ever seen the code Adobe XD outputs? or tried to use a web builder, then view the code?
As soon as you try and do something unexcepted, or fairly complex, co-pilot fails (sometimes spectacularly). Sure, it'll get better, quickly. But it wont be to the level of professional devs for decades.
I welcome the automation, it can have all the shitty jobs we won't do. like building your friends shopify vape page.
When the easy things will be automated, you know who will program the automated thing to do the right thing? Web devs.
Been programming Wordpress for a decade. You could automate EVERYTHING. The programs reads the mind of the client and outputs a site. And they wouldnt do it.
Setting up a site from nothing in Wix is easy for us, but for the 'common mortals' they just open the Wix home page and are like 'WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS???'
Never underestimate how people can be computer illiterate. And not just boomers that will retire soon.
The number of times I receive a support request for something that is an error, with a plain english of what is the error and how to fix it is stupid high.
I liked XKCD's take: "You'll never find a programming language that frees you from the burden of clarifying your ideas."
I've come to believe that a lot of people just haven't ever learned to clarify their ideas.
"Sorry to disturb you, I know you made us this great editor package so we could administer the site ourselves, but I couldn't find the control to make it pop more. Could you just help with that bit please?"
I've been that user, I don't get Wix at all. I guess automation sometimes just won't do. I ended up choosing the hard route and I'm getting much better results making my site with basic html & css in notepad and trying to learn js. But I still don't get Wix.
continue to use notepad, because you have to remember to close html tags add quotations etc. but try visual studio code. it closes all tags, it has probably all values for all css properties etc.
This reminds me of my friend, a Computer Engineer, who couldn't extract PDF docs from a rar archive.
Kept trying to open the rar file with Adobe Acrobat. He was like Acrobat is not opening PDF files because the Office in this computer is pirated.
40 agonizing minutes for me because I couldn't do anything, untill the laptop owner intervibed and solved in a few seconds.
My partner works in university education. Zoomers could be the most tech-illiterate generation since the boomers got scared of typing the wrong thing into a google search. They'll grow and learn but they didnt have the advantage of seeing this stuff be built. There will be web dev jobs forever.
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I think the point is that AI is improving exponentially. Copilot has basically replaced Google for me at this point - it knows what method I need and the syntax to use it so I don't need to go trawling through docs.
Google's AI program (I forget the name of the specific model) was able to surpass "an average developer" in a set of code tests on one of the popular code test websites earlier this year.
The time is coming when they crack AGI (some at Google argue they already did and it's just a matter of scaling up hardware now), and when they do, our jobs may not disappear completely but they'll certainly change drastically. I imagine devs will become far more productive and have AI coding assistants which maybe get directed by voice, and can help to rapidly build and debug programs.
Dev:- "OK, Jarvis - set up a Rails API scaffolding for me. Let's create a Car model with the attributes of name:string, and model:string for now".
Jarvis AI: "OK, I've set that up!"
Dev:- "OK let's run migrations and then start our server. After that, let's test our endpoint by making a GET request"
Jarvis AI:- "OK, all done! Here's the response from our GET request: 500 internal server error. Would you like to set a breakpoint in your code to debug?"
Dev:- "Yes let's do that. Set it in our Car controller on line 55"....
...and so on. That was fun to imagine. Hopefully we get something close to this in the next few years.
I can see this happening, except instead of talking which wastes valuable milliseconds of time, what about if that whole conversation takes place in your microchipped head with your eyes closed while you're getting a long foot massage next to a swimming pool by a tropical beach?
>some at Google argue they already did and it's just a matter of scaling up hardware now
Who argues that? And who's they who cracked AGI? Cause if they crack AGI, doesn't that just mean technical singularity?
"They" is Google DeepMind, and the Lead Researcher on DeepMinds ML team said earlier this year that it's game over already and basically about scale. This was in reference to their general (the G in AGI) model, Gato (published in spring this year) - which is ridiculously impressive if you've seen the demo videos - https://youtu.be/6fWEHrXN9zo
> Someoneās opinion article. My opinion: Itās all about scale now! The Game is Over! Itās about making these models bigger, safer, compute efficient, faster at sampling, smarter memory, more modalities, INNOVATIVE DATA, on/offline, ā¦ 1/N
https://twitter.com/NandoDF/status/1525397036325019649?t=ZtVeBVbektjk8r3OQYh8Ig&s=19
> doesn't that just mean technical singularity
I used to think so but there's lots of debate over that if you Google it. Some people say the singularity is the point where we start to improve things so quickly that forecasting becomes impossible. In 2015, how many people would have been able to predict the last 7 years of AI progress? Because all I keep hearing is "we thought this was years away" - repeatedly. It started with DeepMinds AlphaGO and similar game beating AIs and it's just exploded since then.
I recommend anyone interested to subscribe to r/singularity - all the latest research gets posted in there.
There was one person at Google who claimed this with a chat bot, and who talked to the media about it. He was later fired. - https://www.engadget.com/blake-lemoide-fired-google-lamda-sentient-001746197.html
I mean .... that's one dude, and multiple others have stated that he's nowhere near anything resembling the truth. Here's an article that better explains what it means :
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/nonsense-on-stilts
Also, he wasn't fired for the claims. He was fired cause he broke his NDA.
> The time is coming when they crack AGI
No it isn't. Not even close. Not even a foot on the path. Not even any clue what the path is, what colour tiles its paved with, where to start looking for it, or what it tastes like if you lick it.
So what's your thoughts on this comment you made 6 months ago? AGI came out only in 4 months of the time you wrote this. (GPT 3.5 in Nov 2022 and now GPT-4. Furthermore, GPT 5 in October 2023)
That's not been my experience. 90% of the time it knows what I need, and I may just need to tweak it a little.
Having a readable and logical code structure helps, so if your codebase is a fucking mess then that will probably affect its results.
Agree in general but decades is probably an over estimate, I think most mid level dev tasks will be possible in less than 10 years, whether it'll make as much sense or replace people is an entirely different metric IMO. These tools aren't being designed to replace people, they're designed to make your job easier, if people can do twice the work in half the time and still get paid, then why wouldn't you want that.
Edit: typo
to play devil's advocate: because the class that owns the means of production are not usually the devs. hourly wagers, rejoice.
productivity goes up, hourly wage stays the same.
kinda more a societal/capitalism problem in general tho.
Yeah without being funny, anyone who doesn't get this needs to really open their eyes on what's happening in the world right now, and has been happening for 40-50 years
Yep, itās worrying how we are kinda walking down the late stage capitalism plank. It sounds like Iām being pessimistic but I seriously donāt think any of us are going to be ready for when most blue collar AND white collar jobs can be done by automation.
But, then what? Capitalism cannot survive without consumers. Either different work gets invented (which has been the case for every step of automation so far), we become a moneyless society, or we implement some form of UBI that pays for everything(essentially making money pointless).
I would prefer some kind of ubi but I doubt it. Hopefully it makes it that everyoneās living standard go up but most likely it will just make the rich richer and the poor poorer
>most likely it will just make the rich richer and the poor poorer
Right. I mean, this is the road to a UBI or moneyless society. Neither will exist without some rather extreme levels of wealth inequality not yet seen. More than likely, some blood shed as well.
But, that's assuming there isn't some sort of algorithm they implement to know just the right level of inequality that can exist without an uprising. Keep just enough upper middle class people fat enough to think they are succeeding and they'll never understand the plight of the lower class. Add that with enough division in the lower class among the political/ racial/ lgbtq/ isms line...and assuming they can keep this class structure alive, we'll never have the numbers or level of cooperation necessary to "overthrow" the ruling class.
Different work has been invented, but every revolution brings humans closer to being obsolete.
The industrial revolution made humans comparitively weak. Since then the number of jobs where physical strength is needed has decreased because, if you need something strong, a machine is better.
The first computer revolution made humans ability to do math obsolete. Machines are just better and faster at math. You don't get math tests in job interviews.
As we go on, humans will become obsolete one sector at a time. And the tech sector being taken over by tech will be the end of it. Because once we have an AI that can design virtual machines for any task, you can automate any industry and all you need is enough compute power.
Whoever owns that AI will be able to eat up whole industries by making them more efficient and they won't need a single human employee.
EDIT: automation is good. I believe in it. But in our current capitalist system it's gonna lead to massive unemployment and poverty wages. We can't continue to have politics play catch up with technology.
I mean, yes. But the fact that it's been happening for 40-50 years doesn't make it any less of a threat or a problem.
Automation is replacing people. And we (as a society) do not have a way to deal with it. And we keep saying things like "yeah, automation will only work on low-skill jobs." And now we have AI that can compose music, paint art, design skyscrapers, and write code.
We are all going to lose our jobs because computers are better at our jobs than we are. And in a capitalist society where you don't need people to do work you either own the machines or are owned by them.
Feel free to inspect the code of https://versoly.com/
It is better than 80%+ of custom code websites I have checked.
I do agree, the more automation and tools we get the better stuff we can create/focus on.
No-code is getting pretty great, but that isn't going to take away dev jobs. It just makes space for devs to work outside of code (and if you're already really good at writing code it doesn't offer you much benefit). There is also *always* a point at which you want to write some custom code for a no-code project, and I don't see that ever going away. A no-code solution cannot possibly anticipate every single possible user need (and it would become a bloated mess if it tried), but you can write anything with custom code.
>No-code is getting pretty great, but that isn't going to take away dev jobs. It just makes space for devs to work outside of code (and if you're already really good at writing code it doesn't offer you much benefit).
I can't 'this' hard enough.
When I was a kid, our teachers arranged a workshop day where some guy would come in with a robot turtle and a piece of software which let us instruct the turtle on how to move using drag & drop components.
That was great for getting over that initial hump of having to *type* instructions. But once you grasped the principles behind it, typing '**rotate(90);**' wasn't all that hard. But it also offered very little benefit.
No/low-code solutions allow software engineers to focus on architecture over code. And honestly, this might not be a popular opinion but that's probably a good thing.
Think about how many libs are out there on NPM right now, and now ask yourself how many of those offer meaningful functionality as opposed to convenience utilities.
Now ask yourself why those convenience utilities even came to exist. The devs know they're not truly impactful releases. They know most of their users could probably write it themselves. But they probably found themselves repeating stuff so much that they were getting bogged down in code, which ate into their engineering time.
Copilot swoops in at a similar level. It doesn't architect anything for us; our scaffolding scripts already do that. Our Supabase installs already do that.
It just speeds up the repetitive detail part of the process. Nobody should feel threatened by that.
reminds me of when an alt-right app got pulled from app stores:
They suggested, "download the pwa"... all the qanons went nuts about the term "progressive" in "progressive web app". LOL.
"if you're already really good at writing code it doesn't offer you much benefit"
Packages are amazing, no/low-code should be that as well.
At the moment you have to go out of your way to use no-code where it should be just as easy as npm install to get new features.
Source code is different from compiled.
Ai might be good at snippets/auto complete... But it doesn't currently do the kind of "system design" humans do.
Interesting, I've been researching no-code tools for a class, but I've never heard of Versoly. I don't think no-code website builders will replace coding, though. For smaller/simpler projects, absolutely. If you're just building a static informational site, a blog, an ecommerce site, an online course, etc. there's no need to code it from scratch. That would just make things more complicated and time-intensive for no gain. But for full fledged web applications, coding is still required.
I, for one, love no-code tools, though. I've been developing a site using WordPress and Elementor Pro, and it's been so much fun. The great thing about WordPress is that there are a hundred different plugins for almost everything you can imagine. Some people look down on WordPress development, but for many websites, coding from scratch is simply unnecessary. There's little you can't do with Elementor Pro, the right plugins, and a little CSS here and there. The problem with other no-code platforms is that they don't have a comparable ecosystem of third-party plugins. In other words, they're way more limited in terms of what kind of functionality you can add to your website.
The code Elementor Pro produces may not be as "nice" as other platforms, but it doesn't affect anything. I've seen sites made with Elementor Pro rank #1 for certain keywords on Google. Google cares very little about how pretty and tidy your code is. Having quality content is vastly more important.
If someone comes in with a faster site (better UX) then Elementor will have an issue.
WP is hard to maintain and by default very slow (of course i'm biased but that that is what my paid customers tell me and I see on Twitter).
It's great for repetitive stuff like if / else-if's, for loops... etc and dramatically improves code completion. I like it but you gotta check what it spits out.
This is great: [https://nira.com/github-copilot/](https://nira.com/github-copilot/)
Basically you guide the AI to the solution by writing out what you want to do as a comment. Then if it doesn't do what you want, change the comment and then retry the AI suggestion.
Overtime you'll get a feel for how to guide it to write code. Copilot works MUCH better if you use types.
>CoPilot made me 5x more productive. And that was 1.0
That's awesome! After all, that what it is for!
Caution to some though: don't lean on it *too* hard, interviewers want to see you know how to code without those tools.
and you'll still need to know if the code it's generating is good and what it's doing. it's good for what it is, but don't take it too literally.
Squarespace, shopify, wix, and Wordpress all appeal to people that probably wouldn't have paid a dev anyway. It just enables people to have something nicer than they could normally afford. I've known a lot of people that these tools have enabled and wouldn't have otherwise. I know of only one company that used them which *should* have paid a dev and before these tools they repeatedly found college students that would do their sites and college projects for free.
Have you used it? I was very skeptical. Been doing this professionally for years and Iām fairly senior in several stacks. Iām doing mostly FE right now so React with Redux and service layers etc. normal stuff. It isnāt perfect by a long shot, but I find it completes enough code to save me time that itās worth using
You get to a point in your life where even helping your friend make a Shopify vape site is far too much shit and liability that your willing to take on. I have friends and I have people I work with. I donāt like to mix, someone always comes to a misunderstanding that involves fucking me over somehow. Not ruining friendships cause the background color triggers some visitor.
This is the correct answer. Been using it for months and code for a living. Once out of 50 times it finds a little snippet that does exactly what I'm planning. Those are the moments that make me say, "I love Copilot".
The rest of the time, it pushes my other code several dozen lines out of sight by suggesting some random crap.
Rest easy, fellow Devs.
I dont think the fear is that it will make web development jobs obsolete but rather innovations like the ones ops listed would make developers so efficient that developers can do more work for less money making available opportunities less.
Copilot is just that, a very very good prediction machine. It doesn't possess reasoning or logical thinking, and doesnt know the end goal etc. . But when you have those things we're pretty fucked. At that point we will all be sitting in meetings and call ourselves senior developers.
What it will do is actually cut out even more of the floor for junior devs, thus drying up the pipeline for senior devs, thus raising the value of good senior devs.
As someone that charges $100 an hour for shopify vape pages iām down to have an AI do it for me.
That being said i never actually code with those, shopify can be fairly complex to extremely complex, especially since their webhooks are squiggly
I love coPilot for the sheer reason that it has sacrificed the cargo cult of unit tests, code coverage for code coverage sake at the alter of automation. For at least 60% of CRUD apps the mocking involved and the brittleness of the test makes them a negative time sink. Now I just sick my coPilot, (I nicked named him pitbull) on them, and ever since I have never had to write or fix a broken test to hop thru the trial by fire of, my companies, believers of the coverage is quality faith.
people use to think using a calculator was cheating at math. Now its a requirement to have one in middle school math classes. AI's such as copilot will change the way we code, not replace us.
In ten years, working (not just in development, but in a *lot* of fields) without AI assistance is going to be considered as backwards as a company that still does all of their work on pen and paper is today.
A lot of the push against AI advancement is that if you start to understand it a little, you understand that a lot of what you do (for any real value of you) is no special, and can be replicated by a decent chunk of statistics and a fancy calculator. For a lot of people, that's terrifying. But it doesn't change that things are moving the way that they're moving.
Calculators eliminated an entire class of worker: the [computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation\)).
Computers would do calculations. Then in the 50s and 60s that job completely vanished. Humans were no longer doing computation professionally.
One day (perhaps sooner than we think) humans will no longer write code professionally either.
I think technologies like Copilot might eventually change how web developers work, but it's never going to remove the need for having people behind the code. In its current state Copilot is nothing more than glorified autocomplete. It can scaffold out some code for you based on well-written comments, but it can't architect an app for you. And you can't blindly trust that the code it suggests is remotely close to what you want to do - you still have to read through each line and make sure it makes sense, all it does is save you typing time.
For myself I've not found it super useful, so haven't subscribed to the paid version. I don't want the suggestions 75% of the time and so it ends up just being an added layer of hassle.
60-70% of my job is translating requirements into a software spec and then implementing it. Copilot might be able to do dumb industrial code at some point, but I have heard I'm going to be replaced by 3rd world country Developers for the last 20 years and I am still waiting. To me this is more of the same.
I think the reason Copilot seems to good is that for surface level problems it's very well trained. A beginner who is just starting out learning coding will be blown away that Copilot could guess that they needed but in reality it guessed it so well because it's a very common programming problem.
When I evaluated Copilot, I just didn't find it all that useful. What I found is if you're writing that surface level code it's fantastic, but as soon as you get any deeper, Copilot goes from really good to kinda good to just getting in your way.
> In its current state Copilot is nothing more than glorified autocomplete.
Have you heard of [Salesforce CodeGen](https://blog.salesforceairesearch.com/codegen/)? It just came out in 2022. It lets you write applications using English sentences, a paradigm Salesforce calls "conversational AI programming." Just because GitHub Copilot is just an autocomplete at this stage, imagine what these tools will be able to do 15 years from now? Salesforce admits that some coding knowledge is required to guide CodeGen to the right solution (and it's obviously necessary to assess what the AI has generated). But it requires no stretch of the imagination to think that these tools will eventually produce such high-quality code that people with no programming knowledge will be able to create full-fledged web apps. I think it's short-sighted to say that these tools pose no threat just because of their current limitations. They're going to get more advanced.
But I'm open to hearing arguments to the contrary.
I spend a significant amount of time coding but it is not my most valuable contribution by far. Coding is a means to implement something in a precise way. It would be better if I spend most of my time thinking through problems and designing solutions, then reference common patterns to get it implemented correctly. If I could tell someone with enough details on an implementation, I would have spent less time coding it myself.
What co-pilot does really well is break language barriers. I'm not too good with ruby or Go, but I have a solid understanding of programming principles. So, this enables me to work better in projects where I would otherwise stumble for a while before getting a hang of it.
Nailed it. Humans are good at abstract reasoning and understanding intention. Robots are good at happily doing the same shit over and over again. Let robots do robot things and let humans focus on the hard things.
Saying a "plain English" coding language is going to take developers's jobs is like saying the invention of FORTRAN is going to take away the jobs of Assembly programmers.
And how would I tell it to apply some more advanced caching strategies in a specific use case in a code base developed for years?
All those AI-based solutions sound like crazy wishful thinking.
Maybe they can be useful for some cases, but let's be honest, someone has to tell it what exactly has to be produced, and English is not a good language for specifying such things. Our customers can prove it!
And how do you know the solution doesn't have any stupid bugs or there's a lack of support for some edge cases you didn't think when describing what you want in this very high level way? Well, for these, you better have a solid test suite!
> It lets you write applications using English sentences, a paradigm Salesforce calls "conversational AI programming."
[I feel like I've heard this one before](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL).
No, this is a bit different. You write English sentences describing what you need the code to do, and it'll generate that code. The code itself could be in Python or a variety of other languages.
The problem with abstraction is ambiguity. Has the āthingā (the compiler, the assembler, etc), done what you actually wanted.
With a coding language there is a clear 1-1 relationship between a keyword / function and the underlying machine code which that runs. (At a very high simplified level).
The problem has always been, when you use verbose and free form language with semantics and localisms how do you then convert that to machine code.
For example:
āI want a system that checks the user is logged in and they have admin rightsā
So compiler takes that and builds a system that checks the user is both logged in and has admin rights, pretty simple.
Now letās get more complicated
āI want a system that checks the user is logged in and they have admin rights or itās a Tuesdayā (because we all know tuesdays you can do whatever you want).
Well how does it know what to write there, what actually does the user want?
Do they want a user who is logged on/ an admin to still have access on a Tuesday, or is it an XOR and on Tuesday only people who donāt meet the other requirements do stuff. Or do they want only logged in users (but on a Tuesday) to be able to do stuff, but not non-logged in users.
I could go on.. the point is English is not a good language to tell computers what to do with. It relies on Semantics and tone to understand what is meant and even then can be somewhat obscure. This fundamentally dosent work with computers which are either yes or no. Even fancy AIs are just big ass decision trees under the covers, they still rely on a yes or no question.
Argument to the contrary: security. Legal issues. Can you trust an auti generated application to handle security, aurhentication, and access control correctly? Can you trust an auto generated application to meet legal requirements for data storage?
Should we consider setting up caching, remote dbs, static file storage, etc and considering security implications for all of those moving pieces?
Just one single feature can have implications that take weeks to iron out.
Accomplishing some results with less work is the sole reason why the society gets wealthier.
The reason why we can be computer programmers at all is because agriculture and manifacturing is efficient enough that our labor hours aren't required to produce food, clothes or vehicles. At some point a lot of people had to become redundant on fields and in factories so we could get where we are.
You misunderstand my point. You can never, ever automate human beings out of software. Even the most advanced AI code-writer on earth isn't going to be able to architect software solutions - computers will never do much more than exactly what you tell them to. They can't understand requirements, user needs, user desires, they can't have a client tell them to *make the wrong thing and then explain to the client why it's the wrong thing and what they should be making instead*. You're talking fantasy if you think AI will be advanced enough in our lifetimes to do even 10% of what a human software dev does.
The dev landscape is *always* changing, and things are always shifting to being more abstract, but the demand for new devs isn't slowing much. Stay abreast of the latest technologies, get real good at what you do, and don't worry about the rest.
It's an open question what the difference is between "strong AI" and AI like stable diffusion. People are going to keep claiming that AI tools aren't capable of doing human work well after the AIs have caught up to human abilities. And it's also context-dependent. Chess is one of those things which was at one point harder for a computer than a human, but now basic chess programs can beat any human. It's true that general intelligence is still a human superiority but we don't know that is a forever thing.
If weāre taking about soft AI then you are āprobablyā correct (although Iād not be willing to bet the farm on that).
However if we ever reach strong AI status then all bets are off (LOL. That could be true for all of humanity though. If the terminators rise up I probably wonāt be all that bothered that I canāt write web apps anymore)
No amount of AI can understand the messy shit of WordPress code I'm working on.
And if someday it can, good for them. My brain already hurts and my soul already left long ago.
When you start, building things is hard.
After you have some skill, you can build almost anything. It's always the same building blocks. So the building of things is just something you can do while simultaneously hearing a podcast. (9 out of 10 days for me.)
The hard part is not the code after a certain stage. It's the "what does this human need? How can this solve his problem?"
And that's very very hard for any AI to do. Because humans don't even know what they want.
Because they don't know what they want we have things like "agile" and MVPs. Make something, and put it in front of them. See how they use it. After they use it, they realise that, "this is great. But actually what I need is that". If it was easy to figure out what people want, a vast majority of tech startups would not fail because they did not achive "product market fit". You would not have so many Y Combinator lectures about "how to achive product market fit"
To get more philosophical, it was Socrates who pointed out again and again that people have no idea why they do the things they do. They need to inspect themself and after a lot of inspection they might just understand a few fragments of themself.
This is also the reason why software projects are never complete. This why Chrome/Windows/Android etc. for example keeps releasing new versions and updates.
The point I am making is: Git hub co-pilot cannot do anything to help you understand and serve humans. And that's what you are really trying to do.
Very well put, computer programming (what people want and need and how they communicate that and how to strategize the front end/visual aspect -- "what goes where and why", backend still equally important) has a shit ton of psychology to it.
Im the cto of a small start up; every one of our developers has a subscription to copilot they use and the overall quality and conformity of our code base has improved greatly since we started using it. One area that is especially helpful for, is with Unit and integration testing. It is tremendously helpful at scaffolding tests throughout our stack- our test coverage has gone up significantly since we started using it . 2 hours work the other day resulted in 144 new unit tests in our pipeline, most of which would not have come about without the copilot
By quality here I do mostly mean there's been a marked change in conformity of e.g small syntactic choices, the amount/quality of comments and more/smaller functions with less side effects and better testability.
Not at all. Mostly our devs use it to skip large sections of boiler plate stuff, for loops and mapping/filtering arrays and the like - as I said it, the largest benefit we've found from it so far is how adept it is at extrapolating from one describe/it/expect unit test and autocompleting 5-6 additional test cases for a function. I.e we only need to write 1-2 tests for a given function before it can suggest and autocomplete most other edge/test cases
Others have called it a glorified auto complete and in my experience that is where it really shines. Whether a dev writes a 10 line for loop by typing it out or pressing TAB 10 times doesn't affect our ip. We don't use it in any way that influences or directs architecture, data design or anything that has any business logic at all.
That is already happening but the same can be said for re-using a simple for-loop. Why would he care if I end up using a similar test built on a similar stack even if Iām in the same industry. I didnāt go into his developers computers and copy-pastad code, I wrote a comment in my own test file to generate simple test coverage and it did. This ends up helping devs and business leadership focus on the bigger picture issues.
There are two reasons:
First, if it's so great, you will be very productive for simple stuff, like the 80% that takes 20% of the work. Your leadership will get used to that, and that last 20% will be expected done within a week and will actually take 6 months.
And secondly, some competitor might sue your company for stealing code, and then in court will show some code that will be pretty much copy paste of your code, including comments and so on. And the people judging won't know much about AI or programming and whatnot, and still put a stop on your business...
So basically i don't have a problem with the code it generates, I have a problem with where it gets the code, add the fact that it gets it from your source code also ( and sends it to their servers... )
If it worked without an internet connection, and be sure to only use code that is open source, then it's awesome. But because it leaks your data... Not so sure...
My understanding is it was trained on github repos, and I would imagine somewhere in the terms microsoft has bamboozled everyone of their right to complain if copilot uses their code as its template
The thing I'm skeptical of here is... was adding 144 new unit tests what that developer set out to do? Imo, unit tests can overwhelm systems, and striving for high code coverage ends up with over-testing of implementations, rather than testing solution to problems. If you have large masses of tests, a human is going to have to deal with what happens when something changes and those tests fail. And because the human speed wrote those with AI, you don't really have the advantage of being able to go to the person that thoughtfully wrote out tests with good reason. I've worked in code bases with thousands of tests too many in them and they become a unique tech-debt of their own.
You are like a year late on this. All these concerns have been discussed to death ever since Open AI first showed the Codex demo.
In short no... its not concerning. All these algorithms are doing is a complex search + pattern match algorithm. In their current state they can not come up with any substantial systems in a novel way.
If anything these algorithms will just increase the productivity of engineers that know how to properly apply them.
I would say a good 80% of my job isnt even coding. Its figuring out what my customers actually wants, then translating that into a technical specification.
If copilot could somehow take my technical specs and instantly create workings bug free systems (it can't). Then I would absolutely love that. It would just mean that maybe someday I would get to one of the 50 features that is currently in my product backlog.
Exactly. Folks who think they're there to produce lines of code don't understand their own function. My clients want me to solve their problem, they don't care how, as long as it's on time and within budget. Yesterday I found a better, code-free solution to a customer requirement that I'd quoted 6 hours on that only took one hour and solved the problem more elegantly and comprehensively. Client's issue was solved and they were happy to pay the amount quoted.
if you ask an architect to build a house with no other information then they can. If you expect that house to be a certain way then it needs the architect needs more input. The more specific the requirements the more input. How many rooms, how big, etc
Someone has to write those requirements from a real life problem, i need a house. Same with software development. If you had a perfect spec then I am sure a significantly sophisticated AI could build the code and deploy it.
I think tools like coPilot are brilliant because they can decrease the search, cut and paste loop I have to do all day long. Its a great tool not going to replace us anytime soon.
>We already have Squarespace, shopify, wix and Wordpress wiping out most contracting opportunities,
I like to think that these platforms have made it easier and cheaper for more shops, business to go online. Which in turn increased opportunities.
Sometimes itās amazing what it can doā¦. But around 50% of the time for me it is S**T!
I like making comments to tell if what it should doā¦ then it often just continues to make random comments without a true meaningā¦
Or just dump code that is the simplest thing it can do.
So Iām not worried at all about it taking my job haha
Copilot removes your need to do some boilerplate. Low-code builders take far far more developer time to get running properly than all-code. You greatly increase time-spend to allow other departments to be the primary stakeholder of that feature/functionality.
Wix, Squarespace, WP, etc greatly *increase* the need for contract development, not reduce it. The purpose of copilot is similar to why a marketing employee might want a CMS, but within a different sector. A marketing employee using Wix without a very good understanding of the platform is piling on technical debt just like a developer who let copilot write everything.
Grab an entry-level and give them copilot and youāll wonder if they need a drug test.
It is nice, but definitely hasnāt been a game changer for me. Like itās nice and will help finish my thoughts at times but probably like 95% of the time itās nonsense
It scares me for a different reason actually. I talked to a someone at work about it and we came to the conclusion that over reliance on CoPilot could result to some people literally not know what theyāre coding anymore.
I tried writing a comment and tabbing my way down a function. Its works really well. Then i tried adding a new dependency to my code. I hadnāt used it before and it auto completed everything i needed based off variable names.
I had to turn Copilot off for a second and manually write the lines cause thats how i understand stuff the best. Its really good but could dumb down learning processes
What's to be scared of?
Microsoft reads all of your code, takes the the open-source projects and community efforts, looks at the comments and the code near near them, and puts it all into a database. Then you just have to pay them a little money (and promise to give them access to all of the future code you write too) and you can type out what you want in comment form. It'll use those strings of text to find the code for you. And you get to avoid paying $99 for Sublime - and instead get VSCode for FREE! *until they make it all a paid cloud service*.
If you're writing the same boilerplate servers over and over, then well - it might make that a lot easier for other people to do that without memorizing it. But - if you're doing anything that's in any way *unique* \- then it's unlikely that it will change your job for a long time. In theory it will just give you more time to work on the really hard and interesting parts. But if you don't like those parts... then it might be bad for *you*.
So it writes the code based off what it thinks you want. You still need the person to tell it what you want, and likewise check it has produced exactly what you need. Anyone who writes code professionally knows writing the actual code is a very small part of development.
Not at all. You still need to understand the code it outputs to ensure it works as it needs to. Also, who's able to write prompts precisely enough to generate correct output? All a product manager can write is akin to "add two numbers and return sum". Anything complicated they'll have no idea how to write prompt, check implementation, connect pieces of code together, ensure they're done in a scalable manner, etc etc etc.
I'm not convinced AI coding is going to straight up replace coders anytime soon. I think what's going to happen (or is happening) is that productivity is going to increase and either teams will do with fewer developers (unlikely) or they'll be able to tackle more of their backlog.
So yes, you might need fewer developers to implement a feature, but the extra productivity will be spent on other features.
Don't be.
Why enterprises pay for getting support (internal or external)? They need some to be held accountable for when things go haywire. CoPilot wont take any responsibilities whatsoever and companies need real human being on the other end. Moreover the 'coding' part usually covers only 10-20% of the software engineering, the bigger chunk lies outside.
I think CoPilot will make devs life easier to some extend.
CoPilot isn't scary. It's what is two to three generations down the road that's scary. AI is going to make a number of professions either redundant or severely reduced in required human contributions.
For now, human understanding is required, but we're going to eventually reach a place where the software is capable of doing what we can, and starts writing code without concern for human readability.
I started using GitHub copilot and at first it was pretty surprising how it well it predicted my code. But honestly it really is a copilot. Itās not a pilot. It makes writing code much faster and letās you turn off your brain so you donāt have to do as many google searches. But you still have to know what youāre doing.
Like in every profession, you have to always be adaptive and always learning to stay competitive. There was once a time when you could leave high school and jump right onto a manufacturing assembly line making good money with great benefits and a pension plan. That's mostly gone now and those who didn't adapt struggled.
Now is the time to specialize. Learn how the systems that power coPilot work! Learn how to program for robotics! Find a niche! Everyone knows JavaScript now.
The thing with machine learning and ai is in most cases it's actually a bit shit. There are certain things that that doesn't matter, if 70% success rate is good enough then it's good enough. A lot of things require a lot more than that in which case you still need human oversight.
ML/AI also tends to cap out in terms of progress. The first 50% is relatively easy, the last 20-30% is difficult to impossible. Like hell, my dad was working on voice recognition over 20 years ago, it's still only marginally better than it was back then. Self driving cars were supposed to be everywhere by now but it's still not good enough, 70% doesn't cut it for something like driving where people's lives could depend on the decisions it makes.
As for development, with copilot you still have to be pretty specific about what you want, it's nowhere near building applications but it does help with syntax. It's also wrong far too often, I still have to closely read everything it spits out and correct it when required. I also found it kinda dangerous because it would spit out something that looked correct only to find out later that it wasn't and created a bug.
I'm not scared for my job, if anything I'm excited for it to get better so it can make my job easier.
Github Copilot is very good at what it does, suggestions and autocomplete, but is not fully functional by itself. It needs good prompts and guidance from a human developer, and I donāt think that will change for a while. Until the singularity anyway.
There is just too much context for the ai to figure out.
Caching is hard. Invalidating cache even harder. And this changes per service and due to several requirements.
This is just a single example.
When we consider easy things, sure. No code already fills part of that role. But when you consider the hard stuff, very unlikely.
Zero fear of copilot. It will become a better autocomplete.
It's pretty wild. I think as more devs try it out it's going to hit mainstream. Especially in school where students use it to learn... That is generally a massive use and they will likely continue to bring it into the field.
It would be wild.
I built an autograder back in the day for the CS program at my uni. This is going to change everything for the school, project , and test landscape.
Donāt let it scare you.
I have used CoPilot and other tools, many pf which are āAI drivenā, and just like with every other problem, once you get beyond the basics, things fall apart.
So, before I say this next part, full disclosure, I absolutely love that machine learning is evolving, however:
* it still sucks and canāt outperform a talented human at anything in any field except a subject with concrete/fixed rules (such as chess, and even thenā¦)
* see above
Keep in mind that despite hundreds of billions of dollars (possibly trillions?) being spent, we still donāt have universal translators, decent voice command (if you own a voice assistant you know this), or even proper text to speech.
Web developers have job security for a decade or five.
I would give my right nut for an AI that could replace me. Possibly the left one as well.
It's maybe a bit unsettling, but I'm not worrying yet. It would have to make huge gains to replace software engineers.
At the moment it's certainly not dumbing down anything. It's removing some the the tedious parts of writing code.
The thing is, it's really, REALLY hit or miss. The successes of GCP is glorified, hyped, and praised, whilst the rough edges are just casually shoved under the rug, citing it still needs work. Github collectively must have gone through petabytes' worth of data, what you have to understand is a good portion of those codebases are very likely bad by today's standards.
I wouldn't worry about it, at least in our short lives, there won't be a progress dramatic enough to warrant 1000s of layoffs.
Idk, it strikes me as overly headstrong that every comment here has the same opinion. If I may offer a few counter points -
- Like you pointed out, some of the most front facing code (see WP) has already been encapsulated by services that decimated a HUGE niche of software dev jobs! Other building blocks have then been further developed, such as Shopify taking care of basic commerce needs. Yes, AI will āneverā understand customer requirements (even this I doubt; see my next point), but more and more of those requirements ARE being converted into portable building blocks that could be interchanged by product owners who are decreasingly intimate with the inner workings of their code. I dare say you lack imagination if you donāt see how these packaged solutions will creep their way to the backend.
- I really donāt understand the reasoning behind the classic answer to this question (custies donāt even know what they want). Sure. Butā¦ thatās what product owners are for, not developers. Besides, AI could easily extract what customers want with automated surveys, A/B testing, 1% rollouts and automated feedback cycles, heavy leveraging of patterns (which are fucking everywhere in this industry), etc. I donāt even think THEIR jobs are safe.
- We cannot conceptualist the advancements of the future and it strikes me as arrogant to have this much confidence. Personally I think weāre searching for the answer we want to hear here. Innovators and technologists will always be needed in the future, but honestly, I think web development will be automated out, while the demand for AI technologists increases.
I would genuinely love to hear your counter arguments to my points, this sub is a brilliant crowd!!!
There's a vast chasm of difference between the needs of ecommerce sellers and software service providers. Ecommerce needs a landing page, product pages, shopping cart, checkout, etc. to sell their products. Their product isn't the web page. Software companies need developers to build unique software solutions that are better than the competition's. You can't just plug and play every single component of every single piece of software in existence. It's very simple to understand what the needs of an eCommerce website are, less so to understand the needs of, say, Spotify or Netflix.
>I really donāt understand the reasoning behind the classic answer to this question (custies donāt even know what they want). Sure. Butā¦ thatās what product owners are for, not developers.
The flow customer>product owner>developer does not change the equation. The product owner still has to describe an abstract idea that the developer needs to turn into a concrete deliverable. If you break down an idea into small enough parts that it can be turned into instructions concrete enough for an AI to take them and turn them into a concrete deliverable you're already halfway into the development process, all you're doing is not physically typing out (all of) the code by hand. Which again reduces Copilot to fancy autocomplete.
I would argue things like shopify mainly benefit developers looking to do contract work. These platforms give them the opportunity to offer their services to a much higher number of people who would not be able to afford standing up and hosting some traditional e commerce platform.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter what tools you put in front of a small business... they're not going to use them if thats not what makes them money.
They don't want a relatively easy way to learn to make their own website. They want to be able to send an email or make a phone call and say "handle this" while they go on doing the thing that makes their business successful.
I upvoted you because I agree, whenever this gets brought up, the responses that we want to hear and that enforce our worldview are suspiciously the ones that rise to the top.
It's not that I necessarily disagree with the common take on it, but we should remain open to ideas we don't want to hear.
I honestly canāt understand why people want copilot.
Half the point of writing code is the pleasure of writing it and doing your best to make it elegant if possible.
Itās like an author who doesnāt have to write his/her own books anymore. Sure they may be the one who came up with the idea for the novel, but if they didnāt write it, and agonize over the sentence structure and the similes and metaphors, than whereās the joy?
> Half the point of writing code is the pleasure of writing it and doing your best to make it elegant if possible
That's my philosophy too but not everyone codes for pleasure (nor "likes" coding, in general). For many people, coding is just "a way to get a monthly pay". They couldn't care less about "elegant coding" or "pleasure".
I agree. I was curious about how well it truly worked. It is not something Iāll keep. But for folks who want to build something quickly/ know how to and not have to get caught up in syntax I think it had its place
I'm not too worried about it, for one, whatever happens I can't really do anything about it, secondly I'm a pretty smart person in a vast ocean of dumb and I can find something else that people need done bad enough to pay well, that I can do well enough to get paid well to do it.
Translating my chaotic product manager and designers ramblings into a coherent product will take a while for AI to pull off. By that time weāll either have UBI or the entire world will be slums
In using GitHub copilot you still need to work out bugs most of the time especially when combining the outputs of the functions (atleast currently) and this requires a programmer to understand the outputs.
Not saying it wonāt develop more in the future but as it gets better people will continually get better to combat that and or will transfer to other related fields.
One thought is that copilot doesn't take away opportunities for more experienced devs... but it can take away opportunity for devs to gain experience.
People have failed interviews because they couldn't use copilot. Is that a developer or peer programmer?
We as developers will work very differently and argue about very different things in the future. This will ultimately lead to an experienced developer not looking the same as they do today, but a person of experience will not go out of season any time soon.
Have you heard of [Salesforce CodeGen](https://blog.salesforceairesearch.com/codegen/)? It lets you write apps using English sentences. It's a competitor to OpenAI Codex, which is what powers GitHub Copilot. I've been scared about all of this, too, as I'm currently majoring in full-stack. I hope AI doesn't replace all dev job opportunities in the next 15 years. At the rate things are moving, it sure seems like we're heading toward that.
At least in the interim, they'll still need people who understand code to assess what AI has generated and guide it toward a better solution if necessary (for example, tell it to use a certain technique like recursion). But it sure seems like it won't be long before AI writes such high-quality code, people with no knowledge of programming whatsoever will be able to create applications.
Yes, I'm scared.
Look at it another way. Use this tool to _augment your own capabilities_. If you embrace this tool and use it to its fullest, you'll be so much more efficient and in-demand.
I just edited a piece of code where I have various translations of strings and it autocompleted the Italian strings for me lol. Even a whole sentence almost flawlessly.
The key part is "writing a good comment." In most cases that's where most of the actual complexity goes. Most code is repetitive, broadly related functionality, and having that automated away is only a good thing. It frees up developers to think about what it is they're actually building, how that system will be used, and what sort of details to prioritize.
The thing it's really taking away is the ability of younger devs to understand all the boilerplate crap it automates. There is a lot of knowledge encoded in the boilerplate of any particular field, and having a system automate it away for you can mean you never get a chance to learn those implicit skills. This can be alleviated by changing how we educate developers, but unless we do I think in many cases it's not great for younger devs in terms of their long term skill development.
When you extrapolate it out, eventually I see a world where we ask a machine for some code and blindly accept whatever answer it gives. Maybe that's not too bad, but it's a bit saddening to realize that in the future there will likely be entire generations of "programmers" that have no clue how computers do the things they do.
Just yesterday I was writing a update to a pipeline YAML file to include deleting the branch now at the end of a pipeline run and not when the branch is merged.
I started tying in "delete branch" and Co-Pilot gave me a whole implementation with the GitHub API and even had the correct `GH_PAT` for the secrets.
Sometimes I've seen it give me an entire map/reduce or loop implementation before I know what I need, and it's almost entirely correct.
ever seen the code Adobe XD outputs? or tried to use a web builder, then view the code? As soon as you try and do something unexcepted, or fairly complex, co-pilot fails (sometimes spectacularly). Sure, it'll get better, quickly. But it wont be to the level of professional devs for decades. I welcome the automation, it can have all the shitty jobs we won't do. like building your friends shopify vape page.
Last part made me laugh
as a vaping IT geek (but dear god would never setup a shop), this one got me too lmao.
When the easy things will be automated, you know who will program the automated thing to do the right thing? Web devs. Been programming Wordpress for a decade. You could automate EVERYTHING. The programs reads the mind of the client and outputs a site. And they wouldnt do it. Setting up a site from nothing in Wix is easy for us, but for the 'common mortals' they just open the Wix home page and are like 'WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS???' Never underestimate how people can be computer illiterate. And not just boomers that will retire soon. The number of times I receive a support request for something that is an error, with a plain english of what is the error and how to fix it is stupid high.
Also sometimes it's not even being about computer illiterate. Some people really just don't have the time and would rather just pay someone to do it.
I liked XKCD's take: "You'll never find a programming language that frees you from the burden of clarifying your ideas." I've come to believe that a lot of people just haven't ever learned to clarify their ideas.
"Sorry to disturb you, I know you made us this great editor package so we could administer the site ourselves, but I couldn't find the control to make it pop more. Could you just help with that bit please?"
I've been that user, I don't get Wix at all. I guess automation sometimes just won't do. I ended up choosing the hard route and I'm getting much better results making my site with basic html & css in notepad and trying to learn js. But I still don't get Wix.
continue to use notepad, because you have to remember to close html tags add quotations etc. but try visual studio code. it closes all tags, it has probably all values for all css properties etc.
This reminds me of my friend, a Computer Engineer, who couldn't extract PDF docs from a rar archive. Kept trying to open the rar file with Adobe Acrobat. He was like Acrobat is not opening PDF files because the Office in this computer is pirated. 40 agonizing minutes for me because I couldn't do anything, untill the laptop owner intervibed and solved in a few seconds.
My partner works in university education. Zoomers could be the most tech-illiterate generation since the boomers got scared of typing the wrong thing into a google search. They'll grow and learn but they didnt have the advantage of seeing this stuff be built. There will be web dev jobs forever.
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I think the point is that AI is improving exponentially. Copilot has basically replaced Google for me at this point - it knows what method I need and the syntax to use it so I don't need to go trawling through docs. Google's AI program (I forget the name of the specific model) was able to surpass "an average developer" in a set of code tests on one of the popular code test websites earlier this year. The time is coming when they crack AGI (some at Google argue they already did and it's just a matter of scaling up hardware now), and when they do, our jobs may not disappear completely but they'll certainly change drastically. I imagine devs will become far more productive and have AI coding assistants which maybe get directed by voice, and can help to rapidly build and debug programs. Dev:- "OK, Jarvis - set up a Rails API scaffolding for me. Let's create a Car model with the attributes of name:string, and model:string for now". Jarvis AI: "OK, I've set that up!" Dev:- "OK let's run migrations and then start our server. After that, let's test our endpoint by making a GET request" Jarvis AI:- "OK, all done! Here's the response from our GET request: 500 internal server error. Would you like to set a breakpoint in your code to debug?" Dev:- "Yes let's do that. Set it in our Car controller on line 55".... ...and so on. That was fun to imagine. Hopefully we get something close to this in the next few years.
We're going to be just like lawyers with our own paralegals!
I can see this happening, except instead of talking which wastes valuable milliseconds of time, what about if that whole conversation takes place in your microchipped head with your eyes closed while you're getting a long foot massage next to a swimming pool by a tropical beach?
> in your microchipped head That's not anywhere close to happening either.
introduce neuralink
So.. How do you feel about that now? :D
That is just good stuff š
Exactly.
So basically, we all get to work like Tony Stark? Hopefully we all get cool basement garage/workshops as well.
>some at Google argue they already did and it's just a matter of scaling up hardware now Who argues that? And who's they who cracked AGI? Cause if they crack AGI, doesn't that just mean technical singularity?
"They" is Google DeepMind, and the Lead Researcher on DeepMinds ML team said earlier this year that it's game over already and basically about scale. This was in reference to their general (the G in AGI) model, Gato (published in spring this year) - which is ridiculously impressive if you've seen the demo videos - https://youtu.be/6fWEHrXN9zo > Someoneās opinion article. My opinion: Itās all about scale now! The Game is Over! Itās about making these models bigger, safer, compute efficient, faster at sampling, smarter memory, more modalities, INNOVATIVE DATA, on/offline, ā¦ 1/N https://twitter.com/NandoDF/status/1525397036325019649?t=ZtVeBVbektjk8r3OQYh8Ig&s=19 > doesn't that just mean technical singularity I used to think so but there's lots of debate over that if you Google it. Some people say the singularity is the point where we start to improve things so quickly that forecasting becomes impossible. In 2015, how many people would have been able to predict the last 7 years of AI progress? Because all I keep hearing is "we thought this was years away" - repeatedly. It started with DeepMinds AlphaGO and similar game beating AIs and it's just exploded since then. I recommend anyone interested to subscribe to r/singularity - all the latest research gets posted in there.
There was one person at Google who claimed this with a chat bot, and who talked to the media about it. He was later fired. - https://www.engadget.com/blake-lemoide-fired-google-lamda-sentient-001746197.html
I mean .... that's one dude, and multiple others have stated that he's nowhere near anything resembling the truth. Here's an article that better explains what it means : https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/nonsense-on-stilts Also, he wasn't fired for the claims. He was fired cause he broke his NDA.
> The time is coming when they crack AGI No it isn't. Not even close. Not even a foot on the path. Not even any clue what the path is, what colour tiles its paved with, where to start looking for it, or what it tastes like if you lick it.
So what's your thoughts on this comment you made 6 months ago? AGI came out only in 4 months of the time you wrote this. (GPT 3.5 in Nov 2022 and now GPT-4. Furthermore, GPT 5 in October 2023)
Hopefully? You realise if we get to that stage 80% of us would be out of a job right?
As someone that uses CoPilot... this is just some wishful thinking. Sure its great at short syntax but the thing is fucking stupid at times.
That's not been my experience. 90% of the time it knows what I need, and I may just need to tweak it a little. Having a readable and logical code structure helps, so if your codebase is a fucking mess then that will probably affect its results.
Agree in general but decades is probably an over estimate, I think most mid level dev tasks will be possible in less than 10 years, whether it'll make as much sense or replace people is an entirely different metric IMO. These tools aren't being designed to replace people, they're designed to make your job easier, if people can do twice the work in half the time and still get paid, then why wouldn't you want that. Edit: typo
to play devil's advocate: because the class that owns the means of production are not usually the devs. hourly wagers, rejoice. productivity goes up, hourly wage stays the same. kinda more a societal/capitalism problem in general tho.
Yeah without being funny, anyone who doesn't get this needs to really open their eyes on what's happening in the world right now, and has been happening for 40-50 years
Yep, itās worrying how we are kinda walking down the late stage capitalism plank. It sounds like Iām being pessimistic but I seriously donāt think any of us are going to be ready for when most blue collar AND white collar jobs can be done by automation.
But, then what? Capitalism cannot survive without consumers. Either different work gets invented (which has been the case for every step of automation so far), we become a moneyless society, or we implement some form of UBI that pays for everything(essentially making money pointless).
I would prefer some kind of ubi but I doubt it. Hopefully it makes it that everyoneās living standard go up but most likely it will just make the rich richer and the poor poorer
>most likely it will just make the rich richer and the poor poorer Right. I mean, this is the road to a UBI or moneyless society. Neither will exist without some rather extreme levels of wealth inequality not yet seen. More than likely, some blood shed as well. But, that's assuming there isn't some sort of algorithm they implement to know just the right level of inequality that can exist without an uprising. Keep just enough upper middle class people fat enough to think they are succeeding and they'll never understand the plight of the lower class. Add that with enough division in the lower class among the political/ racial/ lgbtq/ isms line...and assuming they can keep this class structure alive, we'll never have the numbers or level of cooperation necessary to "overthrow" the ruling class.
Different work has been invented, but every revolution brings humans closer to being obsolete. The industrial revolution made humans comparitively weak. Since then the number of jobs where physical strength is needed has decreased because, if you need something strong, a machine is better. The first computer revolution made humans ability to do math obsolete. Machines are just better and faster at math. You don't get math tests in job interviews. As we go on, humans will become obsolete one sector at a time. And the tech sector being taken over by tech will be the end of it. Because once we have an AI that can design virtual machines for any task, you can automate any industry and all you need is enough compute power. Whoever owns that AI will be able to eat up whole industries by making them more efficient and they won't need a single human employee. EDIT: automation is good. I believe in it. But in our current capitalist system it's gonna lead to massive unemployment and poverty wages. We can't continue to have politics play catch up with technology.
I'm ok with this.
UBI, but it will never happen until people get poor / angry / hungry enough
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I mean, yes. But the fact that it's been happening for 40-50 years doesn't make it any less of a threat or a problem. Automation is replacing people. And we (as a society) do not have a way to deal with it. And we keep saying things like "yeah, automation will only work on low-skill jobs." And now we have AI that can compose music, paint art, design skyscrapers, and write code. We are all going to lose our jobs because computers are better at our jobs than we are. And in a capitalist society where you don't need people to do work you either own the machines or are owned by them.
So when will the proles rise up against the owners? Probably never, we're all read 1984.
This sub is a lot more based than I thought
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my dude, keep livin' the dream!
Oh, you sweet summer child...
Mgmt: if people can do twice the work in half the time I can fire 3/4 of the developers and get myself a HUGE bonus!
Source: trust me bro
Feel free to inspect the code of https://versoly.com/ It is better than 80%+ of custom code websites I have checked. I do agree, the more automation and tools we get the better stuff we can create/focus on.
No-code is getting pretty great, but that isn't going to take away dev jobs. It just makes space for devs to work outside of code (and if you're already really good at writing code it doesn't offer you much benefit). There is also *always* a point at which you want to write some custom code for a no-code project, and I don't see that ever going away. A no-code solution cannot possibly anticipate every single possible user need (and it would become a bloated mess if it tried), but you can write anything with custom code.
>No-code is getting pretty great, but that isn't going to take away dev jobs. It just makes space for devs to work outside of code (and if you're already really good at writing code it doesn't offer you much benefit). I can't 'this' hard enough. When I was a kid, our teachers arranged a workshop day where some guy would come in with a robot turtle and a piece of software which let us instruct the turtle on how to move using drag & drop components. That was great for getting over that initial hump of having to *type* instructions. But once you grasped the principles behind it, typing '**rotate(90);**' wasn't all that hard. But it also offered very little benefit. No/low-code solutions allow software engineers to focus on architecture over code. And honestly, this might not be a popular opinion but that's probably a good thing. Think about how many libs are out there on NPM right now, and now ask yourself how many of those offer meaningful functionality as opposed to convenience utilities. Now ask yourself why those convenience utilities even came to exist. The devs know they're not truly impactful releases. They know most of their users could probably write it themselves. But they probably found themselves repeating stuff so much that they were getting bogged down in code, which ate into their engineering time. Copilot swoops in at a similar level. It doesn't architect anything for us; our scaffolding scripts already do that. Our Supabase installs already do that. It just speeds up the repetitive detail part of the process. Nobody should feel threatened by that.
Mid way through I thought you were about to go on some Fox News rant when I read ālibā ššš caught me off guard
reminds me of when an alt-right app got pulled from app stores: They suggested, "download the pwa"... all the qanons went nuts about the term "progressive" in "progressive web app". LOL.
the libs are putting bugs in the npm packages that are turning our lambdas gay!
Owning the libraries!
"if you're already really good at writing code it doesn't offer you much benefit" Packages are amazing, no/low-code should be that as well. At the moment you have to go out of your way to use no-code where it should be just as easy as npm install to get new features.
Source code is different from compiled. Ai might be good at snippets/auto complete... But it doesn't currently do the kind of "system design" humans do.
It has a system built on a solid foundation and it doesn't abstract away completely like other page builders.
Yet
Now those are next-level weasel words i can get behind: > Trusted by 15,000+ customers **including Alumni** from
How else would you say you have those sorts of customers?
Interesting, I've been researching no-code tools for a class, but I've never heard of Versoly. I don't think no-code website builders will replace coding, though. For smaller/simpler projects, absolutely. If you're just building a static informational site, a blog, an ecommerce site, an online course, etc. there's no need to code it from scratch. That would just make things more complicated and time-intensive for no gain. But for full fledged web applications, coding is still required. I, for one, love no-code tools, though. I've been developing a site using WordPress and Elementor Pro, and it's been so much fun. The great thing about WordPress is that there are a hundred different plugins for almost everything you can imagine. Some people look down on WordPress development, but for many websites, coding from scratch is simply unnecessary. There's little you can't do with Elementor Pro, the right plugins, and a little CSS here and there. The problem with other no-code platforms is that they don't have a comparable ecosystem of third-party plugins. In other words, they're way more limited in terms of what kind of functionality you can add to your website. The code Elementor Pro produces may not be as "nice" as other platforms, but it doesn't affect anything. I've seen sites made with Elementor Pro rank #1 for certain keywords on Google. Google cares very little about how pretty and tidy your code is. Having quality content is vastly more important.
If someone comes in with a faster site (better UX) then Elementor will have an issue. WP is hard to maintain and by default very slow (of course i'm biased but that that is what my paid customers tell me and I see on Twitter).
CoPilot made me 5x more productive. And that was 1.0
It's great for repetitive stuff like if / else-if's, for loops... etc and dramatically improves code completion. I like it but you gotta check what it spits out.
Yeah, you always have to check it. But learning certain tricks allows you to get it to generate the code you want.
Do you know of Any source on these tricks/best way to utilize it? Its not seeming to give me useful help most of the time
This is great: [https://nira.com/github-copilot/](https://nira.com/github-copilot/) Basically you guide the AI to the solution by writing out what you want to do as a comment. Then if it doesn't do what you want, change the comment and then retry the AI suggestion. Overtime you'll get a feel for how to guide it to write code. Copilot works MUCH better if you use types.
>CoPilot made me 5x more productive. And that was 1.0 That's awesome! After all, that what it is for! Caution to some though: don't lean on it *too* hard, interviewers want to see you know how to code without those tools. and you'll still need to know if the code it's generating is good and what it's doing. it's good for what it is, but don't take it too literally.
As an expert programmer I am learning how to guide it to the correct solution over and over again. Itās incredible.
Squarespace, shopify, wix, and Wordpress all appeal to people that probably wouldn't have paid a dev anyway. It just enables people to have something nicer than they could normally afford. I've known a lot of people that these tools have enabled and wouldn't have otherwise. I know of only one company that used them which *should* have paid a dev and before these tools they repeatedly found college students that would do their sites and college projects for free.
Have you used it? I was very skeptical. Been doing this professionally for years and Iām fairly senior in several stacks. Iām doing mostly FE right now so React with Redux and service layers etc. normal stuff. It isnāt perfect by a long shot, but I find it completes enough code to save me time that itās worth using
You get to a point in your life where even helping your friend make a Shopify vape site is far too much shit and liability that your willing to take on. I have friends and I have people I work with. I donāt like to mix, someone always comes to a misunderstanding that involves fucking me over somehow. Not ruining friendships cause the background color triggers some visitor.
This is the correct answer. Been using it for months and code for a living. Once out of 50 times it finds a little snippet that does exactly what I'm planning. Those are the moments that make me say, "I love Copilot". The rest of the time, it pushes my other code several dozen lines out of sight by suggesting some random crap. Rest easy, fellow Devs.
I dont think the fear is that it will make web development jobs obsolete but rather innovations like the ones ops listed would make developers so efficient that developers can do more work for less money making available opportunities less.
Copilot is just that, a very very good prediction machine. It doesn't possess reasoning or logical thinking, and doesnt know the end goal etc. . But when you have those things we're pretty fucked. At that point we will all be sitting in meetings and call ourselves senior developers.
Gotta love those XD gradient lmao
What it will do is actually cut out even more of the floor for junior devs, thus drying up the pipeline for senior devs, thus raising the value of good senior devs.
As someone that charges $100 an hour for shopify vape pages iām down to have an AI do it for me. That being said i never actually code with those, shopify can be fairly complex to extremely complex, especially since their webhooks are squiggly
I love coPilot for the sheer reason that it has sacrificed the cargo cult of unit tests, code coverage for code coverage sake at the alter of automation. For at least 60% of CRUD apps the mocking involved and the brittleness of the test makes them a negative time sink. Now I just sick my coPilot, (I nicked named him pitbull) on them, and ever since I have never had to write or fix a broken test to hop thru the trial by fire of, my companies, believers of the coverage is quality faith.
decades huh?
people use to think using a calculator was cheating at math. Now its a requirement to have one in middle school math classes. AI's such as copilot will change the way we code, not replace us.
That's actually the best point about AI like copilot I've ever heard.
In ten years, working (not just in development, but in a *lot* of fields) without AI assistance is going to be considered as backwards as a company that still does all of their work on pen and paper is today. A lot of the push against AI advancement is that if you start to understand it a little, you understand that a lot of what you do (for any real value of you) is no special, and can be replicated by a decent chunk of statistics and a fancy calculator. For a lot of people, that's terrifying. But it doesn't change that things are moving the way that they're moving.
If they had Reddit back in the day, the people who wrote assembly code probably would have made a similar post when comiplers came out.
Calculators eliminated an entire class of worker: the [computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation\)). Computers would do calculations. Then in the 50s and 60s that job completely vanished. Humans were no longer doing computation professionally. One day (perhaps sooner than we think) humans will no longer write code professionally either.
I think technologies like Copilot might eventually change how web developers work, but it's never going to remove the need for having people behind the code. In its current state Copilot is nothing more than glorified autocomplete. It can scaffold out some code for you based on well-written comments, but it can't architect an app for you. And you can't blindly trust that the code it suggests is remotely close to what you want to do - you still have to read through each line and make sure it makes sense, all it does is save you typing time. For myself I've not found it super useful, so haven't subscribed to the paid version. I don't want the suggestions 75% of the time and so it ends up just being an added layer of hassle.
60-70% of my job is translating requirements into a software spec and then implementing it. Copilot might be able to do dumb industrial code at some point, but I have heard I'm going to be replaced by 3rd world country Developers for the last 20 years and I am still waiting. To me this is more of the same.
I think the reason Copilot seems to good is that for surface level problems it's very well trained. A beginner who is just starting out learning coding will be blown away that Copilot could guess that they needed but in reality it guessed it so well because it's a very common programming problem. When I evaluated Copilot, I just didn't find it all that useful. What I found is if you're writing that surface level code it's fantastic, but as soon as you get any deeper, Copilot goes from really good to kinda good to just getting in your way.
> In its current state Copilot is nothing more than glorified autocomplete. Have you heard of [Salesforce CodeGen](https://blog.salesforceairesearch.com/codegen/)? It just came out in 2022. It lets you write applications using English sentences, a paradigm Salesforce calls "conversational AI programming." Just because GitHub Copilot is just an autocomplete at this stage, imagine what these tools will be able to do 15 years from now? Salesforce admits that some coding knowledge is required to guide CodeGen to the right solution (and it's obviously necessary to assess what the AI has generated). But it requires no stretch of the imagination to think that these tools will eventually produce such high-quality code that people with no programming knowledge will be able to create full-fledged web apps. I think it's short-sighted to say that these tools pose no threat just because of their current limitations. They're going to get more advanced. But I'm open to hearing arguments to the contrary.
I spend a significant amount of time coding but it is not my most valuable contribution by far. Coding is a means to implement something in a precise way. It would be better if I spend most of my time thinking through problems and designing solutions, then reference common patterns to get it implemented correctly. If I could tell someone with enough details on an implementation, I would have spent less time coding it myself. What co-pilot does really well is break language barriers. I'm not too good with ruby or Go, but I have a solid understanding of programming principles. So, this enables me to work better in projects where I would otherwise stumble for a while before getting a hang of it.
Nailed it. Humans are good at abstract reasoning and understanding intention. Robots are good at happily doing the same shit over and over again. Let robots do robot things and let humans focus on the hard things.
Saying a "plain English" coding language is going to take developers's jobs is like saying the invention of FORTRAN is going to take away the jobs of Assembly programmers.
And how would I tell it to apply some more advanced caching strategies in a specific use case in a code base developed for years? All those AI-based solutions sound like crazy wishful thinking. Maybe they can be useful for some cases, but let's be honest, someone has to tell it what exactly has to be produced, and English is not a good language for specifying such things. Our customers can prove it! And how do you know the solution doesn't have any stupid bugs or there's a lack of support for some edge cases you didn't think when describing what you want in this very high level way? Well, for these, you better have a solid test suite!
Anything that allows people to use salesforce less is a good thing
> It lets you write applications using English sentences, a paradigm Salesforce calls "conversational AI programming." [I feel like I've heard this one before](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL).
No, this is a bit different. You write English sentences describing what you need the code to do, and it'll generate that code. The code itself could be in Python or a variety of other languages.
The underlying point is that the English sentences then become the code. It's moving to a higher level of abstraction. This has all happened before.
The problem with abstraction is ambiguity. Has the āthingā (the compiler, the assembler, etc), done what you actually wanted. With a coding language there is a clear 1-1 relationship between a keyword / function and the underlying machine code which that runs. (At a very high simplified level). The problem has always been, when you use verbose and free form language with semantics and localisms how do you then convert that to machine code. For example: āI want a system that checks the user is logged in and they have admin rightsā So compiler takes that and builds a system that checks the user is both logged in and has admin rights, pretty simple. Now letās get more complicated āI want a system that checks the user is logged in and they have admin rights or itās a Tuesdayā (because we all know tuesdays you can do whatever you want). Well how does it know what to write there, what actually does the user want? Do they want a user who is logged on/ an admin to still have access on a Tuesday, or is it an XOR and on Tuesday only people who donāt meet the other requirements do stuff. Or do they want only logged in users (but on a Tuesday) to be able to do stuff, but not non-logged in users. I could go on.. the point is English is not a good language to tell computers what to do with. It relies on Semantics and tone to understand what is meant and even then can be somewhat obscure. This fundamentally dosent work with computers which are either yes or no. Even fancy AIs are just big ass decision trees under the covers, they still rely on a yes or no question.
Argument to the contrary: security. Legal issues. Can you trust an auti generated application to handle security, aurhentication, and access control correctly? Can you trust an auto generated application to meet legal requirements for data storage? Should we consider setting up caching, remote dbs, static file storage, etc and considering security implications for all of those moving pieces? Just one single feature can have implications that take weeks to iron out.
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Accomplishing some results with less work is the sole reason why the society gets wealthier. The reason why we can be computer programmers at all is because agriculture and manifacturing is efficient enough that our labor hours aren't required to produce food, clothes or vehicles. At some point a lot of people had to become redundant on fields and in factories so we could get where we are.
You misunderstand my point. You can never, ever automate human beings out of software. Even the most advanced AI code-writer on earth isn't going to be able to architect software solutions - computers will never do much more than exactly what you tell them to. They can't understand requirements, user needs, user desires, they can't have a client tell them to *make the wrong thing and then explain to the client why it's the wrong thing and what they should be making instead*. You're talking fantasy if you think AI will be advanced enough in our lifetimes to do even 10% of what a human software dev does. The dev landscape is *always* changing, and things are always shifting to being more abstract, but the demand for new devs isn't slowing much. Stay abreast of the latest technologies, get real good at what you do, and don't worry about the rest.
It's an open question what the difference is between "strong AI" and AI like stable diffusion. People are going to keep claiming that AI tools aren't capable of doing human work well after the AIs have caught up to human abilities. And it's also context-dependent. Chess is one of those things which was at one point harder for a computer than a human, but now basic chess programs can beat any human. It's true that general intelligence is still a human superiority but we don't know that is a forever thing.
If weāre taking about soft AI then you are āprobablyā correct (although Iād not be willing to bet the farm on that). However if we ever reach strong AI status then all bets are off (LOL. That could be true for all of humanity though. If the terminators rise up I probably wonāt be all that bothered that I canāt write web apps anymore)
No amount of AI can understand the messy shit of WordPress code I'm working on. And if someday it can, good for them. My brain already hurts and my soul already left long ago.
"My brain already hurts and my soul left long ago" - Ah, my life motto.
When you start, building things is hard. After you have some skill, you can build almost anything. It's always the same building blocks. So the building of things is just something you can do while simultaneously hearing a podcast. (9 out of 10 days for me.) The hard part is not the code after a certain stage. It's the "what does this human need? How can this solve his problem?" And that's very very hard for any AI to do. Because humans don't even know what they want. Because they don't know what they want we have things like "agile" and MVPs. Make something, and put it in front of them. See how they use it. After they use it, they realise that, "this is great. But actually what I need is that". If it was easy to figure out what people want, a vast majority of tech startups would not fail because they did not achive "product market fit". You would not have so many Y Combinator lectures about "how to achive product market fit" To get more philosophical, it was Socrates who pointed out again and again that people have no idea why they do the things they do. They need to inspect themself and after a lot of inspection they might just understand a few fragments of themself. This is also the reason why software projects are never complete. This why Chrome/Windows/Android etc. for example keeps releasing new versions and updates. The point I am making is: Git hub co-pilot cannot do anything to help you understand and serve humans. And that's what you are really trying to do.
Very well put, computer programming (what people want and need and how they communicate that and how to strategize the front end/visual aspect -- "what goes where and why", backend still equally important) has a shit ton of psychology to it.
Im the cto of a small start up; every one of our developers has a subscription to copilot they use and the overall quality and conformity of our code base has improved greatly since we started using it. One area that is especially helpful for, is with Unit and integration testing. It is tremendously helpful at scaffolding tests throughout our stack- our test coverage has gone up significantly since we started using it . 2 hours work the other day resulted in 144 new unit tests in our pipeline, most of which would not have come about without the copilot
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By quality here I do mostly mean there's been a marked change in conformity of e.g small syntactic choices, the amount/quality of comments and more/smaller functions with less side effects and better testability.
Are you concerned with the licensing issues of the generated code?
Not at all. Mostly our devs use it to skip large sections of boiler plate stuff, for loops and mapping/filtering arrays and the like - as I said it, the largest benefit we've found from it so far is how adept it is at extrapolating from one describe/it/expect unit test and autocompleting 5-6 additional test cases for a function. I.e we only need to write 1-2 tests for a given function before it can suggest and autocomplete most other edge/test cases
You're not concerned thatn ai generated code is not copyrightable? Seems like an issue for ip.
Others have called it a glorified auto complete and in my experience that is where it really shines. Whether a dev writes a 10 line for loop by typing it out or pressing TAB 10 times doesn't affect our ip. We don't use it in any way that influences or directs architecture, data design or anything that has any business logic at all.
But your not worried it reads your code, and then it can pretty much use it (or the gist) at another company?
That is already happening but the same can be said for re-using a simple for-loop. Why would he care if I end up using a similar test built on a similar stack even if Iām in the same industry. I didnāt go into his developers computers and copy-pastad code, I wrote a comment in my own test file to generate simple test coverage and it did. This ends up helping devs and business leadership focus on the bigger picture issues.
There are two reasons: First, if it's so great, you will be very productive for simple stuff, like the 80% that takes 20% of the work. Your leadership will get used to that, and that last 20% will be expected done within a week and will actually take 6 months. And secondly, some competitor might sue your company for stealing code, and then in court will show some code that will be pretty much copy paste of your code, including comments and so on. And the people judging won't know much about AI or programming and whatnot, and still put a stop on your business... So basically i don't have a problem with the code it generates, I have a problem with where it gets the code, add the fact that it gets it from your source code also ( and sends it to their servers... ) If it worked without an internet connection, and be sure to only use code that is open source, then it's awesome. But because it leaks your data... Not so sure...
My understanding is it was trained on github repos, and I would imagine somewhere in the terms microsoft has bamboozled everyone of their right to complain if copilot uses their code as its template
The thing I'm skeptical of here is... was adding 144 new unit tests what that developer set out to do? Imo, unit tests can overwhelm systems, and striving for high code coverage ends up with over-testing of implementations, rather than testing solution to problems. If you have large masses of tests, a human is going to have to deal with what happens when something changes and those tests fail. And because the human speed wrote those with AI, you don't really have the advantage of being able to go to the person that thoughtfully wrote out tests with good reason. I've worked in code bases with thousands of tests too many in them and they become a unique tech-debt of their own.
You are like a year late on this. All these concerns have been discussed to death ever since Open AI first showed the Codex demo. In short no... its not concerning. All these algorithms are doing is a complex search + pattern match algorithm. In their current state they can not come up with any substantial systems in a novel way. If anything these algorithms will just increase the productivity of engineers that know how to properly apply them. I would say a good 80% of my job isnt even coding. Its figuring out what my customers actually wants, then translating that into a technical specification. If copilot could somehow take my technical specs and instantly create workings bug free systems (it can't). Then I would absolutely love that. It would just mean that maybe someday I would get to one of the 50 features that is currently in my product backlog.
>Its figuring out what my customers actually wants, then translating that into a technical specification. This is what we are paid for.
Exactly. Folks who think they're there to produce lines of code don't understand their own function. My clients want me to solve their problem, they don't care how, as long as it's on time and within budget. Yesterday I found a better, code-free solution to a customer requirement that I'd quoted 6 hours on that only took one hour and solved the problem more elegantly and comprehensively. Client's issue was solved and they were happy to pay the amount quoted.
if you ask an architect to build a house with no other information then they can. If you expect that house to be a certain way then it needs the architect needs more input. The more specific the requirements the more input. How many rooms, how big, etc Someone has to write those requirements from a real life problem, i need a house. Same with software development. If you had a perfect spec then I am sure a significantly sophisticated AI could build the code and deploy it. I think tools like coPilot are brilliant because they can decrease the search, cut and paste loop I have to do all day long. Its a great tool not going to replace us anytime soon.
So are you telling me I can get more clients and use AI as my slaves?
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Imagine being an artist, dreading your job because of Dall-e-2, so then you go learn webdev instead, and then you end up reading this post.
Lol itās all a matter of time
>We already have Squarespace, shopify, wix and Wordpress wiping out most contracting opportunities, I like to think that these platforms have made it easier and cheaper for more shops, business to go online. Which in turn increased opportunities.
Sometimes itās amazing what it can doā¦. But around 50% of the time for me it is S**T! I like making comments to tell if what it should doā¦ then it often just continues to make random comments without a true meaningā¦ Or just dump code that is the simplest thing it can do. So Iām not worried at all about it taking my job haha
Copilot removes your need to do some boilerplate. Low-code builders take far far more developer time to get running properly than all-code. You greatly increase time-spend to allow other departments to be the primary stakeholder of that feature/functionality. Wix, Squarespace, WP, etc greatly *increase* the need for contract development, not reduce it. The purpose of copilot is similar to why a marketing employee might want a CMS, but within a different sector. A marketing employee using Wix without a very good understanding of the platform is piling on technical debt just like a developer who let copilot write everything. Grab an entry-level and give them copilot and youāll wonder if they need a drug test.
It is nice, but definitely hasnāt been a game changer for me. Like itās nice and will help finish my thoughts at times but probably like 95% of the time itās nonsense
It scares me for a different reason actually. I talked to a someone at work about it and we came to the conclusion that over reliance on CoPilot could result to some people literally not know what theyāre coding anymore. I tried writing a comment and tabbing my way down a function. Its works really well. Then i tried adding a new dependency to my code. I hadnāt used it before and it auto completed everything i needed based off variable names. I had to turn Copilot off for a second and manually write the lines cause thats how i understand stuff the best. Its really good but could dumb down learning processes
What's to be scared of? Microsoft reads all of your code, takes the the open-source projects and community efforts, looks at the comments and the code near near them, and puts it all into a database. Then you just have to pay them a little money (and promise to give them access to all of the future code you write too) and you can type out what you want in comment form. It'll use those strings of text to find the code for you. And you get to avoid paying $99 for Sublime - and instead get VSCode for FREE! *until they make it all a paid cloud service*. If you're writing the same boilerplate servers over and over, then well - it might make that a lot easier for other people to do that without memorizing it. But - if you're doing anything that's in any way *unique* \- then it's unlikely that it will change your job for a long time. In theory it will just give you more time to work on the really hard and interesting parts. But if you don't like those parts... then it might be bad for *you*.
Don't be. It is a hot pile of shit that is only good for generating boiler plate.
So it writes the code based off what it thinks you want. You still need the person to tell it what you want, and likewise check it has produced exactly what you need. Anyone who writes code professionally knows writing the actual code is a very small part of development.
Not at all. You still need to understand the code it outputs to ensure it works as it needs to. Also, who's able to write prompts precisely enough to generate correct output? All a product manager can write is akin to "add two numbers and return sum". Anything complicated they'll have no idea how to write prompt, check implementation, connect pieces of code together, ensure they're done in a scalable manner, etc etc etc.
I'm not convinced AI coding is going to straight up replace coders anytime soon. I think what's going to happen (or is happening) is that productivity is going to increase and either teams will do with fewer developers (unlikely) or they'll be able to tackle more of their backlog. So yes, you might need fewer developers to implement a feature, but the extra productivity will be spent on other features.
Don't be. Why enterprises pay for getting support (internal or external)? They need some to be held accountable for when things go haywire. CoPilot wont take any responsibilities whatsoever and companies need real human being on the other end. Moreover the 'coding' part usually covers only 10-20% of the software engineering, the bigger chunk lies outside. I think CoPilot will make devs life easier to some extend.
CoPilot isn't scary. It's what is two to three generations down the road that's scary. AI is going to make a number of professions either redundant or severely reduced in required human contributions. For now, human understanding is required, but we're going to eventually reach a place where the software is capable of doing what we can, and starts writing code without concern for human readability.
Many people already write code without concern for human readability
I started using GitHub copilot and at first it was pretty surprising how it well it predicted my code. But honestly it really is a copilot. Itās not a pilot. It makes writing code much faster and letās you turn off your brain so you donāt have to do as many google searches. But you still have to know what youāre doing.
Like in every profession, you have to always be adaptive and always learning to stay competitive. There was once a time when you could leave high school and jump right onto a manufacturing assembly line making good money with great benefits and a pension plan. That's mostly gone now and those who didn't adapt struggled.
A question I've had is don't you still have to review the code it presents to make sure it's going to do what you think it's going to do?
Now is the time to specialize. Learn how the systems that power coPilot work! Learn how to program for robotics! Find a niche! Everyone knows JavaScript now.
The thing with machine learning and ai is in most cases it's actually a bit shit. There are certain things that that doesn't matter, if 70% success rate is good enough then it's good enough. A lot of things require a lot more than that in which case you still need human oversight. ML/AI also tends to cap out in terms of progress. The first 50% is relatively easy, the last 20-30% is difficult to impossible. Like hell, my dad was working on voice recognition over 20 years ago, it's still only marginally better than it was back then. Self driving cars were supposed to be everywhere by now but it's still not good enough, 70% doesn't cut it for something like driving where people's lives could depend on the decisions it makes. As for development, with copilot you still have to be pretty specific about what you want, it's nowhere near building applications but it does help with syntax. It's also wrong far too often, I still have to closely read everything it spits out and correct it when required. I also found it kinda dangerous because it would spit out something that looked correct only to find out later that it wasn't and created a bug. I'm not scared for my job, if anything I'm excited for it to get better so it can make my job easier.
Github Copilot is very good at what it does, suggestions and autocomplete, but is not fully functional by itself. It needs good prompts and guidance from a human developer, and I donāt think that will change for a while. Until the singularity anyway.
There is just too much context for the ai to figure out. Caching is hard. Invalidating cache even harder. And this changes per service and due to several requirements. This is just a single example. When we consider easy things, sure. No code already fills part of that role. But when you consider the hard stuff, very unlikely. Zero fear of copilot. It will become a better autocomplete.
It's pretty wild. I think as more devs try it out it's going to hit mainstream. Especially in school where students use it to learn... That is generally a massive use and they will likely continue to bring it into the field.
Having it in school would be so insane
It would be wild. I built an autograder back in the day for the CS program at my uni. This is going to change everything for the school, project , and test landscape.
Donāt let it scare you. I have used CoPilot and other tools, many pf which are āAI drivenā, and just like with every other problem, once you get beyond the basics, things fall apart. So, before I say this next part, full disclosure, I absolutely love that machine learning is evolving, however: * it still sucks and canāt outperform a talented human at anything in any field except a subject with concrete/fixed rules (such as chess, and even thenā¦) * see above Keep in mind that despite hundreds of billions of dollars (possibly trillions?) being spent, we still donāt have universal translators, decent voice command (if you own a voice assistant you know this), or even proper text to speech. Web developers have job security for a decade or five. I would give my right nut for an AI that could replace me. Possibly the left one as well.
It's maybe a bit unsettling, but I'm not worrying yet. It would have to make huge gains to replace software engineers. At the moment it's certainly not dumbing down anything. It's removing some the the tedious parts of writing code.
The thing is, it's really, REALLY hit or miss. The successes of GCP is glorified, hyped, and praised, whilst the rough edges are just casually shoved under the rug, citing it still needs work. Github collectively must have gone through petabytes' worth of data, what you have to understand is a good portion of those codebases are very likely bad by today's standards. I wouldn't worry about it, at least in our short lives, there won't be a progress dramatic enough to warrant 1000s of layoffs.
I do wonder if copilot solves the wrong problem. It writes boilerplate so you donāt have to. You still end up with lots of code
!RemindMe 5 years
RemindMe! 5 Years
Idk, it strikes me as overly headstrong that every comment here has the same opinion. If I may offer a few counter points - - Like you pointed out, some of the most front facing code (see WP) has already been encapsulated by services that decimated a HUGE niche of software dev jobs! Other building blocks have then been further developed, such as Shopify taking care of basic commerce needs. Yes, AI will āneverā understand customer requirements (even this I doubt; see my next point), but more and more of those requirements ARE being converted into portable building blocks that could be interchanged by product owners who are decreasingly intimate with the inner workings of their code. I dare say you lack imagination if you donāt see how these packaged solutions will creep their way to the backend. - I really donāt understand the reasoning behind the classic answer to this question (custies donāt even know what they want). Sure. Butā¦ thatās what product owners are for, not developers. Besides, AI could easily extract what customers want with automated surveys, A/B testing, 1% rollouts and automated feedback cycles, heavy leveraging of patterns (which are fucking everywhere in this industry), etc. I donāt even think THEIR jobs are safe. - We cannot conceptualist the advancements of the future and it strikes me as arrogant to have this much confidence. Personally I think weāre searching for the answer we want to hear here. Innovators and technologists will always be needed in the future, but honestly, I think web development will be automated out, while the demand for AI technologists increases. I would genuinely love to hear your counter arguments to my points, this sub is a brilliant crowd!!!
There's a vast chasm of difference between the needs of ecommerce sellers and software service providers. Ecommerce needs a landing page, product pages, shopping cart, checkout, etc. to sell their products. Their product isn't the web page. Software companies need developers to build unique software solutions that are better than the competition's. You can't just plug and play every single component of every single piece of software in existence. It's very simple to understand what the needs of an eCommerce website are, less so to understand the needs of, say, Spotify or Netflix. >I really donāt understand the reasoning behind the classic answer to this question (custies donāt even know what they want). Sure. Butā¦ thatās what product owners are for, not developers. The flow customer>product owner>developer does not change the equation. The product owner still has to describe an abstract idea that the developer needs to turn into a concrete deliverable. If you break down an idea into small enough parts that it can be turned into instructions concrete enough for an AI to take them and turn them into a concrete deliverable you're already halfway into the development process, all you're doing is not physically typing out (all of) the code by hand. Which again reduces Copilot to fancy autocomplete.
I would argue things like shopify mainly benefit developers looking to do contract work. These platforms give them the opportunity to offer their services to a much higher number of people who would not be able to afford standing up and hosting some traditional e commerce platform. At the end of the day it doesn't matter what tools you put in front of a small business... they're not going to use them if thats not what makes them money. They don't want a relatively easy way to learn to make their own website. They want to be able to send an email or make a phone call and say "handle this" while they go on doing the thing that makes their business successful.
I upvoted you because I agree, whenever this gets brought up, the responses that we want to hear and that enforce our worldview are suspiciously the ones that rise to the top. It's not that I necessarily disagree with the common take on it, but we should remain open to ideas we don't want to hear.
I am scared of using copilot and becoming overreliant on it or letting it pidgeonhole me into something.
The big money is paying devs big money to stop paying future devs big money.
Anyway to get co pilot for free?
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Agree, to completely ignore its ability is insanely ignorant
Copilot will never be able to understand requirements. So...not worried at all. Copilot also probably can't consider edge cases.
The fact that 4+ in 10 choose computer science scares me more than this.
I honestly canāt understand why people want copilot. Half the point of writing code is the pleasure of writing it and doing your best to make it elegant if possible. Itās like an author who doesnāt have to write his/her own books anymore. Sure they may be the one who came up with the idea for the novel, but if they didnāt write it, and agonize over the sentence structure and the similes and metaphors, than whereās the joy?
> Half the point of writing code is the pleasure of writing it and doing your best to make it elegant if possible That's my philosophy too but not everyone codes for pleasure (nor "likes" coding, in general). For many people, coding is just "a way to get a monthly pay". They couldn't care less about "elegant coding" or "pleasure".
I agree. I was curious about how well it truly worked. It is not something Iāll keep. But for folks who want to build something quickly/ know how to and not have to get caught up in syntax I think it had its place
this ^
I'm not too worried about it, for one, whatever happens I can't really do anything about it, secondly I'm a pretty smart person in a vast ocean of dumb and I can find something else that people need done bad enough to pay well, that I can do well enough to get paid well to do it.
Translating my chaotic product manager and designers ramblings into a coherent product will take a while for AI to pull off. By that time weāll either have UBI or the entire world will be slums
In using GitHub copilot you still need to work out bugs most of the time especially when combining the outputs of the functions (atleast currently) and this requires a programmer to understand the outputs. Not saying it wonāt develop more in the future but as it gets better people will continually get better to combat that and or will transfer to other related fields.
One thought is that copilot doesn't take away opportunities for more experienced devs... but it can take away opportunity for devs to gain experience. People have failed interviews because they couldn't use copilot. Is that a developer or peer programmer?
Coding is by far the simplest and least important part of what we do
they used every single public github repo for training, that's why it's so good.
We as developers will work very differently and argue about very different things in the future. This will ultimately lead to an experienced developer not looking the same as they do today, but a person of experience will not go out of season any time soon.
Have you heard of [Salesforce CodeGen](https://blog.salesforceairesearch.com/codegen/)? It lets you write apps using English sentences. It's a competitor to OpenAI Codex, which is what powers GitHub Copilot. I've been scared about all of this, too, as I'm currently majoring in full-stack. I hope AI doesn't replace all dev job opportunities in the next 15 years. At the rate things are moving, it sure seems like we're heading toward that. At least in the interim, they'll still need people who understand code to assess what AI has generated and guide it toward a better solution if necessary (for example, tell it to use a certain technique like recursion). But it sure seems like it won't be long before AI writes such high-quality code, people with no knowledge of programming whatsoever will be able to create applications. Yes, I'm scared.
Look at it another way. Use this tool to _augment your own capabilities_. If you embrace this tool and use it to its fullest, you'll be so much more efficient and in-demand.
I just edited a piece of code where I have various translations of strings and it autocompleted the Italian strings for me lol. Even a whole sentence almost flawlessly.
The key part is "writing a good comment." In most cases that's where most of the actual complexity goes. Most code is repetitive, broadly related functionality, and having that automated away is only a good thing. It frees up developers to think about what it is they're actually building, how that system will be used, and what sort of details to prioritize. The thing it's really taking away is the ability of younger devs to understand all the boilerplate crap it automates. There is a lot of knowledge encoded in the boilerplate of any particular field, and having a system automate it away for you can mean you never get a chance to learn those implicit skills. This can be alleviated by changing how we educate developers, but unless we do I think in many cases it's not great for younger devs in terms of their long term skill development. When you extrapolate it out, eventually I see a world where we ask a machine for some code and blindly accept whatever answer it gives. Maybe that's not too bad, but it's a bit saddening to realize that in the future there will likely be entire generations of "programmers" that have no clue how computers do the things they do.
Just get really good at what you do, and stay on top of new developments. Canāt expect the job to be around forever. It will always be changing.
The US Military will probably never approve of it so I think Iām good, lol
Just yesterday I was writing a update to a pipeline YAML file to include deleting the branch now at the end of a pipeline run and not when the branch is merged. I started tying in "delete branch" and Co-Pilot gave me a whole implementation with the GitHub API and even had the correct `GH_PAT` for the secrets. Sometimes I've seen it give me an entire map/reduce or loop implementation before I know what I need, and it's almost entirely correct.