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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