- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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I’m a little defeatist about it. I saw with my own 3 eyes how a junior asked ChatGPT how to insert something into an
std::unordered_map. I tell them about cppreference. The little shit tells me “Sorry unc, ChatGPT is objectively more efficient”. I almost blew a fucking gasket, mainly cuz I’m not that god damn old. I don’t care how much you try to convince me that LLMs are efficient, there is no shot they are more efficient than opening a static page with all the info you would ever need. Not even considering energy efficiency. Utility aside, the damage we have dealt to developing minds is irreversible. We have convinced them that thought is optional. This is gonna bite us in the ass. Hard.Might sound a bit unrelated, but have you been noticing an apparent rise on ageism too? The social media seem to be fueling it for some reason.
Make the junior put it to the test John Henry style. You code something while they use gpt and see who comes up with a working version first
It’s going to get worse. I suspect that this’ll end with LLM taking the part of a production programs. Juniors just feeding it scenarios to follow, hook the thing up to a database and web page and let it run. It’ll gobble power like there’s no tomorrow and is just a nightmare to maintain, but goes live in a quarter if the time so every manager goes with that.
I work at a software development school, and ChatGPT does a lot of damage here too. We try to teach that using it as a tool to help learning is different from using it as a “full project code generator”, but the speed advantages it provides makes it irresistible from many students’ perspective. I’ve lost many students last year because they couldn’t pass a simple code exam (think FizzBuzz difficulty level) because they had no access to internet, and had to code in Emacs. We also can’t block access to it because it starts an endless game where they always find a way to access it.
Damn, I forgot about the teaching aspect of programming. Must be hard. I can’t blame students for taking shortcuts when they’re almost assuredly swamped with other classwork and sleep-deprived, but still. This is where my defeatist comment comes in, because I genuinely think LLMs are here to stay. Like autocomplete, but dumber. Just gotta have students recognize when ChatGPT hallucinates solutions, I guess.
I work in a small company that doesn’t hire hardly at all… Stories like this scare me because I have no way to personally quantify how common that kind of attitude might be.
Look, ultimately the problem is the same as it has always been: juniors doing junior shit. There’s just more of it going on. If you’re hiring one, you put a senior on them ready to extinguish fires. A good review process is a must.
Now that I think about it, there was this one time the same young’un I was talking about tried to commit this insane subroutine that was basically resizing a vector in the most roundabout way imaginable. Probably would have worked, but you can also just use the
resizemethod, y’know? In retrospect, that was probably some Copilot bullshit, but because we have a review process in place, it was never an issue.
How is it more efficient than reading a static page? The kids can’t read. They weren’t taught phonics, they were taught to guess the word with context clues. It’s called “whole language” or “balanced reading”
Holy shit just like an LLM
Literacy rates are on a severe decline in the US, AI is only going to make that worse.
Over half of Americans between 16 and 74 read below a 6th grade level (that’s below the expected reading level of an 11 year old!)
We have the same problem with literacy here in Sweden. It’s unnerving to think that these kids will need to become doctors, lawyers and police officers in the future.
Sweden of all places? What happened in the last decade that Sweden’s slowly losing the fame of country to follow in social aspects?
This is only a guess, but it could be related to increased use of technology. Many things we interact with are simplified, and if you come across a word you don’t know your phone can give you simple synonyms or if you can’t spell autocorrect will catch it.
The same problem people are talking about with LLMs with a different lens.
Of course, there are different opinions, but here’s my take (as a Swede, but not an expert in politics/history):
The issues didn’t start during the last decade. In the 90’s, it was politically decided that schools wouldn’t be nearly as centrally managed by the state as they had been, instead municipalities would handle most school-related politics and administration locally. It was also decided that parents are allowed to choose more freely where to send their kids. This weakened public schools. Moreover, legislation was introduced (in the 00’s I think but I’m not sure) that allows for-profit private schools, which historically AFAIK had been prohibited.
Parents usually don’t have to pay anything extra to send their kids to private schools, and for each private school pupil more tax money flows into the private instead of public schools. The private schools are of course incentivized to attract children from families that are well off, since they tend to perform better (boosting the school’s score and thus reputation), have parents that can e.g. drive them from a longer distance, and just generally have less issues and so cost and complain less. For instance, it’s been reported that some private schools refuse (openly or through loopholes) e.g. special needs pupils since the tax money paid to the school for them isn’t worth the cost (and “bad PR”, no doubt) of actually giving them a proper education.
Sweden has also had a high rate of immigration the last decades. Immigrant parents understandably tend to not be as savvy about the school system and have less time/resources for getting their kids to “nicer” schools further away. Immigrant kids also tend to require more attention, both due to needing to learn Swedish and because psychological problems, e.g PTSD, are more common among many immigrant groups. Also I haven’t seen any studies on this, but IMO the private schools’ advertisements (on billboards etc) tend to be very geared towards “white” kids/parents with no immigrant background.
In 2007 a tax benefit for “homework help” among other things was introduced, halving the price parents have to pay for private tutors at home. This again benefits families that are well off and lets private companies in education siphon tax money.
All this means a cycle of segregation seen in so many countries. Public schools are burdened with students that require more resources, while private schools do everything they can to snatch up low-maintenance pupils. This makes private schools seem to perform better and gives public schools bad reputations. Racism and class discrimination also plays into all this of course.
It also doesn’t help that teachers’ salaries and social standing have decreased, partly due to the same general patterns.
This degradation of the public school system has continued during both left-wing and right-wing governments, though it’s often accelerated during right-wing governance. For instance, the social democrats party was the one to push in the 90’s for shifting responsibilities from the state to municipalities. There is an ever growing issue with corruption across the political spectrum (but worst/most blatant on the right), where it’s become quite common for politicians to push for decisions that benefit private companies, then retiring from politics and joining said companies’ boards etc.
Thanks for the reply, i’ve seen those patterns as well, kinda sad.
Really? My kids are hitting the rules hard. In 1st grade, they’re learning pronunciation rules I never learned (that’s phonics, right?). My 2nd grader is reading the 4th Harry Potter book, and my 5th grader finished the whole series in 3rd grade and is reading at a 7th or 8th grade level.
I did teach them to read before kindergarten (just used a book for 2-3 months of 10 min lessons), but that’s it, everything else is school and personal interest. They can both type reasonably well because they use the Minecraft console and chat. They’re great at puzzles, and my 5th grader beat me at chess (I tried a wonky opening, and he punished me), which they learned at school (extra curricular, but run by a teacher).
We love our charter school, though I don’t think it’s that different from the public school.
I don’t think phonics are the most critical part of why the kids can’t read.
It’s proven that people who read primarily books and documents read thoroughly, line by line and with understanding, while those that primarily read from screens (such as social media) skip and skim to find certain keywords. This makes reading books (such as documentation) hard for those used to screens from a young age and some believe may be one of the driving forces behind the collapse in reading amongst young people.
If you’re used to the skip & skim style of reading, you will often miss details, which makes finding a solution in a manual infinitely frustrating.
Skip & skim could also stem from the fact that this how a mind used to everpresent ads reads. It’s like an adblocker built into your brain.
It’s not that phonics is integral, but rather if reading is a guessing game that’s just one more barrier to reading, and they read less, and what they do read they skim over and potentially ignore foreign words
One can classify approaches to progress in at least four most popular ways:
The most dumb clueless jerks think that it’s replacing something known with something known and better. Progress enthusiasts, not knowing a single thing from areas they are enthusiastic about, are usually here.
The careful and kinda intellectually limited people think that it’s replacing something known with something unknown. They can sour the mood, but are generally safe for those around them.
The idealistic idiots think that it’s replacing something unknown with something known, that’s “order bringers” and revolutionaries. Everybody knows how revolutionaries do things, who doesn’t can look at Musk and DOGE.
The only sane kind think that it’s replacing something unknown with something unknown. That is, that when replacing one thing with another thing you are breaking not only what you could see and have listed for replacement. Because nature doesn’t fscking care what you want to see.
I honestly don’t know how anyone’s been able to code anything predominantly using AI that’s production worthy.
Maybe it’s the way I’m using AI, and to be honest I’ve only used chatGPT so far, but if I ask it to generate a bit of code then ask it to build on it and do the next thing, by about the third or fourth iteration it’s forgotten half of what we talked about and missed out bits of code.
On a number of occasions it’s given me a solution and when I questions it about the accuracy of it and why a bit of it probably won’t work I just get oh yes let me adjust that for you.
Maybe I’m doing AI wrong I don’t know, but quite frankly I’ll stick with stack overflow thanks.
I frankly only used those to generate pictures and sometimes helloworlds for a few languages, which didn’t work and didn’t seem to make sense. It was long enough ago.
Also I have ASD, so it’s hard enough for me to make consistent clear sense from something small. A machine-generated junk to give ideas is the last thing I need, my thought process is different.
You have to aggressively purge the current chat and give it more abstract references for context. With enough context it can rewrite some logic loops, maybe start a design pattern. You just have to aggressively check the changes.
Feels like it would be quicker and easier just to write the code myself at that point…
It’s only useful for stuff that’s been done a million times before in my experience. As soon as you do anything outside of that, it just starts hallucinating.
It’s basically like how junior devs used to go to stack overflow, grabbed whatever code looked like it would work and just plopped it in the codebase.
I remember talking to someone about where LLMs are and aren’t useful. I pointed out that LLMs would be absolutely worthless for me as my work mostly consists of interacting with company-internal APIs, which the LLM obviously hasn’t been trained on.
The other person insisted that that is exactly what LLMs are great at. They wouldn’t explain how exactly the LLM was supposed to know how my company’s internal software, which is a trade secret, is structured.
But hey, I figured I’d give it a go. So I fired up a local Llama 3.1 instance and asked it how to set up a local copy of ASDIS, one such internal system (name and details changed to protect the innocent). And Llama did give me instructions… on how to write the American States Data Information System, a Python frontend for a single MySQL table containing basic information about the member states of the USA.
Oddly enough, that’s not what my company’s ASDIS is. It’s almost as if the LLM had no idea what I was talking about. Words fail to express my surprise at this turn of events.
Yeah, and the way it will confidently give you a wrong answer instead of either asking for more information or saying it just doesn’t know is equally annoying.
Because giving answers is not a LLM’s job. A LLM’s job is to generate text that looks like an answer. And we then try to coax framework that into generating correct answers as often as possible, with mixed results.
This is exactly right. AI can only interpolate between datapoints. I used to write code for research papers and chat gpt couldn’t understand a thing I asked of it.
All I hear is “I’m bad at mentoring”
And some sort of “no one wants to work any more”.
I know young brilliant people, maybe they have to be paid correctly?
There is only so much mentoring can do though. You can have the best math prof. You still need to put in the exercise to solve your differential equations to get good at it.
You get out of education what you put into it. You won’t be an artist from the best art school if you do the bare minimum to pass. You can end up as a legend of the industry coming from a noname school.
that s the point of being junior. Then problems show up and they are forcing them to learn to solve them
To be fair, most never could. I’ve been hiring junior devs for decades now, and all the ones straight out of university barely had any coding skills .
Its why I stopped looking at where they studied, I always first check their hobbies. if one of the hobbies is something nerdy and useless, tinkering with a raspberry or something, that indicates to me it’s someone who loves coding and probably is already reasonably good at it
Nevermind how cybersecurity is a niche field that can vary by use case and environment.
At some level, you’ll need to learn the security system of your company (or the lack there of) and the tools used by your department.
There is no class you can take that’s going to give you more than broad theory.
Stack Overflow and Google were once the “AI” of the previous generation. “These kids can’t code, they just copy what others have done”
As someone who can’t code (not a developer) but occasionally needs to dip my toes in it. I’ve learned quite a bit from using chatgpt and then picking apart whatever it shat out to figure out why it’s not working. It’s still better than me starting from scratch on whatever it is I’m working on because usually I don’t even know where to begin.
Yeah, and copy-pasting SO answers with no thought is just as bad.
And when copy-pasting didn’t work, those who dared to rise above and understand it, became better. Same with AI, those of the new generation who see through the slop will learn. It’s the same as it has always been. Software engineering is more accessible than ever, say what you will about the current landscape of software engineering but that fact remains undeniable.
I’m glad that AI is making it easier to enter into new areas of knowledge. I just hope it won’t be used as a crutch too far into people’s journeys.
I’m glad that AI is making it easier to enter into new areas of knowledge. I just hope it won’t be used as a crutch too far into people’s journeys.
Software engineering is more accessible than ever
This is key here. Having it more accessible, we see more people who do not want to learn but still trying to code. But we also see more people who wants to learn and create solutions.
Well said. Some of the most talented devs I know use Stack Overflow. It depends on how you use it.
All the devs I know use SO…
True.
The problem is not only the coding but the thinking. The AI revolution will give birth to a lot more people without critical thinking and problem solving capabilities.
apart from that, learning programming went from something one does out of calling, to something one does to get a job. The percentage of programmers that actually like coding is going down, so on average they’re going to be worse
This is true for all of IT. I love IT - I’ve been into computer for 30+ years. I run a small homelab, it’ll always be a hobby and a career. But yeah, for more and more people it’s just a job.
That’s the point.
Along with censorship.
I am not a professional coder, just a hobbyist, but I am increasingly digging into Cybersecurity concepts.
And even as an “amature Cybersecurity” person, everything about what you describe, and LLM coders, terrifies me, because that shit is never going to have any proper security methodology implemented.
On the bright side, you might be able to cash in on some bug bounties.
Of course they don’t. Hiring junior devs for their hard skills is a dumb proposition. Hire for their soft skills, intellectual curiosity, and willingness to work hard and learn. There is no substitute for good training and experience.
To me, I feel like this is a problem perpetuated by management. I see it on the system administration side as well – they don’t care if people understand why a tool works; they just want someone who can run it. If there’s no free thought the people are interchangeable and easily replaced.
I often see it farmed out to vendors when actual thought is required, and it’s maddening.
i always found this to be upsetting as an IT tech at a former company - when a network or server had an issue and i was sent to resolve it, it was a “just reboot it” fix, which never kept the problem from recurring and bringing the server down at 07:00 the next Monday.
the limitations on the questions i could ask hurt that SLA more than any network switch’s memory leak ever did, and i felt as if my expertise meant nothing as a result.
No wonder open source software becomes more efficient than proprietary one.
They never could
Exactly, the jr dev that could write anything useful is a rare gem. Boot camps cranking out jr dev by the dozens every couple of months didn’t help the issue. Talent needs cultivation, and since every tech company has been cutting back lately, they stopped cultivating and started sniping talent from each other. Not hard given the amount of layoffs lately. So now we have jr devs either unable to find a place to refine them, or getting hired by people who just want to save money and don’t know that you need a senior or two to wrangle them. Then chat gpt comes along and gives the illusion of sr dev advice, telling them how to write the wrong thing better, no one to teach them which tool is the right one for the job.
Our industry is in kind of a fucked state and will be for a while. Get good at cleaning up the messes that will be left behind and that will keep you fed for the next decade.
Not that this is very unique to the field, junior anything usually needs at least 6 months to get to a productive level.
Kind of wish we went with more tradesmen-like titles. Apprentice, journeyman, master. Master software developer sounds like we have honed our craft. Junior/senior just seems like a length of time.
It generally is a length of time. Your title depends on the years on the job.
Has anyone else clicked the chat.com url in the article …
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Recently my friend was trying to get me to apply for a junior dev position. “I don’t have the right skills,” I said. “The biggest project I ever coded was a calculator for my Java final, in college, a decade and a half ago.”
It did not occur to me that showing up without the skills and using a LLM to half ass it was an option!
