On 11/4/24 14:59, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> On 2024-11-04 11:30, David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>> Not what anybody wants to hear but …
>>
>> AI is going to transform this thing we call “programming”.
>>
>
> It has already.  I use it regularly.  It helped me configure my LAMP 
> server to use php-fpm.  I've played with enough to know it can program 
> faster than me and better than me.
>
>
First, a little background on me:

I'm currently retired and teaching Linux at GatewayCC. For most of my 
life I was a software developer, specializing in Hardware/Software 
interfacing.  I've done 'independent contracting' for a number of years 
(more than 2, less than 10.  If it matters to you I can go figure it 
out.  Suffice it to say, I learned a lot, including to NEVER do a 
fixed-bid contract unless the bid was so high nobody would pay for it 
anyway ;-) (a long story...)  For the last 8 years of my career I wore 
multiple hats:  Linux system administrator; Linux-based test system and 
environment designer, implementer, maintainer, etc; test process report 
generation, including parsing possibly thousands of lines of text and 
summarizing the info (as well as putting the raw data into a database 
for later retrieval) (resulting in changing the time required for a 
human to check out the results of the tests from about 5 hours to under 
3 minutes); customer support.

There's probably more I should say, but I'll leave it at that. (If 
anybody knows of a position where I can do the 2nd of the above, email 
me off-list ;-)

I've recently begun 'playing with' ChatGPT, using it to avoid the usual 
time spent ignoring irrelevant search results.  I'm no expert at all here.

Now, to my blathering:

>
>> The “programming” process is going to become more high-level and 
>> abstract. The “coding" stuff will become hidden in the background and 
>> nobody will care about the language being used.
>
> For now I think one needs senior experience to use AI for 
> programming.  Maybe 3 50 5 years it might be getting there.  I think 
> we are safe for possibly 10 more years.
>
In my experience, most people have no idea of what they ACTUALLY need.  
They come to  you with what they THINK they need, but often what they 
actually need is different.  Given that, currently, the 'prompt' is 
critical to getting a good answer, I think translating what people think 
they need into what they actually need, and forming the final 'prompt' 
to get the AI to create the code, will take an AI-assisted (I'm betting) 
human to form, for a good number of years.  Yeah, maybe 10 or more.  On 
the other hand, maybe much less, especially if 'someone' starts spending 
as much effort doing 'code-generating' AI work as they are doing 
'picture creating' AI work and such ;-)

The stuff that followed in the quoted message was good, but I'll save 
bandwidth since I think I should shut up now ;-)  (And hopefully what I 
said above somewhat obviously relates to the whole design stuff and 
problem solving things mentioned below, which as I say has been removed ;-)
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