate knowledge of front-end and general application development. Always wanted to get more into the latter and become a better programmer. However now I feel like whatever I invest time in learning right now is quite likely to be "useless" due to AI in less than a year.

What would you focus on learning if you wanted to work in the computer / AI / data science world for at least the next five years?

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What you've just asked is essentially "what's going to be on the test"?

Unfortunately, real life isn't a class at school, there isn't a professor, and no one can tell you what's going to be useful vs useless because ChatGPT's just as new for everybody except the people who made it. My time machine's just as good as your time machine, so whatever I'd try to predict is going to be just as wrong as it is right.

If you want to work in AI for the foreseeable future figure out what you want to know about in that realm. Personally I'm learning the math underlying LLMs and learning the principles that go into creating a GPT and how to make my own. Even though I can't afford to train my own, understanding the underlying concepts is interesting to me in its own right. Other people are interested in other aspects of LLMs that don't interest me, but interest them.

I honestly wouldn't worry about AI.

Just learn the thing - whatever it is. Learn it well enough to critique any code that's generated by AI.

Learn about the tools that are available, and how to be productive with them.

Use AI as you would use a computer - it's a tool to be used, not to be feared.

I've been using GPT4 for a while now and at this stage, I'm not at all afraid of it "speeding up and taking over the world". It's incredibly impressive and really useful, but it feels a bit like an impressive magic trick and in no way close to being sentient.

Data science is probably going to be the first on the chopping block with AI advances imo. At least the average data scientist role.

But knowing how to make the computer do what you want will always be there. Just focus on CS fundamentals, problem solving, and keep an open mind and be creative.

I disagree wrt to Data science being on the chopping block. I do not see any hard evidence of this automation happening anytime soon.

Why do you think so? I do have the impression, that once GPT code interpreter is open access, there is a huge part of data science that will be automated. I think in many cases it will be 'enough' to have subject matter expert without much data science knowledge to 'get answer out of data'. e.g. https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1657050639644360706?s=20

Low-level systems programming will always be relevant.

Verifying correctness will become more valuable. Since there's going to be larger piles of code/documentation/artifacts due to generative AI, those who can verify/validate implementation matches spec will become more valuable.

>>However now I feel like whatever I invest time in learning right now is quite likely to be "useless" due to AI in less than a year.

Why do you think so? What advances have made you come to this conclusion?

Looking at some examples of GPT Code Interpreter that people have posted, you can see that you can e.g. without knowing much about Python generate a great data analysis from just a dataframe using AI.

The only interesting example that I saw was of a 60 mb survey data being analyzed and report being generated. In many real world cases that I have worked with, the clients hardly know which question to answer, and how to collect the data to answer that question. That being the case, I think this field will be around for a few more years to come.

Ample time for us to evolve and transition.

Timeless stuff like math in general will always be relevant.

It's not so much about your programming skills, but more about how programming shapes your thinking abilities. Who will tell the AI what to create?

1 or even 5 years is nothing. Aside from maybe individual frameworks, nothing will completely die within such a short timespan.

Java will be with us for many decades.

You mean Javascript ?

You all just meant PHP really!

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