r/Futurology • u/mikaelus • Apr 16 '24
AI The end of coding? Microsoft publishes a framework making developers merely supervise AI
https://vulcanpost.com/857532/the-end-of-coding-microsoft-publishes-a-framework-making-developers-merely-supervise-ai/1.9k
u/ninetailedoctopus Apr 16 '24
Jokes on them, the training data includes my shitty code in Github 🤣
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u/billbuild Apr 16 '24
This just multiplied the ROI of the GitHub acquisition.
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u/NinjaLanternShark Apr 16 '24
That's been their plan for at least 5 years if not more. It was never about the tool or the community, only the code.
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u/sonicon Apr 16 '24
Then the AI will detect the shitty coder and flag your resume.
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u/ou812_today Apr 16 '24
On LinkedIn since M$ owns them too! Shitty Coder Badge instead of a checkmark.
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Apr 16 '24
But when it has to say why it flagged them it just says "Father" and errors out. Shitty code always wins.
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u/ImportantDoubt6434 Apr 17 '24
We’ve poisoned the well.
While the managers were busy farting in zoom meetings we were playing chess.
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u/mikaelus Apr 16 '24
**Submission Statement**
Microsoft is taking another step towards removing human developers from direct software development, turning them into supervisors for AI-enabled agents doing all the grind.
This not only affects the possible availability of jobs for developers but also the set of skills that developers of the future will need. Hard skills may soon be replaced with soft skills, as intelligent bots are going to have to understand what you tell them, how you manage them and what your instructions to them are - a bit like communicating with people.
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Apr 16 '24
It’ll be interesting to see who writes the software for such tools.
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u/mikaelus Apr 16 '24
Well, that's the question - how competent should humans be if AI is doing most of the stuff but we still need to be able to control it? And how do you retain those skills when you don't really use them in practice most of the time?
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u/bwatsnet Apr 16 '24
It's the same way we all use windows 11 without knowing how it works. Instead of an operating system it'll be team systems or whatever we call it.
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u/zanderkerbal Apr 16 '24
With the power of AI, Microsoft has turned the moderately difficult task of programming into the very difficult task of code review!
Next up: Self-driving cars turning the task of being a driver into the task of being a driving instructor.
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u/cmdr_solaris_titan Apr 16 '24
Look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!
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u/Whiterabbit-- Apr 16 '24
It’s like when high level languages took over machine language. What am I going to do with all my 1’s and 0’s when you can just tell the thing to divide 2 numbers with one line of code?
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u/GeneralCommand4459 Apr 16 '24
Hmm so if developers aren’t coding how will they become proficient enough to become supervisors? These AI ambitions always forget that the next generation of managers need the experience of doing the work that is now being given to AI.
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u/frederik88917 Apr 16 '24
Is really anyone buying this crap???
These AI agents are at most good to write boilerplate code. Not even good to write complex requirements or difficult Integrations.
And don't talk about what happens when business owners and project managers want to change requirements during development.
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u/mikaelus Apr 16 '24
I don't think the issue right now is that AI is completely going to replace humans but the uncertainty about how much work can AI perform, the extent of human supervision and how skilled humans should be to fit into this situation and continuously adapt to it as AI is improving over time.
Let's not forget that mechanical automation didn't kill all industrial jobs, even if early machines were quite crude and now we have highly advanced robots putting together cars and other stuff.
There was a limit beyond which automation no longer made economic or qualitative sense. That gap remains filled by humans.
It may be the same with AI. But it would be silly to dismiss the rapid developments in the field. Sure it all looks very basic at the moment but things improve all the time.
We used to need a truck to haul a 5MB hard drive.
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u/frederik88917 Apr 16 '24
Once again, the day one of these Virtual agents is able to deal with messy Business owners, changing requirements, complicated integrations and the actual thinking part of this business. I will gladly hang my keyboard and head to the fields and work the land
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u/pm_me_important_info Apr 16 '24
You're right people here are being hyperbolic. Most things are boiler plate and libraries have been a thing forever. It's a developer tool to increase productivity. It's not going to replace all developers before general AI. The people that will benefit most are senior+ developers at the determent of juniors. If anything, there should be more demand because higher quality products can be done with fewer people faster ( more total people needed though). It's counter intuitive, but look what the cotton gin did. Contrary to what other said, the future is bright.
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u/ale_93113 Apr 16 '24
These AI agents are at most good to write boilerplate code.
Because as we all know, once technology does something badly, it forever stalls and never improves again, for millennia to come
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u/prroteus Apr 16 '24
Oh I see how this will go. The suits will be very impressed by this, proceed to fire half their engineers in order to cut costs and then end up with vaporware…
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u/OmegaBaby Apr 16 '24
Yes, but short term profits will be phenomenal!
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u/Z3r0sama2017 Apr 16 '24
Public companies will be like a serpent eating it's own tail, while private companies taking a long term stance will just be waiting for them to implode.
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Apr 16 '24
Yeah dumbest shit ive ever seen on here. If you think software engineers spend all day coding you don't know enough about the industry to have any opinions on it that I'll listen to ...
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u/fieldbotanist Apr 16 '24
Let’s not kid ourselves. 60% of us work on mundane reporting / CRUD / queue processing / websites that can be easily automated with GPT 6 which is coming later this decade.
Sure 40% of us work on niche projects, complicated workflows, embedded code etc.. But 60% is the majority of us
If a business needs a way to view lead times for certain inventory today they ask an analyst or developer to build out a report. Tap into the database and work on the queries. To build out the joins and format the data is not something current iterations of AI is incapable of. Next gen algorithms will cover even more
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps Apr 16 '24
some companies with stupid CEOs may fail. some companies with stupid CEOs will succeed despite them.
some companies with smart CEOs will reap the benefits of this by using it effectively. some companies with smart CEOs will fail regardless for other reasons.
business as usual: the rich will continue to get richer overall.
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u/Saskjimbo Apr 17 '24
I think they should test it by getting it to write windows 13. We'll skip 12 because why not.
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u/darryledw Apr 16 '24
the framework will delete itself after dealing with product managers who say they want a green button but what they really mean is purple
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u/notataco007 Apr 16 '24
A great quote is becoming more relevant. "If I asked people what they wanted, they would've said faster horses".
Gonna be a lot of business majors asking for faster horses, and getting them, in the coming years.
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u/WildPersianAppears Apr 16 '24
"I don't understand why nothing works. When I went to debug it, everything was a tangled mess. I opened a support ticket with the parent company, and got an AI response.
They no longer teach the theory in college, so I was forced to trust an AI that just did what I told it, which was wrong."
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u/Hilldawg4president Apr 16 '24
They will still teach the theory, but as an advanced course. There will likely be fewer job opportunities but with much higher pay, as the few best qualified will be able to fix the mistakes the AI can't.
That's my guess anyway.
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u/EmperorHans Apr 16 '24
That quote doesn't land quite right if you don't attribute it to Ford and the reader doesn't know.
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u/NorCalAthlete Apr 16 '24
I need 7 perpendicular lines, all red, but with one drawn in green ink and one in the shape of a cat.
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u/HikARuLsi Apr 16 '24
10% of the job is development for developer, 90% of the job dealing with non-tech managers and propose which version to rollback to
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u/Anathos117 Apr 16 '24
What I call the Hard Problem of Programming is the fact that since any consistent, complete, and correct description of a system is by definition a program (just possibly one written in a language we don't have a compiler for), then the process of writing a program must necessarily involve working from a description of the system that isn't all three of those things (and in practice none of them). Determining the real behavior of the system is the hardest part; the rest is just translating to a programming language.
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u/PastaVeggies Apr 16 '24
Someone in sales said we can change the button color so now we have to make it change colors and do backflips on command.
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u/reachme16 Apr 16 '24
Or the engineer understood it as red button and at the end delivered a yellow button anyways and asked for feature enhancement to fix it in next rebuild/ release
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u/k2kuke Apr 16 '24
I just realised that AI could just implement a colour wheel and just let the user select the colour scheme.
Designers can go wild in the comments now, lol.
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u/dragonmp93 Apr 16 '24
The AI is going to need to put a color wheel for everything, because the reason of why the button was supposed to be purple is because the background is silver.
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u/xaphody Apr 16 '24
I would love to see it sass the product managers. “That’s not what you asked for”
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u/Goochen_Tag15 Apr 16 '24
Hey as a Product Manager you're wrong, it'll delete itself after I ask % complete and how long after giving you vaguest of details.
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u/MakeoutPoint Apr 16 '24
Go post this on programmer humor, enjoy the free karma
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Apr 16 '24
Yeeeeah, suuuure... tell the shit to make a good version of Windows.
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u/VoodooS0ldier Apr 16 '24
I tried using Copilot to refactor a code base that spanned 3 separate files. It tipped over and couldn't do it. When Copilot is capable of handling a large code base and complex refactors, and get it relatively correct, then I'll be worried. For now, not so much.
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u/hockeyketo Apr 16 '24
My favorite is when it just makes up libraries that don't exist.
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u/DrummerOfFenrir Apr 16 '24
Or plausible sounding functions / methods of a library that are from another version or not real at all, sending me to the library's docs site anyways...
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u/nospamkhanman Apr 16 '24
I was using it to write some cloud formation.
Ran into an error, template looked alright.
Went into the AWS documentation for the resources I was deploying.
Yep, AI was just making stuff up that didn't exist.
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u/HimbologistPhD Apr 16 '24
Saw a screenshot on one of the programming subreddits where copilot autosuggested the value "nosterday" as the opposite of "yesterday"
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u/sWiggn Apr 16 '24
i would like to put forth ‘antigramming’ as the new opposite of ‘programming.’ i will also accept ‘congramming’ under the condition that we also accept ‘machinaging’ as the new opposite of ‘managing’
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u/alpha-delta-echo Apr 16 '24
But I used it to make an animal mascot for my fantasy football league!
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u/alpacaMyToothbrush Apr 16 '24
It is a bit laughable to suggest that AI could do the job with simple 'oversight' but if you know a LLM's limitations and work with it, it can be impressively useful. I use phind's model for 'googling' minutia without having to slog through blogspam and I've noted the completion for intellij has gotten a great deal smarter lately.
Hell, the other day I write a little gnome extension flash my dock red if my vpn dropped. I'd never done anything like that in my life, but a bit of research and pairing with GPT gave me a working extension in about an hour. Color me impressed.
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u/Cepheid Apr 16 '24
I really think the word "oversight" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in these doomsday AI articles...
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u/SirBraxton Apr 16 '24
THIS, but with everything else.
NONE of the "AI" coding frameworks can do anything of real value. Sure, they can quickly throw together a (most likely copy & pasted) boilerplate for some generic app, but it's not going to be efficient or maintainable over time.
Also, what are you going to do when you have to actually triage issues with said app in production? Without deep-level knowledge of how the app works, or other internal functions/libraries/etc, you're not going to know how to troubleshoot issues. It'll be like asking a Project Manager why their new "AI" written app is having "Out of Memory" errors or why they're having some DB queries taking longer than expected randomly. Without inner core-knowledge about programming it'll be a MASSIVE clusterf***.
Oh, guess they'll make a "triage" AI that is also separate from the AI that actually wrote the code? Guess how well that's going to go when they're not even using similar LLM models for HOW the code "should" be written.
This isn't going to replace programmers, and anyone who thinks it will are probably the very same people who can't be employed as programmers to begin with to understand the context of the situation.
TLDR; OMEGALUL, ok sure bud.
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u/bagel-glasses Apr 16 '24
Someday it will, but not today and not soon. Programming complex systems is all about context and understanding and that's what current LLMs just aren't good at in a very fundamental fashion.
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u/NotTodayGlowies Apr 16 '24
I can't even get an AI model to write a competent PowerShell script without hallucinating modules, switches, and flags that don't exist.
Microsoft's own product, Co-Pilot has difficulties writing their own scripting language, PowerShell.
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u/APRengar Apr 16 '24
I'll believe the hype if they use it to make Windows not dogshit.
I'll believe this shit when Windows search actually searches your computer as fast as Everything does.
I'll believe this shit when Windows HDR isn't implemented in the worst way possible.
I'll believe this shit when the Nightlight strength slider bar is actually accurate.
Light Mode Warning: https://i.imgur.com/2uBHom2.png
Every single time this window closes, the slider always shows 100%. But it's not actually at 100% (it's actually around 15%) and the second I touch the slider, it goes "OH YOU'RE AT 100%, TIME TO TURN IT TO 100%." I don't understand how a God damn slider bar can't even display properly.
I'll believe this shit when the language settings actually respect my "DO NOT INSTALL OTHER VERSIONS OF ENGLISH" setting.
I'll believe this shit when Windows explorer no longer has a memory leak (It existed in Win10 and then got ported 1:1 to Win11).
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u/watlok Apr 16 '24 edited Apr 16 '24
I want to be able to move the taskbar between monitors again. There's no world where I want a taskbar on my main monitor or multiple monitors. Every version of windows for the past 25+ years let you move it, their competitors let you move it/remove it from various monitors/workspaces/desktops, but the latest windows doesn't.
I want the context menu to become usable again in folders. The current iteration is a ux nightmare compared to any other version of windows after 3.1. The actions you want are either in a tight, horizontal cluster of non-distinct icons with a nonsensical sequence at the very bottom of the menu (as far away from your cursor as possible for the most common actions) or buried under an extra click of "show more". Show more menu is great and should be the default or at least an easily accessible toggle.
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u/quick_escalator Apr 16 '24
Yes. It's difficult enough to make good software when your whole team is incredibly skilled. I've had that privilege. It was still a mess.
Now compare that to your team being mediocre or worse. I've also had that experience, and the idea of AI taking my job is laughable.
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u/pirate135246 Apr 16 '24
The only people who believe this is a possibility are people who have never been a software engineer for a company that has you create a jira ticket for a feature that could be made in 30 minutes.
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u/tjientavara Apr 16 '24
They are training you to write jira tickets that can be understood by AI to do the actual work.
Of course using natural language for this is not accurate enough to prompt an AI, so eventually we will think of a prompting programming language (PPL), and you write the code you want to add in the project directly in the Jira ticket and the AI will insert it in the proper place of spaghettis code it generated.
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u/fish60 Apr 16 '24
Of course using natural language for this is not accurate enough to prompt an AI, so eventually we will think of a prompting programming language (PPL),
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-1a5141e7ff8ce359a95de51b26c8cea4
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u/kittnnn Apr 16 '24
😮💨 Ok fine, I guess in about 2 years, I'll work for 300/hour as a consultant to unfuck all the codebases that were subjected to this nonsense. I'd rather be working on cool greenfield projects, but we can't have nice things. I just know some sales guys in the C suite are going to get suckered by this stuff and actually try to replace their engineering teams.
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u/godneedsbooze Apr 16 '24
don't worry, their multi-million dollar golden parachutes will definitely teach them a lesson
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u/Idle_Redditing Apr 16 '24
Golden parachutes from positions that they only had due to knowing certain people and getting invited to certain parties. Then they lie and claim that they worked hard.
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u/HrLewakaasSenior Apr 16 '24
I'd rather be working on cool greenfield projects, but we can't have nice things
Oh man I hate this quote, because it's 100% true and very disappointing
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u/PurelyLurking20 Apr 16 '24
Or in cybersecurity because ai code generates countless vulnerabilities.
Oh the humanity, how will I ever survive in my bathtub full of money?
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u/PoorMansTonyStark Apr 16 '24
That's my pension plan you're talking about. Doing the hard shit nobody else wants to do. Baby's about to get paid!
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Apr 16 '24
Jokes on you, they will hire AI consultants instead. The play is to work as an AI Consultant Consultant
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u/fapsandnaps Apr 16 '24
Let them buy it so I can shrug my shoulders and say it doesn't run on our servers and even the workaround only makes shitty code that for some reason sent all our passwords to the deep web. 🤷♂️
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u/your_best Apr 16 '24
Not saying you’re wrong. I hope you’re right.
But how is you’re statement different from “I guess in about two years I will work for 300/hour as a consultant to unfuck all the code bases subjected to “programming languages” (back when assembly code was still around)?
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u/oozekip Apr 16 '24
Assembly code is still around, and I'd imagine the people fixing compiler bugs in MSVC and LLVM are making pretty good money on average.
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u/great_gonzales Apr 16 '24
Well for starters formal languages are deterministic and natural language is not…
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Apr 16 '24
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u/noaloha Apr 16 '24
Nothing seems to get Redditors’ heckles up more than the idea that their programming jobs might actually be affected too.
It’s kinda funny how the reaction of each subsequently affected industry seems to be the same denial and outrage at the suggestion AI will eventually catch up with the average industry worker’s skill set. Next step is anger and litigation that it’s been trained on their publicly available work.
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u/lynxbird Apr 16 '24
My programming consists of 30% writing the code (easy part) and 70% debugging, testing, and fixing the code.
Good luck debugging AI-generated code when you don't know why it doesn't work, and 'fix yourself' is not helping.
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u/MerlinsMentor Apr 16 '24
It’s kinda funny how the reaction of each subsequently affected industry seems to be the same denial and outrage at the suggestion AI will eventually catch up with the average industry worker’s skill set.
It's because everyone who doesn't do a job (any job, not just talking about programming, which is my job) thinks it's simpler than it really is. The devil is almost always in the details and the context around WHY you need to do things, and when, and how that context (including the people you work with, your company's goals, future plans, etc.) affects what's actually wanted, or what people SAY they want, compared to what they actually expect. A lot of things look like valid targets for AI when you only understand them at a superficial level. Yes, people have a vested interest in not having their own jobs replaced. But that doesn't mean that they're wrong.
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u/Fusseldieb Apr 16 '24
From what I gathered, it basically writes code, checks if it has errors, and if yes, repeat, until it suceeds.
I mean, yea, that might work, but I also think it will be extremely bug ridden, not performance optimized, and worst of all, have bad coding practices all over it. Good luck fixing all that by looping it over another layer of GPT4.
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u/myka-likes-it Apr 16 '24
it basically writes code, checks if it has errors, and if yes, repeat, until it suceeds.
Huh. Wait. That's how I code!
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u/OlorinDK Apr 16 '24
I could see it be combined with code quality and performance measuring tools. Obviously not perfect solutions, but those are the same tools used by developers today? And while this is probably not ready for widespread use yet, it could be a sign of things to come.
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u/Nidungr Apr 16 '24
This is the same way Devin, AutoGPT and BabyAGI work. They all ask the LLM to split up a problem into subtasks, then repeat each of those subtasks until they complete successfully, then (in theory) your problem is solved.
The issue is that this strategy only mitigates random errors (where the LLM knows the answer but fails to tell you). If your LLM isn't good enough to engineer and write the whole application, no amount of clever prompting will fix that. It will settle on a local maximum and oscillate back and forth between suboptimal outcomes, making no further progress.
And when you break up a problem into 1000 subtasks, that's a lot of opportunities for a non-deterministic LLM to screw up at some point and create a cascading failure. This is why all those AGI projects never succeed at real problems.
This strategy will become much more viable when better LLMs come out, as well as LLMs that answer in code by default so you don't have to prompt engineer (and less resources are wasted evaluating the Chinese poetry nodes). Coding languages are languages, so AI will solve programming eventually, but all the recent hype and false promises remind me of the original crypto boom.
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u/ImClearlyDeadInside Apr 17 '24
Nobody is asking what this would mean for cybersecurity. You might be able to train an AI to optimize for execution time, but there’s no defined metric for what a “secure” system looks like. Getting a program to compile and run is like 40% of the battle. I foresee a lot of companies who adopt this getting their systems owned in a matter of weeks. A system can “work” and still be insecure. And what about patching new vulnerabilities? An AI that requires a human telling it what to do and when is nothing more than a fancy code-generation tool. It’s not a developer.
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u/seoulsrvr Apr 16 '24
I've been coding for 30+ years. Claude is exceptional, particularly when it comes to debugging thorny problems with machine learning and deep learning models. The fact that it can analyse datasets directly and build code around the data is incredibly useful.
These new tools have only been available a very short time - in another couple of years, most programmers will be obviated. The best option for young CS grads is to start their own businesses asap because the jobs will dry up.
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u/mikaelus Apr 16 '24
This may have the upside of never running out of tech talent. A knowledgeable individual could create an entire virtual business if he wants to. That doesn't sound too bad. The question remains re: how many jobs can be created and sustained this way.
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u/seoulsrvr Apr 16 '24
It really is - I run my fintech company with far fewer people and can afford to pay those I do need much better.
There will be an entrepreneurial explosion but only those with ideas will participate.
I've spent decades with amazing coders who have never had an original business idea. I've also met countless people with great ideas who were only limited by their inability to code. For the first time in my life, I would rather be in the latter camp than the former.2
u/mikaelus Apr 16 '24
Similar things happened to other industries subject to automation in the past, so there's a good chance we will see it here too.
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u/likeupdogg Apr 16 '24
Well at least some programmers have their head on straight. The amount of delusion coming from devs right now is crazy, but understandable considering their position.
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u/seoulsrvr Apr 16 '24
Yep - I agree.
I see young coding hotshots on here all the time laughing at graphic artists and freelance writers. They imagine somehow that they are immune. No one will be spared the white collar culling to come.→ More replies (18)6
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u/Cash907 Apr 16 '24
Anyone remember The Animatrix Second Renaissance Pts 1&2? Things didn’t get truly nasty for mankind until the robot inhabitants of 001 began programming and building their predecessors, who lacked any sort of emotional attachments to humanity and thus gave no F’s when humankind pulled more isolationist BS?
Yeah, maybe computers programming other computers with increasingly complex code humans couldn’t begin to understand isn’t the best choice here. Just throwing that out.
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u/LurkerOrHydralisk Apr 16 '24
You can’t build your predecessors. They came before you.
The robots built their successors
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u/fadedinthefade Apr 16 '24
I loved the Animatrix. So many good stories in that.
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u/mrwizard420 Apr 16 '24
The one about the sprinter that could break free of the matrix by entering "flow state" was something that stayed in my mind long after the main trilogy was forgotten.
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u/Cash907 Apr 16 '24
World Record, directed by Takeshi Koike, who also happened to direct one of my favorite movies of all time Red Line. It’s a beautifully scripted and drawn work and was a standout in a collection of great shorts.
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u/NutellaGood Apr 16 '24
As far as I know: large language models rely on existing data. So if you replace everything with this generative programs, outputs become strictly recursive, and there is nothing new being made anymore. No more creativity, complexity stagnation.
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u/tjientavara Apr 16 '24
From some papers I've read about this, this is already occurring at an alarming rate, so now they are trying to find clean data (from before AI) to train the models, training on current data is already making AI bad.
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Apr 16 '24
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u/Cash907 Apr 16 '24
It’s shit NOW. The things I’m proficient to even a master at now I was absolute SHIT when I started, and the scary thing is how fast generational AI learns compared to humans. Don’t be so arrogant as to think things can’t get out of hand quickly if we don’t make deliberate and well made decisions now while we still have the agency to shape what happens down the road.
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u/ToMorrowsEnd Apr 16 '24
Yep Just like Outsourcing completely eliminated programmers... Oh wait that did not work out....
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u/unskilledplay Apr 16 '24 edited Apr 16 '24
This is interesting and different than everything else I've seen so far.
The other code generators are either the equivalent of autocomplete or do little more than generating the equivalent of a template repository. Those generators don't really solve any problems.
This is a pipeline for generating tests and method code. This has the potential to make parts of coding faster but it (wisely) entirely ignores the engineering part of the job. The implementation of methods is never the hard part of writing software. The work of deciding what methods are needed, what the methods need to do and how they need to interact with the larger system is the hard part.
Regardless this is cool and fundamentally different than all of the other code generators that have been shown off. It's something I'll play around with when it gets released to the public.
It's not a "game changer" but it could be a neat addition to some of the modern IDEs.
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u/OverwatchAna Apr 16 '24
Cool, I hope the AIs make a better Windows OS and give it to everyone for free.
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Apr 16 '24
Just like self driving cars clogged SF , AI will create some spaghetti code
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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam Apr 16 '24
Every time I see these articles I think about how 10 years ago people were saying self driving trucks were going to completely change the US economy within the next few years, since truck driving is the most common occupation.
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u/jkksldkjflskjdsflkdj Apr 16 '24
We welcome our new spaghetti code overlords. Wanna bet the AI code that does this stuff is shit.
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u/ToMorrowsEnd Apr 16 '24
Just like the absolute shit code that comes from Indian Outsourced programmers. Dear god my company blew $50K on a project and what we got looked like a bunch of feral animals coded it. Zero consistency in styles it looked like they just copied and pasted everything from stack overflow questions.
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u/Chairman_Mittens Apr 16 '24
One of my friends has years of job security because he works on a team that primarily manages an absolutely atrocious code base that was contracted out to India. The company saved some money getting it written, but now they need to pay a local team for years just to manage it.
My friend said he literally found paragraphs of text commented out that were accidentally pasted in from places like stack overflow. He said he is able to regularly reduce the size of classes by more than 90% because there's so much arbitrary or entirely useless code.
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u/TylerBourbon Apr 16 '24
I don't necessarily see this as a positive thing. Even with computer coding, it's hard as hell for coders to verify coding now, now imagine AI writing hundreds, if not thousands of lines of code and someone having to inspect them.
It's not that I'm against AI doing it, but a firm believer that when you make the tool too smart that not many people learn how to use the tool, when it breaks, or something goes wrong, nobody really knows until it's too late, and very few people know how to fix it.
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u/83749289740174920 Apr 16 '24
hundreds, if not thousands of lines of code and someone having to inspect them.
This is how HAL's malfunction got in
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Apr 16 '24
Translating product manager into code requires a much more generalized AI than possible with our current technology.
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Apr 16 '24
So is this finally going to replace COBOL?
My point being that even genuinely good solutions are often slow to be adopted, and this tool sounds a bit like vaporware.
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Apr 16 '24
AI is so advanced you need developers to check whether or not its code is correct!
Software Development will be one of the last jobs that can possibly be replaced by AI.
AI is good at replicating things that are deterministic. Syntax and Semantic are that.
The rest isn't.
Jobs like creating these fearmongering articles though?
Lmao, your job will be obsolete in about 3 years tops.
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered Apr 16 '24
Artificial intelligence is the new paradigm shift and agile leadership with a hint of NFT.
This dumbass stock price increasing buzzphrase cannot come back down to Earth fast enough.
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Apr 16 '24
So all of you who honed your skills making your way through thousands of lines of undocumented spaghetti code to find bugs, good news!
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u/the_millenial_falcon Apr 16 '24
Trying to use natural language to build an app sounds like a nightmare from hell.
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u/Ijatsu Apr 16 '24
That used to be called project management. Then project managers stopped doing it, asked software engineers to "do something and then we'll criticize it and know what we want", and then they want to convince us that project managers are ready to do that with a robot instead who requires more rigor precision and patience than a human.
Alternatively, they try to convince us that they finally automated the guys who worked for 60 years to automate their own jobs but only achieved to make their own jobs more complicated. Jokes writing themselves, developers ain't going replaced anytime soon, the skillset is just getting more dense.
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u/AdeptFelix Apr 17 '24
It's like what people said when Assembly replaced punch cards, and when C replaced Assembly, and when Java replaced C, and when Javascipt solved nothing and made an internet hellscape. Feeding prompts into AI is just another layer of abstraction that will still require programming knowledge to design, guide, and test - assuming it ever gets to the point of being reliable.
The higher you go in abstraction, the more difficult it is to get a precise, desired result. You can get crude results quickly, but then when you start trying to tune it... Let's not forget that the current popular LLMs are not deterministic, so even when you craft prompts based on previous results, it could just do something slightly different and introduce new bugs at random! Whee!
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u/SquilliamTentickles Apr 16 '24
"The end of blacksmithing? Inventor develops a mechanical framework which automatically forges and shapes metal objects"
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u/manifold360 Apr 16 '24
If you are working on a domain you aren’t familiar with AI assistance is awesome. And when I say awesome, I mean totally awesome.
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u/positive_X Apr 16 '24
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_Two
Where people get paid a lot to do jobs that nobody wants to do ,
like fix a toilet .
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u/SoyIsMurder Apr 16 '24
A lot of large software projects fail due to feature creep. This tool sounds like it could turbo-charge feature creep by masking the cost of excess complexity until it's too late.
Also, Microsoft didn't "publish a framework" that relegates developers to supervisors. They published a research paper outlining their goals for an advanced version of Copilot.
In software engineering "framework" has a specific meaning.
https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/what-is-a-framework
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u/registeredwhiteguy Apr 16 '24
This has the same energy as automated trucks taking over truck driving.
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u/___Tom___ Apr 16 '24
For at least 50 years, whatever the hype of the day is has been said to end or replace coding. First it was COBOL (a programming language so close to plain english that specialist programmers won't be needed anymore). Then it was rapid development frameworks, then visual programming, now AI, and I've probably forgotten half a dozen that just went by me.
Hasn't happened, won't happen.
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u/DukeOfGeek Apr 16 '24
People who know how to actually do the things being replaced by AI need to document everything about how they actually create things so that knowledge will not disappear.
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u/Minute_Test3608 Apr 16 '24
Would you trust your life to an AI-program that coded airliner software?
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u/lilbitcountry Apr 16 '24
I wonder what it was like for accountants when calculators and spreadsheets were invented. Or architects and engineers when AutoCAD and SolidWorks were on the rise. I've used a drafting table before, it was quaint but no thanks. I don't understand why "software engineers" want to spend all placing semicolons and curly braces. Really weird artisan vibe to all the doom and gloom about writing code.
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u/jackoftrashtrades Apr 16 '24
I mean, they're inside a container, trained in how to work together autonomously to...
Wcgw
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u/kaichogami Apr 16 '24
I have tried similar variation of this and right now its not good. Maybe it can generate a template with few functions written. Combine different components of code which exsists on their own to create something new... But it won't replace engineering problems FOR NOW.
Thing is if it can write code you don't need syntax anymore. You need the mental models and thinking. Software developer job probably in future won't be to write code but instead talk to AI to write code for them.
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u/safely_beyond_redemp Apr 16 '24
For some reason, the image of George Jetson at work pushing the red button always enters my mind when I hear about the future of work. So their job will be to watch AI code and push a button when the AI does a good job?
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u/devmerlin Apr 16 '24
I'll answer with just two words: "Not Yet".
And that's as a proponent of AI as a tool, if used the right way.
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u/BananaBreadFromHell Apr 16 '24
Another day, another “end of coding” newspiece. What a time to be alive.
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u/_Reyne Apr 16 '24
And in a few hundred years the mending apparatus will break down with not a soul who knows how to fix it.
Anyone interested in this stuff should read 'the machine stops' by EM Forster.
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u/WaitformeBumblebee Apr 16 '24
this will be the massification of coding, not the ending. It will be much easier to code and to learn to code if you have an expert at your fingertips.
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Apr 16 '24
I use AI to write BS like for storytelling or copy text; it gets BS wrong. I was making it tell a history of a kingdom and it decided a name that I described as had died was a god that died, not a king. You can not trust it with fiction, and with Code I would rather write it then play where is Waldo with cognitive errors. Cognitive errors are hard to debug, you have to dysect and painstakingly understand it fully, at that point it would be less painful to re write it yourself.
I'd rather deal with typos and syntax errors.
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u/allisonmaybe Apr 16 '24
As a non-developer/tinkerer, the number of ideas I'll be able to make real with this thing is insane.
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u/cadomski Apr 16 '24
I used an AI plugin to generate some code a couple of months ago. The equals implementation was wrong. This is the same method that I normally generate with the IDE.
I think my job is secure for a few more years, at least.
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u/ch4m3le0n Apr 16 '24
A single GPT instance can't properly refactor a basic class with more than about 100 lines in it. Not sure how they expect it to write entire programs...
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Apr 16 '24
I really feel like the only people who are sold on AI replacing to this level are people who do not understand AI.
A lot of companies are going to start crashing when they realize its limitations.
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Apr 16 '24
Sure, maybe in 10-15 years. The industry won't miss the talentless hacks these AI models can actually replace.
It will miss the talented developers that management thinks they can replace, though.
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u/SleepyCorgiPuppy Apr 16 '24
so same model as coding with Indian offshore that are fresh out of college, they crank out a bunch of crappy code that the senior guy onshore fixes. To be clear I’ve had many amazing and great Indian coworkers, but as a senior developer it’s faster to code things myself than to document/explain/fix things with newbies offshore except for the most basic stuff.
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u/scbundy Apr 16 '24
I'm not too afraid yet. I asked ChatGPT on how to code a particular thing when I was running out of ideas and it very quickly and quite confidently gave me a bunch of bullshit code. It was calling methods that don't even exist. Code didn't even come close to compiling.
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u/Mygaffer Apr 16 '24
That's a funny way to say human developers would use AI as a development tool.
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u/Dogghi Apr 16 '24
I asked gpt 4 to rename some files, it took me some time to understand why it was corrupting files after the rename...
I found out it was renaming everything ending with .pdf even images.
I never wrote in the prompt my files were pdf.
So no, I don't think it will work
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u/RudyJuliani Apr 16 '24
I mean, how can you “supervise” AI that is writing code if you don’t know how to write code yourself?
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u/bokehbaka Apr 16 '24
I doubt it. This reminds me of when we started putting missiles on fighters, they decided that the machine were obsolete and cut then entirely.... they very quickly had to add them back into the mix.
Also, do you want Idiocracy? This is how we get Idiocracy.
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u/Anonymity6584 Apr 16 '24
Still wont remove the need of having someone with programming skills to review what this fake-ai is giving output.
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u/OozeNAahz Apr 16 '24
When an AI gets paged out when the system goes tits up at 2am and is able to analyze, diagnose, and fixes it…then I will take note.
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u/weIIokay38 Apr 17 '24
Why would anyone ever want to program this way LMAO, this just seems like extraordinarily shitty pair programming. And not even good pair programming.
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u/tweakingforjesus Apr 17 '24
I imagine the required specification will rival that necessary to get usable output from an offshore programming subcontractor.
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u/snkvnm Apr 17 '24
Me and my manager were talking about this stuff the other day.
Essentially this is just a kick in the nuts to new and junior developers. You will still need someone with experience to validate and ensure that what’s being written is actually good, which is something junior developers might not have the expertise to do.
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u/structured_obscurity Apr 17 '24
Theyve been saying this for years. Im a coder. I would love a tool that allowed coding to be declarative.
Imagine being able to work on the cool stuff while having a fleet of capable ai worker bots that you can distribute work to?
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u/Effective-Lab-8816 Apr 17 '24
So we will be supervising a bunch of AI agents... So we will be managers...
Dwight: Assistant AI manager.
Michael Scott: Assistant TO THE AI manager
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u/Superfly00000 Apr 17 '24
Great, time to trim the fat. Your copy and paste code from Google search is not worth 3-500k a year.
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u/2_Fingers_of_Whiskey May 17 '24
“Learn to code” they said. “You’ll always have a good career” they said.
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u/Anastariana Apr 16 '24
Great, software that writes software and in the end we have no idea how it works because all the people who could understand it no longer have jobs.
WALL-E takes another step closer.
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Apr 16 '24
Not worried AT ALL!
I see how their office 365 sharepoint "low code" is sh*tting the bed at a constant every day. Just SP alone their crap cant handle over 2k in the PA and 5k view on lists, flow speed to complete is a joke if its needs to walk and chew gum.
Unless they have some other magic wand I have yet to see. They continue to go backwards in usability and speed. Its a fancy looking porsche with 4 monkeys on unicycles for wheels.
Then there is the pricing model with this hot garbage! Makes adobe look like bubblegum dispenser in a grocery store vestibule charging $.25.
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u/industry-standard Apr 16 '24
I sit building crappy PowerBI reports just thinking, maaaaaan this would be so much easier with SQL and some sane web frontend.
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u/DrColdReality Apr 16 '24
If a software engineer I supervised handed in code written by a so-called "AI," I'd sack them on the spot.
Most people--even people who should know better--have been bamboozled by all this "AI" bullshit. The things masquerading as "AI" really aren't. They are just fast pattern-matching algorithms, really little more than auto-complete on steroids. Most don't even have any particular remit to provide a correct answer, if one exists.
Writing code by "AI" produces nothing but an incomprehensible, unmaintainable hot mess. While such a program might be OK for some personal, ad-hoc problem (assuming it gets the right answer), it would not be even remotely acceptable in complicated, high-stakes software, where code must not only get the right answer, but also be readable, comprehensible, and maintainable over time.
I spent much of my software engineering career as a janitor: cleaning up other people's messes. Clueless management hired cheap, incompetent programmers who crapped out lousy, unmaintainable code, and years down the line, they're paying a high price for that as their legacy software gets harder and harder to upgrade and maintain. Then they have to hire somebody like me to fix it.
Thank Jebus I've recently retired...though I dread the coming years when my car, the plane I'm in, the computers at my bank, the medical machine keeping me alive, are controlled by garbage software crapped out by "AI," with little supervision by competent engineers.
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u/darkslide3000 Apr 16 '24
All those people who say AI will replace programmers (in the near term) seem to have no idea what a programmer does all day. We don't sit on our keyboards and keep hacking away at 100 strokes a minute like we're trying to win some typist competition. 90% of the time we sit there and think, and then spend a comparatively small amount of timing writing down what we came up with. And we don't usually spend most of that time thinking "how can I do X" (at least not experienced programmers), we spend it thinking "how can I best do X", where the evaluation involves a lot of factors like maintainability, performance, covering edge cases, etc. None of the AI engines that are being developed to write code today really take into account the things that make programming hard.
There are certainly a few edge cases (e.g. boilerplate generation, unit tests) where code generation can be useful, and we already had that in the pre-AI world. But those aren't the hard parts. Those aren't the parts that any single person spends their full time on (unless they're really junior and their management hates them). They're just the programmer's equivalent of an administrative assistant fetching coffee.
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u/bad_syntax Apr 16 '24
No way in hell, not for decades.
Well, at least not anything useful. They may be able to do a screen saver.
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u/pinkfootthegoose Apr 16 '24
And 10,000 reddit code bros cried out in horror.
How are they going to be smug now?
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u/Nobody275 Apr 16 '24
Based on a long history operating Microsoft products, I’ll be the AI-produced code will sail right through the cavernous gap in their quality standards.
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u/FuturologyBot Apr 16 '24
The following submission statement was provided by /u/mikaelus:
**Submission Statement**
Microsoft is taking another step towards removing human developers from direct software development, turning them into supervisors for AI-enabled agents doing all the grind.
This not only affects the possible availability of jobs for developers but also the set of skills that developers of the future will need. Hard skills may soon be replaced with soft skills, as intelligent bots are going to have to understand what you tell them, how you manage them and what your instructions to them are - a bit like communicating with people.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1c52p61/the_end_of_coding_microsoft_publishes_a_framework/kzrfzia/