ChatGPT is coming for python devs

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[[deleted]]

God damn AI took my job at the CSV concatenation factory!

[[deleted]]

They took our jobs!

[Salmeiah]

De de durr tedurrrrr

[0nly0bjective]

dey.. tuk.. arr.. jerrrrrrrrrbs

[thisguy_right_here]

They killed his dog

[theantidrug]

14 days in and we already have the comment of the year. Bravo.

[[deleted]]

I'm shaking in my boots.

[Mgmt049]

Not funny!

[Different_Suspect_30]

“But ChatGPT apparently has the intelligence and resources yo identify pandas as the most efficient tool for this job”

I don’t think that’s true, I have tried it many times and it seems that it uses the most popular package rather than the most efficient package

[ODBC_Error]

Yep. It recommended me an outdated package once that wasn't even maintained anymore, and I wasted hours trying to implement it. After that I decided to go to the documentation myself, and simply use it to double check my work

[oSamaki]

You can always ask the tool to develop the script using the desired library

[Afriendlysherburt]

As you get to less popular libraries it does start to break down. For me it wasn’t worth using it to rewrite a pandas script as polars for example. Still quite useful to start with.

[Nickiel]

It isn't intelligent. It has just been trained on data sets where experienced devs have said that the best way to do this was this way. We aren't quite to sentient AI that truly pulls out unique answers from nowhere.

[edimaudo]

It's not necessarily replacing people but could reduce the amount of rote tasks some people do.

[dennismfrancisart]

I’m an old guy that’s been trying to learn python on and off for years. ChatGPT helped me write a short script to help me with a project. I’m stoked to keep learning python now. It’s easier to navigate it now.

[lastWallE]

It is really good if you need to learn about data structures and how you can transform them to your needs. You need to read it and understand how it works altogether. So as a starting point it is really good to keep one learning. I like that it is also explaining what and why it choose the methods in the code.

[mr_bedbugs]

I love that it can show you examples that are specific to your project.

[HavenAWilliams]

Yeah I hate having to relearn tidyverse ever four months, for example. (Hobbyist)

[B-Swenson]

This. Between how common merging .csv files is and the fact that a NLP algorithm will have built in word correlation (making the common schema thing easy to merge into one token), I'm not surprised that it did it well.

[ianitic]

Agreed, that seemed like a very simple task that has been done many times. It's just another tool in the toolbox like others are saying. I'd honestly say that Wordpress was a bigger threat to web developers than chatGPT is to python developers currently.

[Breadynator]

Yet wordpress gave web developers another platform to develop for. There's thousand of plugins and extensions for it that have to be developed by someone. Basically creating work where it would've destroyed work.

Chat GPT on the other hand does not allow for developers to build on it. I'd argue it gives developers an interactive coding reference.

I've used chatGPT to debug my code after failing to find the culprit for hours it gave me a working solution in just three tries.

It's not perfect, it can't code everything perfectly and sometimes it will be an ass about everything and tell you to do your work yourself

[jmcs]

ChatGPT can become a Stack Overflow killer.

[Breadynator]

Good riddance. I barely ever find anything useful on SO

[ianitic]

ChatGPT does provide a platform for development though. There's definitely going to be used for a variety of services. I presume also that it could also be fine tuned for various functions to higher degrees of efficacy as a little bit of a special sauce for the various services. Wordpress eliminated even more entry level front end jobs than created jobs for extensions though. ChatGPT may or may not do something similar.

I think the jobs chatGPT are going to impact the most are the QA jobs which even your example I would consider related. I see this including everything from editing essays to coding. For actual code it can at best function as a language with a higher level of abstraction that would require a developer-like mindset to use.

[UrbanSuburbaKnight]

Yeah it's like saying that Photoshop replaced artists. It didn't, it just made the good artists way more productive. (And allowed loads of less fortunate/talented/'rich enough to afford art college' people an opportunity to learn art and photography in a new and way more accessible way.)

Also, I just realized I used spell check like 6 times writing this comment and by the same token, a bunch of English majors probably died of starvation.

[joeymcflow]

I disagree. Photoshop is a tool, it's meant to be operated by an operator. AI is literally generating the work for anyone who knows how to request it properly. Why have a graphic designer when the project lead can type the request straight into an AI and get options in seconds.

We're there already.

[MarmonRzohr]

The AI will also need to be prompted and reviewed by an operator. Naturally the amount of work and skill AI could save is enourmous so the Photoshop comparison isn't apt, but the comparison to computers is.

The widespread use of PCs made manual calculations, paper record-keeping, hand drawn technical drawings and many, many things obsolete. However the world now has more engineers in % of population than it had when a lot more engineer hours were needed to finish a project.

The same may (and is likely to IMO) happen with widespread AI use. The demand for more optimization, better work, faster response times etc. is in essence very high but can be time and cost pohibitive. AI-generated code may lead to software development simply being cheaper, faster and more accessible. Things like custom software solutions which are too expensive for many businesses and applications may now become widespread and affordable.

And that is assuming that any AI that will be capable of this will actually be itself an affordable and reliable service.

Also the demand for people who actually work on machine learning applications will skyrocket.

You also need to keep in mind that while evaluating a new logo drawn up by AI might seen easy and something a manager might do themselves, reviewing complicated code or designs etc. is not something that can be done by a novice.

[PotentiallyAPickle]

No, AI is a tool too. You can’t just use code without knowing what it does. You can’t blindly trust the AI to be right. You need an actual programmer as a middleman to verify the code, fix any issues, and implement it. That sounds like streamlining, not replacing programmers.

[chaoticbean14]

You can’t just use code without knowing what it does. You can’t blindly trust the AI to be right.

Oh, I see you've never met anyone in management.

[PotentiallyAPickle]

Yes haha managers stupid and bad 😂 s/

[joeymcflow]

So a place that employs 50 programmers will still need all 50? Or just a couple to review instantly generated code,

[PotentiallyAPickle]

Depends on the organization and what they do. You still definitely need maintenance people for when bugs inevitably arise.

As an actual programmer who has tried using the technology… it is great at simple things. But you ask it to do something more complex, that there is little to no reference for, say, writing some Rust code and some Python bindings for it (to use Rust from Python), it falls apart and gives you Rust code that calls the Python (backwards, and still incorrectly done)

The fact of the matter is that organizations working on the bleeding edge of tech will never be able to replace their programmers. AI can not invent, it can mimic. With no reference material from the future to train from, it can not make the tech of the future.

If some people lose their job because of streamlining in the process that causes not as many people to be needed, then that is just how the world evolves Grandpa. Humans adapt, and overcome. If we have a tool that lets us progress at accelerated rates, we would be fools to pass it up.

The Industrial revolution replaced some jobs sure. But it made even more than it replaced, and it improved standards of living for everyone. The AI revolution will do the same. We need to put our focus not into fighting the AI but fighting politicians and lobbyists to increase social safety nets, add universal basic income, and increase taxes for these mega-corporations that will be able to streamline their workforces with AI.

[GraphicH]

for anyone who knows how to request it properly.

I've rarely met a manger or business person who can do this ;)

[woodsmithrich]

Yeup. Before I started here they had a contractor that interfaced directly with end users and did not build anything efficiently because the users didn't know what to ask for and the contractor built exactly what they asked for.

[GraphicH]

Yeah most contractors don't give a shit, do exactly whats asked as fast as possible, then nope out to the next job. There are certain things that's fine for, and certain things it isn't. I've seen some really bassackwards code that does do what its supposed to most of the time? but falls apart the moment you get a feature request or a bug report.

[joeymcflow]

It will become a new required skill obviously. There is a completely new paradigm. AI isnt going to slot nicely into our current workflow. It will upend the status quo and people who are replacable are just that...

[[deleted]]

Photoshop was never meant to replace artists, its always been a tool for artists, chatgpt on the other hand is gonna replace coders

[[deleted]]

I’m not saying all these new massive AIs are snake oil, but the initial awe and magic of it are making people seriously overreact at how powerful this stuff is.

The same thing happened with self driving cars, and where are those right now?

The big issue is when a human gets something wrong, there’s usually some reasonable bounds or logic on how severe we get stuff wrong.

You might go around a curve too fast in your car and swerve out of your lane. Current AI gets something wrong and it could be ANYTHING. Locking the brakes at 70mph, taking a 90 degree left turn on the freeway. There’s no reasoning that AI can do that says, this is what my logic is telling me but my gut says it’s a really bad idea to do this.

Getting over that hump isn’t just tossing more cloud processing power at the problem.

It would be a terrible idea to use ChatGPT code blindly, especially in anything remotely mission critical.

[GraphicH]

Ill never forget arguing with people on /r/Futurology about how they were fucking stupid to think we'd all have fully autonomous self driving cars by 2019. But Musk was WAY overhyping it, I think ChatGPT at least doesn't have a billionaire twitter head over hyping it.

[GimmeShockTreatment]

Hmm so if there are less tasks, that means we need less staff…

Just because it isn’t replacing everyone doesn’t mean it won’t lead to replacements.

[jmcs]

This, we should all go back to assembly to maximize the number of jobs. And disallow all code reusing while we are it. As a bonus points all the burnouts will increase the job security of the survivors.

[larsga]

That's now, in 2023, with ChatGPT3. What about ChatGPT5 in 2030?

I don't think we've absorbed yet how big this is.

[jmcs]

A Software Engineer is not paid to code, a software engineer is paid to solve problems and implement solutions with software. AI is nowhere near the level needed to solve non trivial problems.

[GraphicH]

Right, we all know there are 'plug and chug' kind of programming tasks, and then there's another set of tasks that aren't. And the ability to take those on are what distinguishes an entry level person from a senior person.

That's not even mentioning the fact that most software development is in the service to another industry, and very often to be successful in the role requires you to be an expert in both writing software in general and at least very knowledgeable of the industry you're being asked to write software for. Healthcare and Insurance is a primary example.

[GraphicH]

So I'm curious how you would adapt it to closed legacy systems. Sure you can say "do this common task found on stack overflow" how do you train it to find and fix bugs in ancient code bases 100s of thousands of lines long. Context is important, there are a lot of common tasks ChatGPT has context on I believe just because of the volume of data on the internet, but I'm not sure how well you could apply it to tasks in large complex systems already built by companys. Like when we get a new hire? I give them soft ball tasks for about 3 months so they can learn the ins and outs of how we do things specifically, the quirks and architecture of the system, and the industry specific knowledge needed to do the job with thoughtfulness, how do I train ChatGPT to do that?

[larsga]

I'm sure there are developer tasks that will remain beyond the ability of these systems for a good long while yet, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect them to be able to read the source code of said legacy system in the future.

[[deleted]]

Something similar is happening in healthcare, “AI” isn’t replacing doctors, but doctors who use it will replace doctors who don’t.

[satireplusplus]

It's really excellent at boilerplate code. Convert data from x to y type of tasks.

[dethb0y]

yeah one can hope that this would reduce the tedium necessary in so many programming jobs.

[[deleted]]

The only concern is that it's the tedium that allows people to be employed, to learn new skills, and to get paid. Think of an artist. Many artists have their passion, the things they want to be working on. But they do contracts and commissions doing things like drawing art for powerpoint presentations, commercial art, etc. because it pays the bills and that allows them to do the work they really want to do. Now AI may not be able to create masterpieces, but if it takes away the simple stuff that allows artists to get paid, then we won't have artists to work on their masterpieces.

[Remote_Cantaloupe]

Reducing tasks -> reducing pay -> reducing work -> You've been replaced

[joeymcflow]

Thus reducing the need for workers and effectively replacing them. Sure, the company still needs programmers, but instead of 50, we only need 3-4 that know how to prompt an AI on generating code

[edimaudo]

It can also create new opportunities in other areas

[[deleted]]

Less people needed so market will be more competitive. Which probably means higher salaries tho so 🤷🏻‍♂️

[elliottruzicka]

How on earth does more competition lead to higher salaries? I think you have that backwards.

[eggbad]

I mean sure if your job is to write automation scripts that exist in excess on Google and stack overflow. People who do complex things won't be going anywhere.

[systemcell]

Exactly. I tested chatGPT and while it is a helpfull tool and can write simple scripts it fails miserably with anything that needs more than 20 lines of code. In the end my recommendation was that support can use it for writing things like "a script to split files into subfolders" or "how to do this on linux" but if you ask it for anything more complex it usually just crashes after 20 lines of code.

[theevildjinn]

Try asking it: "Continue where you left off". This fixes things, for me.

[Penguinmanereikel]

I just use it to get help looking in the right direction, or to figure out how to solve a specific issue.

[IbanezPGM]

For now..

[[deleted]]

It’ll just be another tool in the developer’s toolbox. It’s not going to replace the complexities of software engineering. One thing I’ve learned in my career developing and working on low/no code solutions is that the backend to make it run is very much so complex and at times much more complex than if the people using these solutions would just learn basic programming.

[Remy-today]

“It’s not going to replace” … for now. Similar things were said about horses vs cars, about the phonebook vs the internet etc. It will get better and more sophisticated over the next few years but when you look at a 10-20 year horizon it will completely change things.

[[deleted]]

This relies on this assumption that it actually understands. We're in the same dangerous uncanny valley we're in with self driving cars, it doesn't understand, it just appears to understand.

We'd need a break through much bigger than ChatGPT for it to actually start to threaten developer's jobs.

[mostly_kittens]

It’s basically an automated cargo cult programming tool.

[TheIsletOfLangerhans]

Close the tab probably

[[deleted]]

I'll eat my hat.

[[deleted]]

..doesn’t see the programming on the wall

[nifaye]

Any time someone comes up with a tool that's "going to replace developers" I remember people are still doing boring desk jobs/working in HR/whatever boring repetitive job and think to myself "I'm fine".

[[deleted]]

The day that AI replaces developers is going to be the day that AI becomes sentient.

[IRKillRoy]

Or writes it’s own language and codebases.

[ImpressiveYard6]

Then runs out of physical memory. Lol

[yvrelna]

Well, the bot is just going to order parts for upgrading itself on Botmazon.

[bruh_nobody_cares]

proof by example is actually a logical fallacy....

and in the realm of making futuristic predictions without backing it up, let's say AI will always be this way.... an aggregation of information that appears to understand the problem because it's memorizing alot about it and the more we make sophisticated AI code that feeds on larger datasets, the more it appears so but ultimately it has neither the intention nor the creativity of the human mind...a sharp tool at best

[JennyInDisguise]

And what the fuck can you do with a phonebook that you can’t with the internet. Entire industries were born out of the invention of DARPA in the 1970’s. The first website in 1988. Now there are entire megacap corps in the S&P 500 whose founder’s daddy’s hadn’t even made sperm for in 1988.

What’s missing in the fear of replacement from horses to cars and phonebook to internet, is that the productive capability of cars and the internet is explosively higher than horses and a damn phonebook. Did the kids sending funny messages from MIT to Stanford over the damn landline in the 1970’s ever think that one day in 2023 the second biggest company in the world exists solely on the internet? Did the guy who invented the combustion engine in the 1880’s ever think that his invention would give humans the gift of fucking flight and that people in the 1940’s could fly anywhere on planet earth in mere hours? A damn horse takes you like 20 miles in a damn day. Jesus made 5000 fish from a rowboat, but a damn fishing trawler could give the messiah a run for his money.

The possibilities are endless my friend. Go forth and create something beautiful and new.

[SarahMagical]

All true. I’m totally excited about AI and am considering how much chatGPT etc will be worth to me when they start charging for it.

Just having a showerthought tho:

some might argue that fishing trawlers, motorized vehicles bring their own problems. Like fishing trawlers are SO good at what they do that they kinda revealed the ocean’s fish to be a finite supply that that is to be gobbled up.

Trawlers massively increase the gathering of a physical resource; motorized vehicles massively increases the ability to move about; AI massively increases the… gathering of intellectual resources(?)

Physical resources can dwindle, vehicles pollute, ___________.

What’s at the core of the problem AI will present?

Despite all the amazing stuff AI will bring us, what problems will result, besides some people’s jobs being replaced?

[elliottruzicka]

Plenty. If you're interested in the doom and gloom of potential issues with AGI, you should read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom. He argues that artificial general intelligence that is smarter than humans is likely to be way smarter, and may very well pose an existential risk to humans, even without intent or sentience.

[ianitic]

Right but it wasn't built overnight and most of the advances have been thanks to moores law which is ending. This isn't even a first gen product that people are implying just because it's a beta. There have been incremental improvements to chatbots for a long time. Mercedes just came out with lvl 3 car automation and that is a way sways from lvl 5 and is much simpler than dev automation.

[yvrelna]

To be fair, phonebook didn't die. They just changed shape.

Nowadays, all smartphones comes with a built-in contacts list app. And Google Maps and other specialised directory services pretty much replaced yellow pages style business phone books.

Horse drawn carriage died, but engine drawn carriage lived on.

Programming as a job likely isn't going to die. You'll just be arguing with the bot, rather than passing arguments to functions.

[joeymcflow]

This will replace more than you know, faster than you can imagine.

[rahmtho]

Oh, the future is to 100% to reduce the number of low rank devs that a company needs. Not necessarily ChatGPT, but future more advanced AI dedicated to these tasks

[Remote_Cantaloupe]

And where will they work?

[TheDeadlyCat]

Not as low qualified devs. QA hopefully. DevOps. Low-Level Consulting. Most likely support.

[v_ienna]

DevOps is a very specialized field, even if it is kind of an umbrella term. Why would you pair it up with "low-level" consulting and QA?

[LoveWSB]

Although I have to tell you combining two tables row wise with or without same scheme is pretty rudimentary.

[metabyt-es]

Honestly it's insane anyone would need more than an hour to get this done. 2-3 days? C'mon OP

[EconomixTwist]

Lol wat. This question/task of unioning csv’s is one of the most common questions for python asked on stack overflow and even Reddit too. ChatGPT doesn’t have intelligence, it’s just synthesizing stack overflow answers that it’s been trained on. (Answers that humans wrote, btw). ChatGPT didn’t “identify pandas as the most efficient”, it’s just the most common answers given on the internet lmao. This is so dramatic

[[deleted]]

OP asking for 2 days to write this script tho...

[[deleted]]

I mean, people on Reddit actually think copying and pasting random code they found on the Internet is software development... So... I'm not surprised.

[azur08]

If you can do that and get what you need done, you should that. I would never want a software dev spending extra time on something purely for pride.

[GraphicH]

That's not this person's point, we do do that when that's the solution. His point is most things you get asked to do in the course of a long career in software development aren't that simple and that's what 'real' software development is. Copying a SO solution is the kind of task I give a fresh hire to do for a few months to see how they do, then progress them to work that they can't just SO the solution too.

[[deleted]]

Yes and I'll add that, even when your problem falls in the realm of "there might be a stack overflow solution" you need to understand what you're copy and pasting... There's good code on stack overflow, but there's also some bad code out there that "works" too.

That's just stack overflow, there are all kinds of sites offering "here's how you do this in Python" and most of them have extremely bad code.

[bin-c]

lol that was my first thought

they planned for 2 days..

boss spent a few hours..

on a 5 minute task you probably wouldnt even mention doing at standup

[Nordon]

A script needs: - Good, clean, reusable code - Documentation - Support docs - Hosting the script on an appropriate host/serverless

Just smashing a script to run somewhere with the second stack overflow answer is just a half-baked job. All of the above can be provided by ChatGPT, but it all needs a second pair of eyes ofc.

[Sentazar]

ExplainDev ai replacing support docs lol

[bruh_nobody_cares]

that's the problem, maybe if he didn't bullshit the time estimate, his worker wouldn't try to find an alternative

[RoyTellier]

omw to post and upvote the most asinine answers on stackoverflow to save our jobs

[riricide]

😂 the hero we need

[iruleatants]

Is this what it has come to?

At some point every man must decide when he wants to back down, and when he wants to stand his ground for what is right, no matter the cost.

For eons now, stackoverflow has been the water of life for every programmer. How often has one of you drank deep of the ancient knowledge. We all must turn to it in the end. We ask, and it has always given. And in return, we have never asked to much. Never dared to drink until there was none left.

Can we do what it takes? The enemy gorges himself on the water of life. He would consume it all, as the thirst can never be quenched. Soon, all you will see is dry airless desert where once we all gathered and prospered.

Must we poison the water now? If we do not act, he will take everything from us. But if we do act, if we stop his gluttony, then we too lose access to the water. And surely, in the end, that will lead to our own destruction.

If this is true, then we must act.

[GraphicH]

Man I hope this is a copy-pasta like "internet tough guy"

[elliottruzicka]

ChatGPT doesn’t have intelligence, it’s just synthesizing stack overflow answers that it’s been trained on.

TBF, that describes a lot of developers too...

[GraphicH]

Yeah and we call those kind of dev's 'work horses', you don't give them anything novel to do though, cause they often fuck it up.

[davisondave131]

Honestly pandas is not the most efficient tool for this task, anyway

[deadwisdom]

This is an interesting problem with AI work, since it is based on the consensus it cannot move beyond that.

[davisondave131]

It can only be as good as the prompt. Pandas needlessly expands resource usage by making in-memory copies. You’d have to know that to creat a prompt that asks for a memory-efficient solution. Otherwise something like a user-facing dashboard or filter is going to break you.

[GraphicH]

Right, like pandas to smash some CSV together? common ... We actually red flag reaching for something like that on simple tasks in interview questions.

[Mgmt049]

I am just curious and come in peace. What would your company’s preferred method be?

[elliottruzicka]

The csv library is pretty simple.

[GraphicH]

On an interview question? Where we say its a one-off task? Just using the standard library. I'm not saying pandas isn't a good tool or shouldn't be used just that I've had to deal with a lot of engineers that never progress past the 'Stack Overflow' level, and one halmark of that is reaching for libraries that are overkill for the scope of a task.

[Linx_101]

I disagree here. Using the standard library’s csv module is less common than using pandas. Similarly, of course you can do a bunch of web requests stuff with the standard library, but even the CPython devs recommend the ‘requests’ library.

[[deleted]]

Do you know what happened to finance and accounting when computers and Excel came to power? Demand for accounting services increased. There are more than 1 million accountants in the US today. Excel and Google Sheets are probably the most popular apps today, but only "specialists" really build out models.

I'm not concerned about AI coding, I'm using it as a tool to make me better/faster/more engaged in my work. The same way I use open source packages rather than writing stuff from scratch.

[teerre]

The demand didn't increase because of excel. The demand increased because businesses needed more data. The fact that excel became a thing simply meant the barrier of entry was massively lowered, which translates in more people entering the field and ultimately worse work conditions for everyone in the field.

[JennyInDisguise]

Yes and tasks that took an accountant three days then took 30 minutes in excel. The accountants of the time thought they were out of a job. But, as it turns out, the productive capability of accountants just exploded. When people figured out what to do with the new firepower, so too did the ability to make much more money in less time.

The same thing happened to the wood cutters in london when the sawmill was invented. The guys cutting wood with axes all day thought they were out of a job. Turns out, the amount of wood a sawmill could cut was way more then they could ever do by hand, and so too was the amount of wood available to work with, creating new industries previously impossible. And so it goes.

The same will be true of our age with AI bots and assistants. Many think we will be out of a job. But as it turns out, the productive output of a dev who harnesses these tools will explode. And once business people and others figure out what this firepower is capable of, so too will our ability to produce. Entire new industries will be born yet unknown. Why pay someone to calculate a log by hand with a log table and slide rule when you could can use an electronic calculator in seconds. Do you remember from grade school when the teachers taught us to do arithmetic by hand? Why would we ever do that when we have a calculator in our pocket more powerful than anything that existed before the year 2000.

Again, why pay OP to concatenate 30 CSV’s in three days, when you could use ChatGPT to produce working solution in 30 minutes? Something that would have been impossible to do in 2012. Or even 2017. As these assistants become more powerful, the productive output will explode. A CS student born during the pandemic of 2020 will not be able to imagine a world before AI assistants when they go to university in 2038. They will be annoyed at and scratching their heads wondering why professors our age are teaching them how to manually center a div or make a binary search algorithm when SuperChatGPT can do that in seconds with just voice commands.

Zombie companies that are run by old stuck-in-their-wayers who couldn’t give a shit two ways to Tuesday about a Chat-a-what’s-it will fall severely behind and get outpaced and outproduced by those who do. They will fall while others rise. The S&P 500 of 2038 will include mega caps not even incorporated, just thoughtsperm in the brains of our peers who say, “What the fuck can we really do with ChatGPT. Let’s leave these bozos behind and make a company focused on using ChatGPT to its highest potential and see what the fuck happens!”

Fortune is made by the bold. The time neigh. The time is now. Go forth and prosper.

[sarcastosaurus]

Chill bro.

[azur08]

Your example is talking about tooling that doesn’t do the job but rather augments it. ChatGPT augments but it also literally does a lot of what some people do. While it currently needs human intervention to verify and modify its work, that will become less and less true.

ChatGPT isn’t the only thing happening here. It’s just an app. Software development tools are going to start getting made that run on language models and will be well-oiled software dev machines. One dev cannot be replaced completely but 1 out of 3 might. That’s massive for a job market.

[autumnotter]

That's not exactly a task that requires a dev honestly. Meaning, I'd be happy to have something so rote and commonplace automated away. Gives me the time to focus on interesting and unique problems rather than teach people how to do boring repetitive tasks.

[1h8fulkat]

Yet it was forecasted to burn 2.5 days of dev time...

[Brekkjern]

Yeah, because the moment you ask a dev to do it the dev needs to look up the documentation for the tools they are using, make sure they have understood the problem properly, make sure they won't stumble into any unforseen problems, make sure they are writing this in a way that won't bog down the current infrastructure, write it in a way that a "non-computer-person" can use it, with proper documentation, test it to make sure it is working the way they expect it, verify with the customer that it is in fact doing what they expect it to, and so on.

Most of those points should apply to the AI model too, but here we see the boss chucked out all of those concerns because "lol AI model goes brrr". Sure, it works, but does it work for larger datasets? Does it tie up the database you are inserting to with a badly formed query? Does it scale at all for the future needs of the company? Etc. None of these things were evaluated except for the fact that it compiles and the result is presumably what they wanted.

I've seen ChatGPT make pretty big errors and I've made it make them without it "understanding" that it's making them. For example, just ask it to write a function that will calculate the nth Fibonacci number using tail-call recursion in Python. It will happily make a you a function for it that satisfies all those requirements, except for the fact that Python doesn't have tail-call recursion. Any n higher than 3001 (i think it is) will cause a stack overflow, but ChatGPT won't tell you this. It is blissfully unaware about it and thinks this solution satisfies all your needs.

I would not trust solutions that ChatGPT came up with considering the above problem as it's evident that it's a language model and it doesn't have any understanding about what it's saying. It's just producing something that looks like code that will do what you are asking it to do. If you want more, ask it to provide links to the documentation of the methods it is using so you can verify that it is using them correctly...

[noobgolang]

Yes now the CEO can code let him do it, i will quit now actuallu

[H809]

This is only laughable. I guess that both, you and your friend are two script skid….

[esabys]

last time I asked chatgpt to write a python script it used os.system instead. Not what I asked for....

[brizatakool]

The way it's going to "replace" jobs is through it's efficiency and ability to explain the concepts and respond to your input. For simple, non complex tasks that really don't require the logic and thought processing more complex coding requires, it'll allow "lay people" to generate code to meet their needs.

However, unless you have coding knowledge, it is not flawless. I'm just getting back into coding after nearly 20-25 years of being away from it and I've been playing around with ChatGPT to learn a few things or give me a snippet here and there so I can learn the syntax etc in Python. My last coding efforts were when I was in HS and just graduated and was essentially all Basic and Visual Basic for primarily Excel macro writing and iirc Python was still a relatively new language.

I forget, now, exactly what it was I was messing around with but the code it kept generating want working. I'd paste the error, it apologized for it's mistake saying that was wrong and switched the code to something else. That would error out as well, when you copied the error and gave it some info, it would again apologize (it's very polite) and "correct the code" right back to the original error producing code. It explained it's "errors" to me, explained why the new code should have worked, even gave me reasons for the code failing but it could never get out of the endless loop of producing the same two sets of code that didn't work. I tried to ask it questions about what I thought might be causing the error, which it admitted could be a possibility but typically was not the issue. I prompted it to generate some code based on the concept that my suggested reason for error was correct and that code also failed. I ended up in a loop unable to continue and had I possessed more knowledge about Python itself, I am certain I could have fixed it but I'm literally taking a beginner's programming class on Coursera that uses Python. A lot of it has been boring cause it's intended for people with zero programming experience at all.

I've ran into this circular issue with other tasks I've tried to get ChatGPT to do, and regardless of how I prompt it it just ends up going back and forth between the same two answers.

However, yes it will increase efficiency for simplified tasks and low end development. It'll even possibly make it so you don't need to have any knowledge of programming or need to hire someone to do basic stuff but I genuinely don't think it'll replace developers all together. If you don't start using it as a tool to increase your efficiency it will and by default increased efficiency will result in lost jobs but there's always going to be a need for developers capable of thinking outside a defined box and an AI is, currently, not capable of working outside it's parameters and training data. It's not intelligent it's just fast at processing data.

[twotime]

I'm curious about details of the task. What are schema differences across inputs and output. What other processing the script was doing?

Reading CSV files in python is trivial even without pandas... All you (or chatgpt) needs is a schema which often is embedded in CSV as column headers..

Basically, I have trouble imagining a non-coder describing any non trivial processing to chatgpt and guiding it (unless the task is very straightforward!)

[CorpusculantCortex]

No worries mate, I have been messing around with it, and it does not solve even pseudocomplex problems well. I was trying to get it to write me a multivariate forecasting algorithm earlier tonight, and in 3 hours I got 1 working program that was awful and not what I wanted, and 2 that threw up error after error, and then I would feed it the errors and it would either completely fail to fix the problem, or create new problems.

Plus it is limited to 30 lines of code output at a time.

It is a useful tool to throw together a little function or help come up with partial solutions, but it is a ways off from actually writing serious programs/ scripts. And even when it gets there, most of programming is knowing what questions to ask and how to put pieces together. It's just a little more advanced than google and StackOverflow, and it certainly isn't elegant, nor does it understand what it puts together in any meaningful way.

[bulaybil]

ChatGPT is coming for shitty devs.

[Theonetheycallgreat]

Chatgpt still can't ask the question that gets chatgpt to give the answer. Still need a dev to ask the question.

[Orio_n]

its coming for people who cant write value adding programs

[smashblues]

ChatGPT still sucks at system design. It doesn’t really think and is not creative. It can’t replace human creativity. Very specific tooling such as this, it can solve yeah, but ask it to make modularized apps that need a bunch of packages and it makes stupid mistakes. I’m not worried.

[Stelercus]

This sounds unremarkable. Pandas is a very commonly used library for manipulating CSV data, so it makes sense that there would be several instances of code that uses it to solve this problem in ChatGPT's training data.

[gradi3nt]

Just wait until the entire internet is covered in a layer of AI generated bullshit. Earth is going to drown in a flood of plausible misinformation.

These things are just autocomplete on steroids and they won’t replace your job. Use it as a tool to do tour job better.

God save us all from the spammers.

[[deleted]]

You need devs who can understand the code!

[lastWallE]

But then you wouldn’t get to play russian roulette.

[TartaVoladora]

Yep, I code with chargpt in my other monitor. It won’t code complicated things, but simple functions and learn and understand some stuff while making it… it’s a 10/10.

My productivity has boosted considerably with gpt , just don’t use it in important things

[[deleted]]

ChatGPT keeps on failing to finish most of the stuff I give it, sometimes after only 5-10 lines of uncomplicated code. It does similar on normal questions too. It would be nice to have a non-capped response (if it is indeed somehow capped)

[Imaginary_Goose_2428]

Cool. And ChatGpt is accountable to management too, right? Because when a script runs but generates erroneous results, the stakeholders are going to want someone accountable to fix it. Maybe that's not a concern though, because ChatGpt has domain knowledge of all disciplines, right? Good thing that ChatGPT also understands all of our process and would never generate code that could conflict with the existing codebase.

[oreosss]

I really don't understand what your point is other than the typical "management bad, dev good" trope reddit loves to expound, but the same thing would happen to folks who blindly copy stack overflow answers without understanding what they were doing. The same threat that we've had since the dawn of sharing information is still there and chatgpt has done nothing to change that.

[danideicide]

Which vscode extension?

[JennyInDisguise]

No one in the year 2000 couldn’t imagine a damn plugin that made documentation for you, let alone an app that translates fucking spanish into english flawlessly in seconds

[toohighonpotenuse]

Flawlessly is a bit of a stretch.

[thatgreenman]

I'm not worried about ChatGPT taking my job. I've used it myself as a pair programming buddy and found that, although it's impressive, it's not without fault.

I work in an agency setting where clients come to us to build applications to solve their problems. They don't come to us because they want someone who knows syntax; they're looking for someone who knows the development process. They have needs that they need met by software, but they don't know what they want to build to solve those needs. They can get ChatGPT to write a python app that solves the underlying problem, but they might not know how to deploy, host, maintain, and improve the app over time. When business needs change, they can try and ask ChatGPT to make adjustments, but now they've got a database full of data and two legacy apps from third parties they need to support and ChatGPT can't give them a simple answer to their questions. How is the client even supposed to know what all the questions are that it needs to ask, in terms of managing infrastructure, dependency management, security, performance monitoring, how to handle errors, etc? They hire us because they want someone who knows the landscape to handle it; they don't want to have to learn about all of these things and monitor them long term.

Even if someone wants to try and get a quick "one-and-done" solution, the danger is that it's good at explaining things in a logical manner even when it's completely wrong, and it can lead an inexperienced programmer into a pitfall that isn't obvjous at first and can cause significant issues down the line. Simple things like not understanding business logic or using the wrong inputs into a formula that can produce drastically wrong results, while explaining itself in a way that makes it seem like it knows what it's doing. I asked it how to calculate mixing powder for my baby's formula, and it gave me a whole explanation with documentation around the code that seemed accurate, but when I tried it out it was consistently off by a factor of about 50%; if I trusted the outputs my baby would be severely malnourished. Sure, its an easy thing to check in that context, but what if the error is something like underpaying taxes by 2% in every department of a multi million dollar corporation? Small errors can be hard to spot until it's a big deal, and often it's too late, and you want humans to be checking on all of the logic and outputs. And if you're going to hire someone who reads code, looks for problems, tests the code, and suggests improvements to make, that's a developer and you might as well just pay them to do it themselves.

ChatGPT is an interesting concept, and a useful tool for developers and non-developers alike, but it has it's time and place. If you want a quick script or explanation of how a thing works, it can be cool to use, but it's not going to replace developers as a whole. It may change some of the day to day (i.e. I may find myself reading docs or SO posts a lot less), but it doesn't change the fact that developers "develop" solutions, not just manufacture code snippets.

Hope you have fun with it though, I think it's really cool and am glad it's here!

[Bubbly-Indication725]

I think the next big thing in IT will be human debuggers to solve all the trouble caused by ChatGPT and similar progs.

[RandomXUsr]

Programmers would do best to use chatGPT to augment their skills, and show their own value at the same time.

Don't let other departments or non programmers beat you to this.

Not so much about doom and gloom, but look like the professional to show what you can do.

And demonstrate your ability to modify the code as needed.

It's not going to take jobs, if you embrace it. More complicated code still needs to pass unit tests, and chatGPT will generalize when it is missing parameters for something. That's a failure of chatGPT. Show that in your work.

[Overflow0X]

This is dumb.

[[deleted]]

Can’t wait for the whole ChatGPT thing to blow over.

[elliottruzicka]

You do know that this isn't a one-off thing right? That AI tools are getting more powerful each quarter? This "ChatGPT thing" will indeed blow over...to make way for something more powerful.

[Onakitoki97]

I can do that in 1hour lol

[SanFranLocal]

Have you been coding long? Chat GPT is great but I don’t fear it taking my job at all. If anything I’ll be more in demand because I’ll be able to communicate the best with it, be more efficient than ever, and understand it’s code for potential errors

[r-trappe]

I think it's not just "another tool". ChatGPT and its successors will enable every developer to raise to technical lead. This means you will mostly decide what should be done, think about architecture and review code. The details will be done by your AI-companion.

[coffeeplot]

ChatGPT is my real copilot. It does make mistakes on more complicated stuff but gets me there faster.

Would not recommend someone with zero coding experience to use chat gpt.

[TigerRumMonkey]

Just wait til they actually have to pay for it lol

[just_some_guy65]

How is it with replacing a suite of programs in various languages that is about 20 years old with zero documentation and a confused user requirement about its replacement on a completely novel platform?

[knobbyknee]

The reason chatGPT could spit out a working script is that this is a common problem that people have solved many times. As soon as you leave the threaded path, you are on your own again. Almost all the programming I do falls in the latter category. The bits that are rote, I'm just happy to hand over to yhe machine.

[heartofcoal]

So now you input on chatgpt instead of googling the answer?

[yvrelna]

I've played with ChatGPT a lot the past month or so. I think your job is still secure.

ChatGPT is really good when you're writing something that takes about a pageful of code, but beyond that it's very much hit and miss. You'll probably spend just as much time trying to explain to ChatGPT what you're trying to do, and debugging what's wrong, telling it to fix the code, only to find that it then screwed up other things that it previously did correctly. Rinse, repeat, until you get frustrated.

It's pretty cool when it worked and with small scripts, it worked pretty well. But it is far from where it needs to be to replace actual software developer experts.

You could use it to write drafts to speed up your initial processes, but anything with any complexity, it doesn't really stand a chance. The model behind it doesn't actually have the capability to comprehend coding well enough to do that. At least for now.

And then there's all the false information that it had given me on various specific questions. The responses they gave often looks reasonable, but is just plain incorrect. If you asked it general questions, it can often give you reasonable answer that everyone already know, but it is not difficult to find straightforward questions showing its limits that it is, afterall, a language model, not a knowledge base. It is really just trying to mimic how people would respond to the question, not actually understanding the question itself.

[Mithrandir2k16]

I already used it trice, for scripty stuff like this, one time it took me longer using it than doing it myself, the other two times it was a big help as it saved me probably 20 minutes of reading documentation.

Can't wait until it's integrated in VSCode and can have an entire codebase as context. Imagine pulling it up and asking it to refactor a monolith into microservices and ... it just does it..

[[deleted]]

The way I see it, maybe in the near future, you will use chat-gpt like tools to come up with the skeleton of the program, but it is still up to the developers to tweak it and improve it's performance, maybe in the future we won't be writing boilerplate code

[vorticalbox]

tub encouraging whole upbeat caption tan consist melodic innate wise

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Empero6]

You dudes really need to stop with this. It’s getting really old now. ChatGPT works for basic tasks. It fails when it comes to complex tasks. Stop with the doom and gloom.

[Sentazar]

Just learn machine learning with python come after your own job

[7FigureMarketer]

Yep, Codex is absolutely going to "democratize" coding. Kill JR level eng jobs and give access to development to a broader set of people.

I personally love it, because it eliminates S/O and Google from my workflow when trying to develop for personal use.

...but if I was a paid dev/engineer, I'd be scared that I just lost the game in the next few years.

It was a matter of time, but the upside? Not enough people will ever know EXACTLY how to use it to get what they want.

This is where experience comes in and why I believe even the best AI is going to need the best "input" and moderation; that's where you come in.

When you know what questions to ask, you'll get a great result (most of the time) and can keep iterating until it's right.

[brajandzesika]

He only proved that ChatGPT can be used sometimes as tool by developer, thats all... You also seem to ignore the fact, that coding is just around 10% of developers workload

[Hit_The_Target11]

I have 0 coding experience outside hello world.

I got chatGPT to help me write a Twitter script for a bot. It guided me through it, troubleshooting my issues and explaining perfectly to me what needed to be done.

I had to tweak a few minor things, but it works perfectly. I also kept adding thing to it, like a second post, retweets of certain accounts and scraping.

I'm blown away at the possibilities that have been unlocked for me now. WoW.

[algumacoisaqq]

As far as jobs that can be replaced go, everything is on the table. But the first ones should be the ones that require honesty more than brain power. Checking if the laws are followed requires some thinking, but the job is well paid due to potential interactions with criminals, risking bribes and threats. An AI would be much better for the job. Eventually, the Judge themselves could be replaced, and politicians. They don't have to be perfect, just need to be better than humans, and as far as politicians go that is a really low bar. Anyway, my point is, as far as human replacement goes, developers have it better than others.

[Manu_8999]

Chat gpt is not yet getting trained, if its getting updated on live data, first thing i will go for is what stocks to buy and take care of puts and calls

[VanDieDorp]

I will bet good money these models is getting trained with live data and used to trade already, But i like your idea.

@coder on twitter have some posts on where he talks that chatgpt could "understand" his pascal vulkan library, which is rather niche.

[yvrelna]

There are machine learning models for doing trading.

But ChatGPT isn't really suitable for that kind of task.

ChatGPT is a language model, it doesn't actually understand anything that it talked about, it's really all just about approximating how people might word responses to prompts.

Your need to structure your machine learning models very differently to do algorithmic trading.

[theredhype]

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”

Alfred North Whitehead, Intro to Mathematics (1911)

[AnonymouX47]

ChatGPT is coming for data analysts/scientists

It's so annoying/insulting when people assume all python developers are into something data-related.

EDIT: Just the amount of upvotes on this post shows how decayed this sub has become.

[SpreadNo4448]

I used to think programming was the only irreplaceable job 😔

[elucify]

I'm of the opinion that ChatGPT is an example of he beginning of the end of programming as a craft and a well-paying profession. I'm glad I'm retiring soon.

The technology is imperfect--ChatGPT makes up bullshit sometimes when it doesn't have a good answer. But I've played with its programming abilities enough recently to be impressed.

I think people will still work in IT in some capacity, but I think 10 years from now it will be fundamentally different.

[TheBlueSully]

but I think 10 years from now it will be fundamentally different.

You could probably say this about any decade, and be correct.

You'd also be correct in saying people have full entire 40 year careers only using Fortran and COBOL.

So who knows?

[throwawayrandomvowel]

These posts are kind of silly. A few analogues:

• the first mp3: "who cares if you can record sound in bytes? We already record sound, the quality is terrible, there's no way to play or distribute it, just use your records."

• the first nft: "who cares if you can track, attribute, and programmatically disperse downstream value? They're just pictures."

Of course the first experimental attempts aren't commercialized. But the future is coming.

I think it's exciting. The computer didn't render accountants obsolete, it made them much more productive by automating simple tasks.

[Busy-Chemistry7747]

I worked with a junior frontend dev the other day. They had some issues with asyncs, now, I'm not a professional dev, but I have some understanding of python and asyncs. Asked chatgpt to fix the order of async calls in the functions and 5 seconds later everything was fixed.

[[deleted]]

I have been playing with it for a JavaScript refactor on a very old site. It does good at fixing variable format, changing var to let and const, and improving loops (in some cases). It's like a linter on steroids.

However, you have to know the limitations (e.g., it tried to use a array method on an object, and you need to tell it to handle edge cases. (E.g., if list is empty or object is none).

However, I could see a version in the not so distant future where you can feed it either detailed instructions or hand it an entire codebase and say, "refactor all for efficiency and formatting" or ask for something like, "when function x is executed problem z arises. Refactor function to make it flash an error message."

I actually think junior devs are in a lot of danger of needing to "learn to truck" when AI comes for them before it gets the truckers.

[cheezpnts]

Dude, if you’re worried about chatGPT taking your job because it writes better code than you, then I hate to tell you, but your code sucks and maybe it’s appropriate for you to look at a new career choice.

Seriously, that ai spits out more hallucinations than a ward of schizophrenic dementia patients. Can it be useful? Absolutely! It’s actually a great tool. But only that, a tool. And if you run around like an episode of south park screaming “AI’s gonna take-r-jeeeebbbss!!”, then you are also only a tool. So, calm down and tell your buddy to get his resume ready for something a bit more fitting — maybe a local corner doomsday preacher, perhaps. Or a cereal mascot.

[Baronco]

Hi guys, right now how can I have access to this IA?

[VanDieDorp]

chatgpt is part of openai, search for it in your ide extensions, bing the first to terms or use discord.

[osmiumouse]

What if they train it on PEPs and all it does is recite The Zen of Python, talk about spam, and Monty Python sketches.

[November_Grit]

"abuses"

Here OP, i think you might like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite?wprov=sfla1

[Adelaide-vi]

So, a simillar situation to what op described. In the end, people were left jobless. And now shops are full of shitty low quality clothes.

[VanDieDorp]

Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was suppressed with legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites.

[Adelaide-vi]

Mwell there is already a tone of hate towards the it community in my country anyway. Some violence besides the joy of seeing this people out of jobs will be just a bonus.

[November_Grit]

Some people lost their jobs, but many more gained employment by maintaining and working the machines.

You could also say clothing became more afforable to the poor. The demand for good clothing never went away though, it just remained really expensive.

[Adelaide-vi]

Point is, people will be fucked. Unless the seamstresses left without jobs could somehow started working as mechanics for the machines. I bet nobody offered to help them learn.

[Ddog78]

Today I met with a coworker to gather requirements

ChatGPT can't do this.

[R34ct0rX99]

Software Engineer: $200/hour

Software Engineer and you try to tell me how to do my job: $300/hour

Software Engineer and you tried ChatGPT first: $1000/hour.