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I had to scold and mentor juniors who tried to push their crappy ChatGPT code in our codebase. They believe it gives them amazing powers because they don't have the experience to know whether a solution is good, bad, or completely buggy. Most of the time it's inefficient and full of bugs.

I do believe you learn from your own mistakes, but that requires thinking for yourself, not generating random answers.

> I'm left wondering if I'm somehow doing it wrong or if all the stories of amazing results are coming from juniors who don't realize the model isn't very much better at this than they are.

And here I am, being impressed that SOTA AI passes the Turing programming test for a human junior programmer(using your own interpretation of the skill levels involved). Let's at least appreciate that 10 years ago this level of computer intellect was science fiction. And while I'm very much a "junior developer" (not my day job and I do have a BSCS), I can still use AI productively for my personal backlog of things I'd like to accomplish, and it's been pretty helpful for me notwithstanding its limitations.

> Let's at least appreciate that 10 years ago this level of computer intellect was science fiction.

I definitely appreciate that the tech has come a long way! All I'm saying is it hasn't changed my life, and OP's characterization of the AI skeptics as essentially uninterested in learning or having sci-fi expectations is unfair. Some of us may simply be too experienced to get much out of it yet (if ever).

10 years ago this level of computer intellect was science fiction

It was still science fiction just 5 years ago.

My experience is very somilar. In my own narrow domain chatgpt, Claude, copilot et al has been a toy, as in, mostly useless answers to my very specific questions.

>> coaching a junior developer

I have honestly never gotten GPT to work like a junior developer as it can't seem to get details right so the actual coding usually ends up being done by me.

What it is great for is being a general teacher (sometimes wrong) and something to bounce ideas off of. It is enormously useful but not quite in the same way that people think it should. I am not the "manager" with the LLM being a direct report. At least I have never gotten it to work like that.

I think it's strictly inferior to a junior dev because it has no domain-specific knowledge, and even training it on your org repo does not really help it seems (ironically, a junior is doing it at my org as upper management want us to use GenAI, so maybe he fudged something)

The big way I think about how much value AI is providing me is by thinking about how much of my Google search traffic has shifted to chat GPT.

It's not just that it's a bit better, it's that it can answer queries I had that Google never could answer, especially really vague stuff.

I've heard that too and it's strictly not true for me. I regularly try it but it's wrong more than half the time.

Again, some of this may just come down to experience: by the time I'm turning to ChatGPT or Google it's because I'm in deep water and the docs have failed me. A search engine can turn up the one obscure github issue where someone had the same problem and someone else hints in a direction that ends up having the solution, but that won't have been encoded in the weights with enough strength to be spat out by ChatGPT.

The funny thing is that's the opposite of my flow these days. I start with chatgpt and then fallback to Google if I can't get a good answer.

Also, are you using the free version or paid? The difference between gpt3.5 and gpt4/4o is huge.

At work for real problems, paid.

And when I do try a GPT it usually is before turning to a search engine, but after I exhaust my own resources and direct searches in the docs.

Life changing seems fair, I'm making changes to my life assuming that programming jobs are about to get cutthroat competitive and then disappear. We've got something that is about as good as a junior developer in ChatGPT, much cheaper to employ for a month and it's competence is improving. It may not learn anything in a single session but at a higher level the rate of improvement of these models seems to be much faster than a human can manage. A human couldn't possibly learn as much as ChatGPT has in the time it has taken from founding OpenAI to now, and hardware improvement doesn't look like it'll cap out any time soon.

We've got all these people in a state of delusion that somehow the job of a developer isn't glorified autocomplete of what someone else prompts them with. We can't be sure what the speed is that it will happen, but the writing is on the wall that AI will obsolete software development roles as they currently exist.

If ChatGPT becomes as good as a junior, it may replace this position and we will be stuck with a decreasing number of seniors. But right now it's bad, makes a lot of mistakes and hallucinates APIs which is unacceptable.

> the job of a developer [is] glorified autocomplete of what someone else prompts them with

Clients don't know what they want, need, or what machines are capable of. Managers can't properly translate that either to the developers. My job is to understand all this and propose solutions, or say no if it's impossible. Will AI do that in the future? Do you remember when Cobol was supposed to replace programmers? Same thing for me. I have yet to see a fully generated solution from the specs to the deployment that takes responsibilities for its mistakes. But not yet another ReactJS frontend that anyone can do in a few days, something real that is useful to me and that you can sell as a real product.

We currently have a large number of business guys (look it up on LinkedIn) who learn "prompting" because they believe it will make them gods in the future even if they don't know what a programming language is. And a lot of scammers who sell their prompts to those people. It feels like cryptocurrencies all over again.

Last but not least, who will create the new APIs, technologies, and languages that we use? Will we be stuck with C++2x forever? ChatGPT will need a few additional revolutions to do this and to be independent on the open-source that already exists.

Yeah I feel like people have been focusing on getting more, faster compute done. Both software and hardware side. But the hard question of 'what compute should be done' remains the important one.

> We've got all these people in a state of delusion that somehow the job of a developer isn't glorified autocomplete of what someone else prompts them with.

You could make the same oversimplification about any other knowledge or managerial job, up to and including C-suite executives.

If this technology is coming and taking everyone's jobs, we're going to need incredibly strong social support structures like Universal basic income and radical redistribution of wealth from AI-owners to fund it. Do you have any ideas for tackling that?

It might be more accurate to forget about the various current job categories. There is nothing that requires a technology to eliminate a certain existing job category(as if a job category is an immutable constant in the universe). Instead, it idea more likely to accelerate some types of activities and perhaps completely automate others.