<story><title>Testing GPT 4&apos;s code-writing capabilities with some real world problems</title><url>https://tylerglaiel.substack.com/p/can-gpt-4-actually-write-code</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vages</author><text>If increased productivity equaled job loss, there would be two programmers alive today, doing the same job as the fewer than 10000 programmers using punch cards as we entered the year 1950.&lt;p&gt;A lot of projects today are not even greenlit because they would be too expensive to make. For instance, there are a lot processes in almost every country that require you to file paper forms, even though we have had web forms and databases for 25 years. This goes even for rich countries. If one programmer is able to do the job of 5 others, we will probably have 5 times as many systems to tend to now that businesses and institutions can afford them.</text></item><item><author>IKLOL</author><text>I think the fear should be less about AI taking 100% of jobs but it should be AI making a single programmer do the job of 5, which would wipe a majority of the market out and make it a non-viable career option for most.&lt;p&gt;Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors.</text></item><item><author>quitit</author><text>This is so common in many types of business, and usually a very difficult point to articulate so thank you for that. It&amp;#x27;s something to be shown to those ringing the death-knell for programmers, artists, and the like.&lt;p&gt;Those death-knell types seemingly aren&amp;#x27;t aware of what day to day operations looks like and how AI makes a great tool, but doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily deal with the very human factors of whims, uncertainty, reactive business mentalities and the phenomenon that is best summarised by this webcomic: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theoatmeal.com&amp;#x2F;comics&amp;#x2F;design_hell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theoatmeal.com&amp;#x2F;comics&amp;#x2F;design_hell&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;In my field they like to call this &amp;quot;hurry up and wait&amp;quot;, a nonsensical but fitting description that summarises everything from changing scope to the unjust imbalance of time between the principal and the agent.&lt;p&gt;(There is a comment further down which suggests that we could just train AI to deal with this variability, I hope that&amp;#x27;s humour... sweet summer child thinks you can train AI to predict the future.)</text></item><item><author>danwee</author><text>I want to see GPT-4 dealing with this situation:&lt;p&gt;- they: we need a new basic POST endpoint&lt;p&gt;- us: cool, what does the api contract look like? URL? Query params? Payload? Response? Status code?&lt;p&gt;- they: Not sure. Third-party company XXQ will let you know the details. They will be the ones calling this new endpoint. But in essence it should be very simple: just grab whatever they pass and save it in our db&lt;p&gt;- us: ok, cool. Let me get in contact with them&lt;p&gt;- ... one week later...&lt;p&gt;- company XXQ: we got this contract here: &amp;lt;contract_json&amp;gt;&lt;p&gt;- us: thanks! We&amp;#x27;ll work on this&lt;p&gt;- ... 2 days later...&lt;p&gt;- us: umm, there&amp;#x27;s something not specified in &amp;lt;contract_json&amp;gt;. What about this part here that says that...&lt;p&gt;- ... 2 days later...&lt;p&gt;- company XXQ: ah sure, sorry we missed that part. It&amp;#x27;s like this...&lt;p&gt;- ...and so on...&lt;p&gt;Basically, 99% of the effort is NOT WRITING CODE. It&amp;#x27;s all about communication with people, and problem solving. If we use GPT-X in our company, it will help us with 1% of our workload. So, I couldn&amp;#x27;t care less about it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_fizz_buzz_</author><text>This is true for other domains also. My wife translates for an ecommerce business. A lot of what she does is very automated. The software she uses remembers all phrases she has translated and uses a word bank she manages for special parts and uses DeepL for new translations which are then only proofread and fine tuned. It&amp;#x27;s amazing how much stuff she can translate that way in a day (no idea how many thousands words). She is kind of managing and overseeing an AI (DeepL) and sanity checking the work. If this was 20 years ago one would probably need a translation department of 10-15 people to do the same work. However, her company would have never been able to justify that kind of cost. So, in my view: Software and AI made translators probably more than 10x more efficient in the last 10 years, however the amount of stuff that gets translated also increased 10 fold during this time.</text></comment>
<story><title>Testing GPT 4&apos;s code-writing capabilities with some real world problems</title><url>https://tylerglaiel.substack.com/p/can-gpt-4-actually-write-code</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vages</author><text>If increased productivity equaled job loss, there would be two programmers alive today, doing the same job as the fewer than 10000 programmers using punch cards as we entered the year 1950.&lt;p&gt;A lot of projects today are not even greenlit because they would be too expensive to make. For instance, there are a lot processes in almost every country that require you to file paper forms, even though we have had web forms and databases for 25 years. This goes even for rich countries. If one programmer is able to do the job of 5 others, we will probably have 5 times as many systems to tend to now that businesses and institutions can afford them.</text></item><item><author>IKLOL</author><text>I think the fear should be less about AI taking 100% of jobs but it should be AI making a single programmer do the job of 5, which would wipe a majority of the market out and make it a non-viable career option for most.&lt;p&gt;Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors.</text></item><item><author>quitit</author><text>This is so common in many types of business, and usually a very difficult point to articulate so thank you for that. It&amp;#x27;s something to be shown to those ringing the death-knell for programmers, artists, and the like.&lt;p&gt;Those death-knell types seemingly aren&amp;#x27;t aware of what day to day operations looks like and how AI makes a great tool, but doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily deal with the very human factors of whims, uncertainty, reactive business mentalities and the phenomenon that is best summarised by this webcomic: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theoatmeal.com&amp;#x2F;comics&amp;#x2F;design_hell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theoatmeal.com&amp;#x2F;comics&amp;#x2F;design_hell&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;In my field they like to call this &amp;quot;hurry up and wait&amp;quot;, a nonsensical but fitting description that summarises everything from changing scope to the unjust imbalance of time between the principal and the agent.&lt;p&gt;(There is a comment further down which suggests that we could just train AI to deal with this variability, I hope that&amp;#x27;s humour... sweet summer child thinks you can train AI to predict the future.)</text></item><item><author>danwee</author><text>I want to see GPT-4 dealing with this situation:&lt;p&gt;- they: we need a new basic POST endpoint&lt;p&gt;- us: cool, what does the api contract look like? URL? Query params? Payload? Response? Status code?&lt;p&gt;- they: Not sure. Third-party company XXQ will let you know the details. They will be the ones calling this new endpoint. But in essence it should be very simple: just grab whatever they pass and save it in our db&lt;p&gt;- us: ok, cool. Let me get in contact with them&lt;p&gt;- ... one week later...&lt;p&gt;- company XXQ: we got this contract here: &amp;lt;contract_json&amp;gt;&lt;p&gt;- us: thanks! We&amp;#x27;ll work on this&lt;p&gt;- ... 2 days later...&lt;p&gt;- us: umm, there&amp;#x27;s something not specified in &amp;lt;contract_json&amp;gt;. What about this part here that says that...&lt;p&gt;- ... 2 days later...&lt;p&gt;- company XXQ: ah sure, sorry we missed that part. It&amp;#x27;s like this...&lt;p&gt;- ...and so on...&lt;p&gt;Basically, 99% of the effort is NOT WRITING CODE. It&amp;#x27;s all about communication with people, and problem solving. If we use GPT-X in our company, it will help us with 1% of our workload. So, I couldn&amp;#x27;t care less about it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldtea</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;If increased productivity equaled job loss there would be two programmers alive today, doing the same job as the fewer than 10000 programmers using punch cards as we entered the year 1950.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only reason it&amp;#x27;s not the case in this example is because computers at the time were a tiny early adopter niche, which massively multiplied and expanded to other areas. Like, only 1 in 10,000 businesses would have one in 1950, and only big firms would. Heck, then 1 in 100 million people even had a computer.&lt;p&gt;Today they&amp;#x27;ve already done that expansion into all businesses and all areas of corporate, commerce, and leisure activities. Now almost everybody has one (or a comparable device in their pocket).&lt;p&gt;Already cloud based systems have made it so that a fraction of programmers and admins are needed. In some cases eliminating the need for one altogether.&lt;p&gt;There are tons of other fields, however, more mature, where increased productivity very much equaled job loss...</text></comment>