What scares me about ChatGPT is less so that I’ll lose my job (though it’s possible), but more so that I’ll be using language models to work at higher and higher levels of abstraction doing mainly configuration tweaking. Some of the particular pain points expressed in the article should be removed with AI in the loop development, but it’s another step away from “real programming”, which is what attracted most of us to this field. Yes, creating things is the end goal, but I’m terrified that I won’t be able to extract nearly as much joy when my job becomes largely prompting GPTn to swap out frameworks and UI paradigms for me like magic.
How much joy do we really get from day-to-day work if we are really honest? I am using ChatGPT to help me get things done (Node.js programming) for my startup. It's getting me closer to having this client project done so I will have more time for my own internal AI thing I am adding to the main service.
No one is stopping you from writing 6502 assembly code in your spare time. That's actually still a somewhat popular hobby.
I already started using ChatGPT to solve problems because I can’t be arsed to read through ten vendors worth of documentation. It wrote me a fairly complete and accurate chunk of code the other day to solve a problem.
I've found it's often like pairing with a junior developer who is familiar with whatever problem you're describing and types insanely fast, and that's without learning too much how best to prompt it. A recent discovery was that you can ask it what problems may exist in its code, then ask it to fix them.
- how to filter tabs in a firefox extension (turns out some APIs are only accessible in background scripts). the fun part is that it gave me an obsolete use case, so I told him "it's wrong, firefox uses promises now", so he fixed itself and used the new api.
- someone about django custom inlines, the answer was mild but it integrated various aspects of the framework in a short answer which helped a lot (django is particularly horrendous, i cant suffer its strange style, so that played too)
Its already like this. My first job in the 90s I wrote our own linked list classes, a logging framework and a persistence layer. Now it feels like I write css and yaml all day.
You still get to do something as close to the metal as writing raw CSS? I'm reliably told that's cavalier and you should be writing something that compiles to CSS.
By the way, the HiSOFT that created DevPac 4 (assembler/debugger) for the ZX Spectrum is still around. According to their about page they now build websites?!? https://www.hisoft.co.uk/
