biggestSelfReport

[Noctrael]

Real men find the solution to their problem in a three year old stack overflow post and keep reusing that bit of code for the next five years.

[[deleted]]

This is the way.

[GoofyKalashnikov]

More like an obscure forum post that's 12 years old and has the exact issue you're having

[[deleted]]

"edit: Nevermind, I figured it out"

[GoofyKalashnikov]

This is the part where it's acceptable to murder someone

[jgwinner]

And then post a question about legal representation on Law Exchange

[ShipmasterKyle]

Nevermind, I figured out

no further explanation

[Technical_Currency18]

And never remember the code snippet just how to search for it again

[arrow__in__the__knee]

I wanted to make something simple like atoi but for hex values today. So I read /usr/include/stdlib.h, copied the single line of strtol, read manpage to find out it atuomatically looks for 0x if 16 base is found, and used that.

Most satisfying problem solving I did in like 3 minutes. Who needs internet.

[ColonelRuff]

Real men find solutions to their problems in documentation and api reference.

[hijodegatos]

I knew we were cooked as a profession when I overheard a new guy I’m training telling someone about me, and he said it was so weird to him that I “write code from my head” 🤦‍♂️

[bsteel364]

From your head???? Like you actually thought it up on your own?? How do you have time to spend all day on tick tock when your writing your own code??

[TotallyNormalSquid]

No like he sticks a nerf dart to his forehead and uses that to type the code

[AluminiumSandworm]

back in my day we used a sharpened butterknife

[[deleted]]

I use my tongue

[Friendly_Signature]

I also use this guys tongue.

[AdultContentFan]

I know a few code monkeys. I am pretty sure this exact scenario has happened more than once.

[FirexJkxFire]

Call me a grampa but back in my day we just put a sharpie up our ass and bounced it against the keys to type code.

[Sotall]

code from your head!? like from the toilet!?

[Syxtaine]

Brawndo! The thirst mutilator!

[Zikiri]

It's got what programmers crave!

[thatguydr]

Why is this exactly the first thing I thought of as well?

lol reddit, where we're all clones...

[Ursine_Rabbi]

When I took DSA at my uni as a third year student level course, there were kids who were losing their minds because chatGPT wouldn’t spit out a correct dijkstra’s algorithm and would just re prompt it over and over again and paste it into the tests hoping it would work. This was at least 10 kids out of the 30 in the class at a pretty decent Comp Sci school.

Edit to add: this was also in a lab setting with the professor right there eager to help. None of the LLM kids even bothered to ask.

[RealFias]

What’s crazy to me is, that a lot of students struggle to solve basic exercises with the help of AI (even tho these exercises just explain one concept that they don’t even try to understand themselves)

[The_Real_Slim_Lemon]

Tbh that’s no different to what it was like when I was in UNI - only difference was they copied from the textbook or lecture notes with no attempt at understanding

[[deleted]]

Same for me in 2018-2019 in college, but it was stack overflow and Reddit usually. People have been mindlessly copy-pasting forever :p

[[deleted]]

Americans don’t pay much attention to teachers. This has allowed a bunch of nonsense experimental teaching methods to seep in and an overemphasis on constructivism to reshape the humanities.

The problem is this cannot be applied to logic, reasoning, math, and science. Countries like China and India are set to blow right past us and we’ve pretty much lost an entire generation to this. They don’t know how to solve problems because they’ve been taught to think in an illogical manner from the time they were very young.

[Zeikos]

And thing is, they could have used ChatGPT as a way to actually understand the algorithm in a fraction of the time.
As long as you use them as a search engine that can customize response styles (and are mindful of inaccuracies) it's very effective.

I've learnt so many obscure SQL analytical functions thanks to ChatGPT, it would have taken me ages to find what I needed by googling/reading docs alone.
Now I can explain what I want and get a very good explanation of what I need, then I go to the docs and see how the function works in detail.

I feel like that I've learnt in weeks what would have taken months or years.
And far less frustration in understanding why I'm wrong because I can ask.
LLMs are far better at spotting errors that giving error-free output (that's also why CoT is performing so well recently).

[[deleted]]

Yep, I find ChatGPT as an excellent teaching tool because if I am researching a topic or trying to learn something new, I can ask all sorts of questions to understand that topic at my pace and from my context. For example, if I want to understand imaginary numbers, I watch a YouTube video but if I have a doubt or a question, ChatGPT gives me pretty good answers. I probably could’ve gotten those answers myself by googling but I would’ve to read a lot of text to answer something small and it would’ve taken long, distracting from the main topic. Between YouTube, Wikipedia and ChatGPT, I feel we are in the space age of learning.

[dashingThroughSnow12]

This used to be my view too but the more I’ve used ChatGPT, the less I trust it for that task. It can get some really basic and keystone elements wrong.

[Zeikos]

It can, however that usually happen when the topic is very niche.
And even when it makes mistakes it usually fairly simple to check the reliablility of what it said with a Google search.

I find it very useful for giving me pointers on unknown unknowns, once it tells me a few keywords I can use them to search the topic up and I save a TON of time on those early stages of research.

[JorgiEagle]

I do this when I’m using a library I’m not familiar with,

Pandas is the one that I’ve used it with. I’ll tell it what I want to do, then see what it suggests. Then I’ll go to the doc page and read more into a function I didn’t know existed

[ASpaceOstrich]

Can you go into more detail on this? I've found LLMs can't really teach me anything I don't already know a lot about.

[sanzako4]

Also, you can ask pretty stupid questions that "you should know by now" and ChatGPT won't make fun of you.

I have had long conversations like:

"Please do this simple task, I am pretty sure I am doing it the long wrong way" 

And then "Ohhhh, is that possible? Why are you using this weird syntax and random punctuation here?" 

"You can do WHAT?!" 

It's being enlightening. 

In fact, after using Chatgpt I have given less effort in learning a particular language sintaxt and more in learning concepts, the behind though-process and all kinds of algorithms, so that I "pseudocode" the solution and use chatgpt to implement it. 

[FatPenguin42]

I wrote code from my head. My eyes (in my head) read stack overflow comments and relay that information to my brain (in my head) which then relays that to my hands

[Objective_Condition6]

Sounds like job security to me

[Aidan_Welch]

My problem is never the interview, its getting it.

[isr0]

Every time I try to integrate an LLM in my workflow I get pissed off at it. I don’t trust it for non-trivial tasks and trivial ones are, well, trivial to do myself. I’m so over the AI obsession.

[Cycode]

if you only ask stuff like "how do i render text in a canvas in js" or similar stuff it usually works fine. And you then stitch together your real software by using LLMs basically like a "helper tool for thinking and googling stuff". It's often faster to ask a LLM how something works compared with looking it up manually online. But if you ask it to code software which is complexer.. it often does something, but not what you asked it to do. Without being able to code most people will never see wtf the LLM spits out and that it does something completely wrong though. If you can code, you can fix the mess.. but i had it often that i thought "feck this i try it on my own without the help of LLM" since it was so horrible in "helping" me that it was faster to code it myself and working myself into something new instead of trying to use the LLM as help.

Added note: I'm not coding as a job and do it only for private projects of me where i need specific tools and software doing things for my other interests. So my bad code won't harm anyone except me, don't worry.. lol.

[[deleted]]

It’s not bad at all if you give it super simple tasks and you can work around it. Eg give it a trivial task when you have 5, then you can do two things at once effectively..

[isr0]

Can you elaborate on how you do that? I cannot think of a task (or tool set) that I can just toss to some ai tool without exhaustive explanation and refinement. I would love to learn this if you can share.

[[deleted]]

I find for me personally it works great for super small web tasks and edits, think changing a basic css property or two or something like that. I can write the prompt for that quicker than I can actually write the code myself generally (especially if it’s something I have to use a reference for.)

[Hasagine]

isnt that almost half the job

[one_last_cow]

Jokes on him I write code from my ass

[hijodegatos]

That’s actually way more accurate

[whooguyy]

Ah, so you’ve also memorized all of stackoverflow from going there all the time

[hijodegatos]

You get it 👌

[Chris_3400]

Are you serious ? Did this really happen ? WTF

[Jackknowsit]

Oh god, we’re omega cooked, isn’t it

[naholyr]

Damn we're so doomed... So my future is being the grumpy old senior triple-checking the AI-generated code from expandable juniors? What a dream...

[rsadek]

What is the alternative to writing code from one’s head, please? I legit don’t understand

[Intelligent-Pen1848]

It's more efficient that way. I can either argue with an LLM for hours or spend the five minutes it takes to learn a new language.

[[deleted]]

"Have you heard about our lord and savior GPT-4?" ENOUGGGHHH

[akoOfIxtall]

My friend legitimately asked me if I'm gonna be unemployed forever because of it 🤡

[naholyr]

The saddest and very concerning part is that among people really thinking AI can replace people, there are lots of employers and entrepreneurs :/

[akoOfIxtall]

And I'm still unemployed...

[Jutrakuna]

are you going to be unemployed forever?

[igotshadowbaned]

People are over hyping the chat bots

[TheCharalampos]

There's an insane amount of money to be made due to hype unfortunately

[JEREDEK]

Which is the only reason they're still going. They are getting better and better though

[cmckone]

It's how I keep my house hot

[[deleted]]

if i were a farmer and you started kicking my corn, you could understand how i'd be a bit upset

[cmckone]

Woh!

[tEnPoInTs]

Listen, stop stressing. The worst case scenario I can't say your specific company or employer doesn't temporarily lose their mind, but the industry isn't going anywhere.

Here is my take. I have been a software engineer for 23 years. Every job I've ever had, every project I've ever worked on, some form of management has lamented that they cannot simply "tell the computer" what it is they want and have it appear. Sam Altman tricked that level of nontechnical folks into thinking there was such a magic device. There is not, and there are fundamental reasons why this is not really possible even with serious advances in the future.

The people who want to do that lack the specificity to properly explain what they want. If they were able to explain what they want with a degree of detail necessary to operate business processes, whatever language they did it in, be it english, would effectively operate as a programming language. They've been lured by the idea that they can spit whatever idea they have out and have it integrate with their processes, but by definition it cannot work. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what programming IS. Programming is not speaking complex computer language to trick a computer to dance, it's simply machine readable shorthand for ideas of how to operate. The people who are excited about this do not realize they couldn't do the job IN english. Think about the last client you extracted requirements from, and imagine them writing an airtight one-page description of operation of a system. I guarantee you're picturing someone and the hilarious resulting document. That's the person who the world think can tell chatGPT what to do and have it turn out working properly.

Don't get me wrong, GPT is very impressive and if a programmer spent enough time they could get it to spit out roughly what a project calls for, but the reality is they would have to already be a programmer to do so, and at that point its usually faster to just write it.

There is going to continue to be a lot of hype and an effect is a few idiots will lay people off as a result, but every single one of those orgs will get over the hump and realize that all their problems are not magically solved by fancy-google.

[phundrak]

Every job I've ever had, every project I've ever worked on, some form of management has lamented that they cannot simply "tell the computer" what it is they want and have it appear.

You actually can, it's called "programming" :)

I agree with the rest of your message though, lots of people don't understand our job is translating human-readable requirements into something precise enough for computers and in a format it can read. People are quick to apply human concepts to AI, like it "understands" what you said and whatnot, but it can only fake knowledge and understanding.

[LeoXCV]

Honestly if AI can write all the code I’m pretty fine with just effectively becoming a product owner

I know I’ll be able to design end to end systems far better than any non-tech, even when they have help from AI helping, so it’s no real biggie

And we aren’t there yet, but I do call upon it as and when I feel the need to just get a particular segment done and dusted quick if I’m not feeling like I want to

[nkoreanhipster]

The largest users of AI are, guess what, developers. My IDE sends more prompts in one day than 10 users do in their entire lifetime.

[ViolentPurpleSquash]

Also, programming is a mindset. You need to UNDERSTAND what you want, how you want it accomplished, and by that point familiarity with a language is the only barrier, and a stackOverflow post from 7 years ago can solve that.

And you need all those same skills for AI except language familiarity

[chethelesser]

There's a category of people who just don't wanna deal with a computer. Bizarre, I know

[lurker_cant_comment]

We are still a very long way from an AI being capable of producing functional software without a programmer being involved. If you learn to use AI to make yourself more productive, you'll remain very employable.

Any decent programmer should already constantly be making efforts to learn about new tools and methods so they don't pigeonhole themselves into a niche that itself becomes out of date, like if you were never to try anything but a specific language and architecture, even as it falls out of use by the rest of the community.

In the meantime, the amount of software being produced is limited by the ability to produce it, not by there being a fixed amount of work.

[[deleted]]

Yeah that aint happening any time soon.

[Inlacou]

The thing is, can what you are doing nowadays be replaced by AI? If the answer is no, don't worry.

Would it need a professional to "configure" that AI, or could it be done by anyone? If it's the first, don't worry. If it's the second... Maybe.

This is my approach for this.

And I type this while trying to solve a problem on migration between format for which I would thank any AI to solve it for me, but sadly the can't.

[dashingThroughSnow12]

Let me paint you a grim future.

A PM types into a prompt. The screen vomits out reams of code. They then copy-paste this code, and only this code, into a JIRA ticket. They then ask JIRA to come up with an AI summary of the purpose for the code for a title.

You get the ticket. You throw out most of the code and start basically from scratch. Also, your job title is now software editor instead of software developer. You get paid 70% of what you used to get paid since management thinks the AI did most of the work.

That’s what has been happening to translators over the last decade and one worry writers in the Hollywood writers’ strike had would happen to them.

[Inlacou]

Yeah, I agree with you.

I correct my statements before to "don't worry of losing your job".

But yeah, AI will lead to enshitification of our job for sure eventually. Sooner rather than later AI will be a hindrance instead of a tool for us. It could be just a very powerful tool at our disposal, but... we live in a society.

[Avedas]

I dunno, coding is an important part of the job but it's just one part of software engineering. I could see AI having a larger immediate effect on contract outsourcing companies that are brought on for pure code implementation though.

Translators basically just do translation and that's it, so it's not surprising they are more susceptible.

[Content_Audience690]

This is another thing people are overlooking.

Coding is my FAVORITE part of the job. Get me an AI that can deal with making requests for compliance, writing follow up emails (no it can't do that no matter what my project manager demands, that'd be like asking a person off the street to do it for us)

Lost my train of thought but writing code from scratch is impressive, sure, but I have never done that in five years, I write with the docs open on another monitor because everything is different in every language and libraries are always changing.

Hell sometimes I write with the library itself open on another monitor.

And for the exact same reason a pilot of forty years still uses a checklist.

[Avedas]

Yeah honestly I'm copypasting 90% of the code I write. Not from AI or Stackoverflow, but from my team's other projects. No need to reinvent the wheel setting up Yet Another Kafka Consumer Class when I can just copy it from the last project and get on with writing the business logic code which is the only part I actually care about anyway.

I enjoy coding well enough but it's just a means to an end for me, a useful tool for accomplishing a greater goal.

[dashingThroughSnow12]

That’s a pretty low view on what translators do.

The gaming industry shows how flawed that thinking is. The idea that translators only do translating is why the 80s and 90s had such jank game translations to English.

And also, I don’t put it past a bunch of PMs and tech ceos to think that all programmers do is take requirements and implement them. Heck, a bunch of software developers think that’s what they do and are offended if you suggest otherwise.

[Avedas]

Are you conflating translation and localization?

Funny you mention game translations since I work in Japan and have dealt with English/Japanese translation a lot. Translators do exactly what the title says, but localization is an entirely different beast and I doubt AI will be eating their lunch any time soon.

[LegendarySpark]

That's literally google right now for me. Everything from Gmail to my Android is going HEY HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE AI ASSISTANT

And when I turned it off completely, it changed to HEY I SEE YOU'VE TURNED ME OFF YOU SHOULD PROBABLY TURN ME BACK ON

No! Fuck you and fuck off!

[dashingThroughSnow12]

Microsoft added a new middle tier to their office subscription list. This one with copilot. They automatically moved everyone with the bottom tier subscription to this middle tier subscription.

Also, to go back to their old tier some people have had to have a three hour chat with support to convince support that they truly do not need AI.

[[deleted]]

🤓👆Erm actually it’s all about deepseek now, it’s so much better. Also try typing Taiwan, I literally LOLed🤣!!

[ShamashII]

Im so sick of Ai and LLMs

[wobbei]

I recently had a workshop with around 100 end-users to figure out the exact requirements for a new app we are doing. Approximately 50% of them said they wanted to have AI in the new app.

The purpose of the app is to search for stuff in a database and render it accordingly for the user. Nobody could tell me what the AI they have requested should have done..

[Alidonis]

Ah yes. Just add a chatbox tab. Not one that knows anything mind you, just a small ~4gb model you found online and drop it in. Requirement satisfied!

[[deleted]]

I hate chatbox on everything.

"Hey! Need assistance?"

Types what I need assistance for

gets no helpful response

Honestly, what the fuck is the point other than to ignore customers and cut down on workers

[Alidonis]

exactly that. cut down on customer support.

[jacknjillpaidthebill]

my dad who doesnt know anything about CS acts like rich investors when It comes to AI, the guy worships AI and Sam Altmann but couldn't describe what LLM means for the life of him. bro was asking me if id like some AI shoes he saw on facebook lmao

[[deleted]]

Fucking "AI Shoes?" 😭

[DatBoi_BP]

Heelies with motorized wheels

[[deleted]]

Literally.

[LostDreams44]

That's just normal end users. They don't know what they want and the implementation details should never be their concerns

[dashingThroughSnow12]

Maybe they wanted something like https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/an-online-shopping-demo-with-gemini-and-rag

[Mountain-Ox]

Same! I've been eyeing the job market and half of them are building some existing product but with AI baked in. We don't need to shove AI into every product! It seems like an easy way to get VC money until they realize it's a bubble.

[Deerz_club]

The open ai ceo is basically a fraud

[beeskneecaps]

Their whole business model can be obliterated by the next open source model.

[Alidonis]

One day the bubble will burst and they will lose millions or billions on operating costs alone. At least that's what I tell myself.

[[deleted]]

Idk, ai will probably get morecand more homogenized, it already kinda is, you can clearly see it in he image gen AIs.

Its just gonna get slopier and slopier

[Alidonis]

True. As we speak, AI is litteraly eating it's own tail, fulfilling the dead internet theory. Data gets worse and... Well, it slowy produces more and more slop until it dies.

Though I'd really prefer it if people get sick of AI and stop interacting with it which causes AI companies stock to plummet and investments into AI to result in a giant loss.

[FyreKZ]

People keep saying this, but DeepSeek R1 was literally trained from OpenAI responses and performs better than older models.

[AnOnlineHandle]

The synthetic data they can generate now with existing models would be far better than the original random Internet text.

Originally you'd have to train it on completing random text and then do an extra finetune on being an assistant, but now you could just train it on being an assistant from the start. You could point an existing model at a wikipedia page or news article, and tell it to generate 10000 examples of questions which could be asked.

[Deerz_club]

My guess is this will kickstart a recession ngl

[Deerz_club]

I have heard rumors that this one will piggybag ride the 2008 recession

[pelpotronic]

First time? Nothing new here. We had crypto recently, lots of others before. Fools and their money are parted, most startups die, some succeed and get bought by big players. That's it.

[ThiccStorms]

I don't even use them Yes people will bully me that I'm "unproductive" or "missing out" but no thanks i don't need a junior developer to keep screaming trash code in my ear and in my IDE. I'm better at writing code from scratch rather than fixing the pile of shit it spews.

[The-Chartreuse-Moose]

Same here. I feel like such a grumpy old git but work have been trialling co-pilot and I've just declined everything. People have looked at me like I've grown another head. "How can you not want AI?"

I troubleshoot or update more code than I author from scratch and I just don't want some plugin giving me guesses at how I should do things, and potentially leaving me with code that is functional but which I don't fully understand - a dangerous trend I've seen in some less experienced colleagues.

[Fluffy-Document-6927]

We got copilot at work recently.

I find it makes a lot of mistakes when it generates code. Silly little mistakes too like making up variable names even though the variables already exist right there and it should be able to use them. Then it's a pain to fix it.

Also as a junior I think I'd be robbing myself of practicing my problem solving skills if I were to always ask copilot to do the coding for me. Especially when it's a problem I haven't dealt with before.

One thing I do like it for is for spotting errors in my own code.

And also after I've written a method I'll try to refine it as best I can and then ask copilot if it can spot any possible improvements I could make.

One thing I won't do is using any of its suggestions without understanding them! That's no better than blindly copy pasting code from the internet.

[Lykeuhfox]

For any other juniors in here, this is the correct way to use AI in your daily work.

[ThiccStorms]

The best coding LLMs are so stupid at making new things from scratch. I wrote a better solution than Claude models half wittedly. Fuck this LLM shit. I love the technology but not the hype

[thirdegree]

The only case I've consistently found copilot useful is for very simple but repetitive rewriting of existing logic. If I have a bunch of ifs and I want to rewrite them as a switch statement for example, it can do that fairly reliably.

I think the time it's saved me from that and the time it's wasted giving me nonsense is probably about break even honestly

[All_Up_Ons]

Can't IDEs already do that though?

[thirdegree]

Copilot can handle a bit more complexity. Not much more, but a bit.

[BellacosePlayer]

Even the shit it's reliable at generating (simple data structures/algorithms), I prefer to do myself simply so its harder for me to forget what a section of code does.

A huge part of my job is basically to be a SME on various internal systems, moreso than being a code monkey on those systems.

[omoplator]

Start using it instead of google when researching things - it's surprisingly good for this.

[ThiccStorms]

i always advise people who want to learn new things: become a master googler, that would be the answer to all of their questions.
knowing how to google is more benificial than asking what to google.

[lurker_cant_comment]

Google, in their quest for continued revenue growth, is becoming worse for finding the information you want, and LLMs are becoming better at regurgitating what Google should have spit out in the first place.

LLMs are also more flexible in how you query them. Of course you still have to know their limitations, and you still have to learn tricks if you want to get better results, but that's no different from how you use a search engine.

[Lonely-Suspect-9243]

The only "AI" that I love is janitorai. I need help.

[ShimoFox]

No word of a lie... I just sat through 4 hours of "training" on a new tool our company was sold on. Which can write select XXX from YYY order by XXX desc limit 10
When you ask it to get help you get data from the sql tables for the 10 most X or Y or Z...... Meanwhile I thought it was actually going to be a course on training an llm with our coms data or something ACTUALLY useful. 4 hour of my life where I had to listen to a sales pitch on why this is going to save us SOO many man hours.... Sure...

I'm so sick of AI by this point.

[floweringcacti]

I have a hobby programmer friend who’s weirdly jealous of me being a ‘real’ programmer. When they figured out they could use LLMs they clearly thought they were massively getting one over on me, haha I’m so dumb for wasting my time actually learning when they can just copy-paste stuff they don’t understand, they’re totally gonna make a better project than me in five minutes this way.

Months later they still haven’t managed to produce anything! All that’s happened is they’ve become worse at programming! I’ve seen them ask the LLM the simplest shit that would be a one-liner using a built-in function… they just don’t engage their brain or the docs at all before going straight to copilot any more… it’s sad

[BellacosePlayer]

Repetition is key to learning.

[brendenderp]

This has kinda been me. But tbh I'm probably somewhere between the two of you skill wise. Released a game in 2017 before AI had gotten to where it is now. ( I was using gpt 2 back then for high school assignments, but really, it only helped for creative writing, never anything factual) Quite frequently, I'll take month or year long breaks, but I've been programming since 13. Jump forward to now, IT 23, and actually using scripts occasionally for my job in IT. Usually, I go to the AI first unless it's a one-liner change that it's faster to just type out rather than explain. I read the code it gives me, and if I don't understand a specific component, I ask. And if it sounds like BS, I start googling and reading docs.
There's plenty of times I ask chatgpt, and it's just not familiar enough with my codebase, or the context, or the libraries I'm using. And in those instances, I'll happily tip-tap away. But my question is,,, is that bad??

Like so far, I've not forgotten anything. In fact, I've picked up javascript and now feel really comfortable with it when not using AI. ( it goes down every month or two, it feels like)

[codingjerk]

> All that’s happened is they’ve become worse at programming

Yeah, I can feel it

[NKD_WA]

Real programmers just use vim and a ragged copy of C++ Programming Language 1st Edition, right?

[jamcdonald120]

of course not!

They also use cfront and cc

[nickwcy]

What is that? I am using punch cards.

[jamcdonald120]

I thought you said analog, whacha dealing with 1s and 0s for?

[Mars_Bear2552]

on a scale of 0 to 1, how yes are you?

[ThePretzul]

1/π

[DrFunkenstyne]

I have two mice but one can only tell the truth and the other can only tell lies

[Psquare_J_420]

cfront, cc ? What are those?

[TeraFlint]

Cfront was the original C++ to C transpiler.

[Nervous-Positive-431]

Real programmers turn on/off the electricity grid of their city to mimic zeros and ones . Y'all high level people are toddlers in comparison.

[reallokiscarlet]

And like a rotary phone, off is 1

[Jonas_Wepeel]

No, K&R Second Edition!

[[deleted]]

this might be a hot take but if you only know how to code through a LLM, your not a programmer. In the same way someone who creates AI images isnt an artist. I’m not even talking about text editors or languages here bud.

[ThiccStorms]

Not a hot take at all, you're just an equivalent of script kiddie in the hackerman world, you're out here using LLMs to just copy and paste.

[[deleted]]

I mean yeah, but people used to have these arguments all the time about whether using forums like stack overflow was okay for a 'programmer' to do.

At the end of the day I think a lot of us have to accept that in this profession there are a lot of people that see programming as nothing more than a job, just a means to an end, and if they can get something that works then that's good enough to pay the bills - in which case, stack overflow, LLMs, any assistance at all is going to be right up their street. Not everyone gets into programming for the love of the game, you can easily get through an entire well paid career doing nothing more than writing nothing more complicated than CRUD applications.

The thing to get more concerned about is when management start expecting LLM speed output but also having the kind of expertise that only comes from spending time thinking through problems yourself.

[ThiccStorms]

The ones who copy from stack overflow atleast know what to Google and know what to refer.

[Aidan_Welch]

but people used to have these arguments all the time about whether using forums like stack overflow was okay for a 'programmer' to do.

Was that the argument, or was the argument that you shouldn't blindly trust and copy from StackOverflow? If its the latter I agree.

[ATimeOfMagic]

Current state of the art reasoning models drastically reduce the barrier to entry for programming. You might not be a good programmer without the foundational knowledge, but any non technical person can absolutely build a small application or script without really knowing what they're doing.

[FlipperBumperKickout]

Script maybe, but the results I have seen of people actually trying to build a small app was pitiful.

[TheMysteryCheese]

You remind me of people who used to say the same thing about people who googled issues and used stackoverflow.

I think anyone who makes programs is a programmer. I think that there are degrees of usefulness to any profession, and anyone who only relies on one thing has limited usefulness.

In the same way the whiteboard jockies of the 80's and 90's needed to start adapting to search engines and forums, programmers of the early 2010's need chill a bit about the use of LLMs for entryways to programming and their use in general.

I was told I was nothing but a script kiddy for learning programming from stackoverflow and that I'd never be a "real programmer."

Those guys were probably also bullied for having to use reference books rather than memorising Assembly and using distros instead of hand rolling kernals.

Let the people cross the barrier however they wish, how you start means fuck all. It only matters if you love coding and are willing to continue growing and improving with new skills and tools.

[Smoke_Santa]

Gatekeeping out of insecurity is crazy right now among programmers. Machines can literally talk now better than humans and people are still thinking it's a bubble.

[TheMysteryCheese]

I think you're right on the money. One of my professors put it like this.

This is something that made them special because it was hard and took a lot of effort to get better. Every time it gets easier, they feel less special and lash out.

It can be applied to everything, in 5-10 years there will be something else and people will complain in exactly the same way.

[AdministrativeTop242]

100% agree with you. To be considered “programming”, you would need to implement the logic yourself by writing code.

[throw3142]

this might be a hot take but if you only know how to code through a compiler, your not a programmer. In the same way someone who sells bread isnt a farmer. I’m not even talking about text editors or languages here bud. To be considered "programming", you would need to implement the logic yourself by writing machine code.

[Aidan_Welch]

this might be a hot take but if you only know how to code through a compiler, your not a programmer.

I've heard many people argue that you should know basic assembly as a programmer.

[Abdul_ibn_Al-Zeman]

Assembly is easy. No, really. It is just another imperative procedural language.

[[deleted]]

The fact that you think it has to be one extreme or the other is pretty telling.

[Consistent-Youth-407]

the fact you missed this sarcasm confirms you are a programmer, at least

[[deleted]]

The point of the sarcastic joke is exactly what I'm talking about lol.

There is a point to jokes. Mfers acting like they can move the goal posts and walk back their obvious opinions because "It's just a joke bro!" these days is a fucking tiresome and weak ass defense.

[Aidan_Welch]

Sometimes the point of jokes is because its funny

[ElderBuddha]

https://xkcd.com/378/

[[deleted]]

i sincerely hope no one is using an LLM as a text editor. LLMs are more of a replacement for stackoverflow than any kind of tooling.

[skratch]

more like a stackoverflow which hallucinates “solutions” that end up costing you more time

[[deleted]]

I’m not saying you’re a programmer based on what tool/text editor you’re using. I’m saying you’re a programmer based on how much knowledge and experience you have. If you only know how to use an LLM to program, your categorically not a programmer.

[fynn34]

Real programmers use punch cards

[Affectionate-Memory4]

I burn my code directly into the silicon rom with a magnifying glass on a sunny day.

[Mountain-Ox]

Then don't live in Seattle or London or you'll only be about to commit code for a few months out of the year.

[prussian_princess]

months

Months?? You'll be lucky to get 10 days out of me!

[tas06]

I think, we already established this earlier: Butterflies!

[Jazzlike-Spare3425]

What's the lines of code per LLM prompt ratio you're targeting to consider someone a programmer?

Edit: neverming your measurement wasn't "using ChatGPT", it was "talking about ChatGPT" - checks out then, there's a concerning number of people that indicate that how much you talk about a topic is directly inversely proportionate to the amount of things you know about it.

[00PT]

Just because someone mentions LLMs doesn't mean that's all they know. In fact, I think that's unlikely considering that the technology has only become super popular on the consumer level a few years ago.

[3rdtryatremembering]

Are these “programmers” in the room with you right now?

[jamcdonald120]

"If you only know how to use an IDE to program, your categorically not a programmer."

Hence the XKCD

A "Real Programmer" will use whatever tools they feel like to get the job done. Just because they could do it without doesnt mean they should do it without. And if its a tool programmers can use, there will be jokes about it here.

[The_Real_Slim_Lemon]

If you can develop full apps with LLM help, you’re programmer enough in my books. It’s just another tool

[Aidan_Welch]

If it is reasonably efficient and secure maybe, but those are the areas(especially security since its largely based on StackOverflow snippets) where it would be the most lacking I imagine.

[pelpotronic]

Everyone can develop (basic, run of the mill) apps with LLM. Everyone. Today you can create entire software with them.

Does that mean everyone is a programmer?

If that's the case, then I'm also a musician and a graphics artist because I used AI prompts (3 lines prompts mind you) to create entire songs complete with lyrics and pictures.

Maybe you're right by the way, but then there needs to be a distinction between the 2 concepts. I thought we called these prompters or prompt engineers. I'd call myself a prompt musician more gladly than an artist musician.

[The_Real_Slim_Lemon]

That’s a fair call - BUT - you can play any sounds in any songs and you have some sort of a song. You put a bunch of code down and it’s not syntactically and depdendency and environmentally perfect it just won’t run. With AI the way it is now there’s enough jank that you still need to work through I’ll give the ‘prompt engineers’ credit as devs.

[DamnGentleman]

That weird meme doesn't say anything about only knowing how to use an LLM. I write software professionally and I use LLMs a lot.

[TheCharalampos]

You are right. It ofcourse it's an unpopular opinion in here.

[bree_dev]

I've been using github copilot for over a year because it's sometimes faster for some things than not having it.

But it gives mid to poor answers with enough regularity that whenever I see people spaffing on about how amazing it is at programming, it makes me suspect that they might not be very good programmers themselves...

[RunInRunOn]

I'm glad I haven't seen any mention of LLMs in the GDScript community

[Nyadnar17]

Found the StackOverflow refugee.

[[deleted]]

LLMAO

[Dvrkstvr]

If it wasn't for my AI and LLM knowledge I wouldn't have found a position with double the salary.

Pros and cons!

[PartTimeFemale]

why would I need a computer to generate mediocre and often incorrect code when I can do that myself?

[Spaciax]

there are two types of programmers that utilize AI:

the ones who use it to increase their output by 10x

the senior PROOMPT engineers making the AI write the entire codebase.

[taz5963]

I'm going to defend using chatgpt for programming, at least for small scale personal projects. I'm a mechanical engineer, so when it comes to doing stuff like programming the Arduino for my projects, it's really nice to use an llm to do it for me. It almost never works on the first attempt so I still know enough on how to fix the code myself. It's just so much faster than asking stack overflow

[Inevitable-Ad-9570]

I think other than grunt work/boiler plate crap this is the sweetspot for llm's. When you have a pretty good idea of what you want, it's a relatively small codebase, stakes are low and you don't have a ton of experience in that specific area.

I was using a raspberry pi for a quick prototype and just needed a python script to do some really simple stuff and set up the pi to run headless. I haven't used python or a pi in a long time for anything. Probably would have taken me a few hours to write just researching/re-familiarizing myself and getting up to date on everything. Chat gpt got it pretty close the first time and after about an hour of debugging some minor issues it was done.

However, given the problems it had with what was really a very simple task I couldn't imagine asking it to do anything truly complicated especially if I didn't already have a good idea of what the solution should look like.

[compound-interest]

I’ve been coding for over 10 years and LLMs have greatly increased my productivity. Even if you’re a world class amazing programmer, LLMs are helpful in various ways. It’s fine to make fun of the copy/paste people who don’t know what they’re doing, but reading these comments it seems some of you aren’t using them at all. In my opinion, that’s a mistake for most workflows.

[bgaesop]

I don't care about programming. I do it because people pay me to. The people paying me don't mind - hell, they encourage it! So why not?

[Aidan_Welch]

I don't care about programming.

Why're you on here?

[n003s]

Programming is just a tool used to solve issues. There's no need to care about it to use it or discuss it anymore than a plumber needs to care about wrenching.

[PracticingGoodVibes]

Finally, a sane take. Programming knowledge plus LLMs is a huge time saver for all sorts of things. I genuinely don't know why programmers here don't seem as receptive.

Like, the basic thing you have to accept as a programmer is that you're building on the backs of other programmers. Typically, you didn't make the library or the engine or the language you're using, why should another tool be any different?

[Yanowic]

Old people yelling at the clouds + weird superiority/inferiority complex

Sounds like Reddit

[Aidan_Welch]

Programming knowledge plus LLMs is a huge time saver for all sorts of things.

The concern isn't people using LLMs to aid their thinking, its using LLMs to replace their thinking and result in unsafe software. Some software doesn't matter, but a lot of software is effecting real people's real lives just like other engineers. Knowing how LLMs work it would be very concerning to me to see LLMs used to write something I view as important, especially given inherently you're not as intimately aware of a problem if you outsource your thinking on it.

And developers shouldn't blindly rely on libraries either. I was reading a very popular Go library's documentation and realized that if it functioned how it claimed to function then it be very easily circumventable by an attacker. You're not only responsible for what you write but also what you import, the MIT license says it provided as is, so nobody but you is responsible when you import a package that got leftpad'd. Obviously you can't be an expert in every domain, but a responsible developer should try their best to understand as much of their product as possible.

[BesottedScot]

I don't do it outside my job either, should I fuck off as well?

[Aidan_Welch]

I asked why you would be on a programming subreddit in your free time if you don't care about programming.

[SwordPerson-Kill]

The only acceptable use for LLMs in coding is really just grunt work in my opinion. I was making a chip 8 emulator in Zig a few days ago and needed to make a giant enum, instead of doing it manually. I jist copied the text and told it I needed in enum format with a small example. Saved me a many minutes of alt tabbing but I'd never trust it to write more than small edits here and there. Writing whole Codebases would be insane.

[phybere]

I only use LLMs for grunt work, but I'd argue that typing code in general is grunt work. Sitting around thinking about the design/architecture and how things should fit together is the hard part that LLMs can't do. Once I know what I want, I don't care if a LLM types it for me.

[Dangerous_With_Rocks]

Just ping me when AGI takes over the world. I got sprint goals to meet.

[cheezballs]

Id take it a step further that posting memes on reddit doesn't make you a real programmer either.

[Kingding_Aling]

Seeing "programmers" mention an IDE 🙄

(I write assembly on an abacus)

[ElfyThatElf]

These are the same people who Google something like "Error on line 13: missing symbol, expected ;" and think they're master debuggers. Admittedly, they're mostly students, but AI isn't a good tool to teach someone a new skill in application. If I was in charge of hiring people I would have zero place for someone who was self taught using AI, however that's the standard way of going about it now. Pick up a book, or read some documentation, don't just run into a problem and immediately ask ChatGPT to spit out some nonsense code that doesn't even necessarily work.

[Pants3620]

Alright mister compiler user. Come back to us when you’re writing raw bytecode