Is it just me or the Chat GPT's writing was clearly distinguishable? I have created content with various writing styles: humorous, formal, informal. It creates very repetitive content. It might create a sentence, but it would not understand how much to expand on it. Like, at what point does the reader want more details? What will make the story more interesting?
As counterintuitive as it seems, I'm pivoting to writing. Writing clearly and writing more.
I've been doing web development for 15 years now. For the past 4 years, 80% of my time was spent on refactoring old codebases to use more modern tech (Backbone -> React). Even though it's my job, I hope it gets automated soon. It's a long process, especially if you do this in a big organization.
I won't make any bold claims, but I hope in the near future, creating software will be 100x more accessible than it is now, and we can focus on building businesses that serve people instead of replacing date-fns with dayjs in 2500 files and hoping every component had test coverage.
Apr 19, 2023·edited Apr 19, 2023Liked by Kent Beck
Did you try including "Writing style: Include punchy analogies. Include in media res. Include callback. Include humor. Include asides." in the prompt? :)
I'm not sure how much of the following to attribute to Confirmation Bias, but when I read the first of the two essays that ChatGPT generated, writing ostensibly in your voice, it read very much like Kent being held hostage and reading a letter on camera written by the perpetrators.
I truly hope we demand better from these LLMs than the kind of thing any of us might have written in our first secondary school course on How to Write An Essay.
Too many people seem to misunderstand the fundamental job of a developer. We aren't paid to program a machine to do a certain operation, we are paid to understand a particular problem domain and to encode solutions to problems in that domain in a format that is understandable to other people. That is something that AI will never be able to do. Are the latest incarnations of AI impressive and continuing to improve? Certainly. Do they provide new types of tools that accelerate certain specific activities? Definitely. But they only supplement the skills we already have as developers. They don't replace them.
Another great article. Keep up the great work Mr. Beck!
It's interesting to see the dichotomy between the 90% of skills that may lose value and the 10% that will gain leverage. So, do you think we should focus more on developing the skills that can't be replicated by AI, or should we find ways to integrate AI into our existing skillsets? 🤔
Beyond this I'd love to hear your thoughts on where you see the gotchas with using Chat GPT for coding. For example, if an AI generates code for which the design is not prohibitively difficult for the human programmers involved to understand then do we end up down a rabbit hold of dropping automated tests and relying on AI to maintain more and more of the system whilst the knowledge and skill of humans atrophy?
Does this constitute a whole other level of technical debt?
What can we do to avoid the alluring short term productivity gain of AI code generation at the expense of such potentially disastrous delayed effects?
if chatgpt starts filling the dessert of interesting things to read out there it will at best become netflix ... i feel we r trending towards idiocracy
By unleashing ChatGPT on a company’s code base, wouldn’t one be exposing the company to risks that would result in the unleashing being considered criminal, or negligent, or in other ways nefarious?
Is it just me or the Chat GPT's writing was clearly distinguishable? I have created content with various writing styles: humorous, formal, informal. It creates very repetitive content. It might create a sentence, but it would not understand how much to expand on it. Like, at what point does the reader want more details? What will make the story more interesting?
As counterintuitive as it seems, I'm pivoting to writing. Writing clearly and writing more.
I've been doing web development for 15 years now. For the past 4 years, 80% of my time was spent on refactoring old codebases to use more modern tech (Backbone -> React). Even though it's my job, I hope it gets automated soon. It's a long process, especially if you do this in a big organization.
I won't make any bold claims, but I hope in the near future, creating software will be 100x more accessible than it is now, and we can focus on building businesses that serve people instead of replacing date-fns with dayjs in 2500 files and hoping every component had test coverage.
Did you try including "Writing style: Include punchy analogies. Include in media res. Include callback. Include humor. Include asides." in the prompt? :)
I'm just getting around to reading this.
I'm not sure how much of the following to attribute to Confirmation Bias, but when I read the first of the two essays that ChatGPT generated, writing ostensibly in your voice, it read very much like Kent being held hostage and reading a letter on camera written by the perpetrators.
I truly hope we demand better from these LLMs than the kind of thing any of us might have written in our first secondary school course on How to Write An Essay.
Hi Kent, can you provide some example how we can leverage Chat GPT in our day to day programming job.
Too many people seem to misunderstand the fundamental job of a developer. We aren't paid to program a machine to do a certain operation, we are paid to understand a particular problem domain and to encode solutions to problems in that domain in a format that is understandable to other people. That is something that AI will never be able to do. Are the latest incarnations of AI impressive and continuing to improve? Certainly. Do they provide new types of tools that accelerate certain specific activities? Definitely. But they only supplement the skills we already have as developers. They don't replace them.
Another great article. Keep up the great work Mr. Beck!
It's interesting to see the dichotomy between the 90% of skills that may lose value and the 10% that will gain leverage. So, do you think we should focus more on developing the skills that can't be replicated by AI, or should we find ways to integrate AI into our existing skillsets? 🤔
Oh, Kent. It turns out that you only used it for text generation. (Or at least it's the main focus of your post.)
Try asking it to code, refactor, debug. It may blow your mind. And tell us if it does :)
Not to be stickler, but I've always used "in medias res". I think that might be the proper way to say it.
Dayum. It doesn't write much like you do, but dayum that's good.
Beyond this I'd love to hear your thoughts on where you see the gotchas with using Chat GPT for coding. For example, if an AI generates code for which the design is not prohibitively difficult for the human programmers involved to understand then do we end up down a rabbit hold of dropping automated tests and relying on AI to maintain more and more of the system whilst the knowledge and skill of humans atrophy?
Does this constitute a whole other level of technical debt?
What can we do to avoid the alluring short term productivity gain of AI code generation at the expense of such potentially disastrous delayed effects?
if chatgpt starts filling the dessert of interesting things to read out there it will at best become netflix ... i feel we r trending towards idiocracy
What do you think about this:
https://www.unilad.com/technology/expert-michio-kaku-ai-fears-glorified-tape-recorder-376135-20230814
By unleashing ChatGPT on a company’s code base, wouldn’t one be exposing the company to risks that would result in the unleashing being considered criminal, or negligent, or in other ways nefarious?
Great, Insightful Article