I write automation code for devops stuff. I’ve tried to use ChatGPT several times for code, and it has never produced anything of even mild complexity that would work without modification. It loves to hallucinate functions, methods, and parameters that don’t exist.
It’s very good for helping point you in the right direction, especially for people just learning. But at the level it’s at now (and all the articles saying we’re already seeing diminishing returns with LLMs) it won’t be replacing any but the worst coders out there any time soon.
I can believe that they manage to get useful general code out of an AI, but I don't think that it's gonna be as simple as just training an LLM on English-code mapping. Like, part of the job is gonna be identifying edge conditions, and that can't be just derived from the English alone; or from a lot of other code. It has to have some kind of deep understanding of the subject matter on which it's working.
Might be able to find limited-domain tasks where you can use an LLM.
But I think that a general solution will require not just knowing the English task description and a lot of code. An AI has to independently know something about the problem space for which it's writing code.
It's great for Pseudo code. But I prefer to use a local LLM that's been fine tuned for coding. It doesn't seem to hallucinate functions/methods/parameters anywhere near as much as when I was using ChatGPT... but admittedly I haven't used ChatGPT for coding in a while.
I don't ask it to solve the entire problem, I mostly just work with it to come up with bits of code here and there. Basically, it can partially replace stack overflow. It can save time for some cases for sure, but companies are severely overestimating LLMs if they think they can replace coders with it in its current state.
Context-aware AI is where it's at. One that's
integrated into your IDE and can see your entire codebase and offer suggestions with functions and variables that actually match the ones in your libraries. Github Copilot does this.
Once the codebase gets large enough, a lot of times you can just write out a comment and suddenly you'll have a completely functional code block pop up underneath it, and you hit "tab" to accept it and move on. It's a very sophisticated autocomplete. It removes tediousness and lets you focus on logic.
The thing is, devops is pretty complex and pretty diverse. You've got at least 6 different solutions among the popular ones.
Last time I checked only the list of available provisioning software, I counted 22.
Sure, some like cdist are pretty niche, but still, when you apply for a company, even tho it is going to either be AWS (mostly), azure, GCE, oracle, or some run of the mill VPS provider with extended cloud features (simili S3 based on minio, "cloud LAN", etc), and you are likely going to use terraform for host provisioning, the most relevant information to check is which software they use. Packer? Or dynamic provisioning like Chef? Puppet? Ansible? Salt? Or one of the "lesser ones"?
And thing is, even among successive versions, among compatible stacks, the DSL evolved, and the way things are supposed to be done changed. For example, before hiera, puppet was an entirely different beast.
And that's not even throwing docker or (or rkt, appc) in the mix. Then you have k8s, podman, helm, etc.
The entire ecosystem has considerable overlap too.
So, on one hand, you have pretty clean and useable code snippets on stackoverflow, github gist, etc. So much so that tools like that emerged... And then, the very second LLMs were able to produce any moderately usable output, they were trained on that data.
And on the other hand, you have devops. An ecosystem with no clear boundaries, no clear organisation, not much maturity yet (in spite of the industry being more than a decade old), and so organic that keeping up with developments is a full time job on its own. There's no chance in hell LLMs can be properly trained on that dataset before it cools down. Not a chance. Never gonna happen.
Lol. Humans are just moving up on the stack. I'm sure some people were upset about how we wouldn't need electrical engineers anymore once digital circuits were invented. AI is a tool, without a trained user a tool is almost useless.
AI is a tool, without a trained user a tool is almost useless.
Exactly. This feels a bit like the invention of the wheel to me. Suddenly some things are a lot easier than they used to be and I'm sitting here thinking "holy crap half my job is so easy now" while watching other people harp on about all the things it doesn't help with. Sure - they're right, but who cares about that? Look at all the things this tool can do.
I use Claude to write plenty of the code we use, but it comes with the huge caveat that you can't blindly accept what it says. Ever hear newscasters talk about some hacker thing and wonder how they get it so wrong? Same thing with AI code sometimes. If you can code you can tell what it does wrong.
Just because you're the CEO of a big company, it doesn't mean you know what you're talking about. In this case it's clear he doesn't. You may say "but the company makes a lot of money" and that's not a point in his favor either, as this is a clear example of survivor bias. Coding is going nowhere and the companies laying off people are just a proof CEOs don't know what they are doing.
For years there have been open source solutions ready for basically any purpose, and if that has not made coders useless, nothing will. Maybe they will change designation, but people that understand what's going on at a technical level will always be necessary.
There have been some situations in the past few years that made the situation less clear-cut, but that doesn't make coders optional.
That's how this statement and the state of the industry feels. The ai tools are empowering senior engineers to be as productive as a small team, so even my company laid off all the junior engineers.
So who's coming up behind the senior engineers? Is the ai they use going to take the reigns when they retire? Nope, the companies will be fucked.
I don't think he's seen the absolute fucking drivel that most developers have been given as software specs before now.
Most people don't even know what they want, let alone be able to describe it. I've often been given a mountain of stuff, only to go back and forth with the customer to figure out what problem they're actually trying to solve, and then do it in like 3 lines of code in a way that doesn't break everything else, or tie a maintenance albatross around my neck for the next ten years.
Yesterday, I had to deal with a client that literally contradicted himself 3 times in 20 minutes, about whether a specific Date field should be obligatory or not. My boss and a colleague who were nearby started laughing once the client went away, partly because I was visibly annoyed at the indecision.
I think this is bullshit regarding LLMs, but making and using generative tools more and more high-level and understandable for users is a good thing.
Like various visual programming means, where you sketch something working via connected blocks (like PureData for sounds), or in Matlab I think one can use such constructors to generate code for specific controllers involved in the scheme, or like LabView.
Or like HyperCard.
Not that anybody should stop learning anything. There's a niche for every way to do things.
As someone who's had a bit of exposure to PLCs and ladder logic, and dabbled in some more 'programming' type languages, I would love to find some sort of 'language' that fits together like ladder logic, but for more computery type applications.
I like systems, not programs. Most of my software design is done by building a flowchart, then stumbling around trying to figure out how to write that into code. I feel it would be so much easier if I could just make the flowchart be the code.
In some sense this is regressive, but I agree that ladder logic is more intuitive.
I hated drawing flowcharts in university, but at this point have learned that if you understand what you're doing, you can draw a flowchart. If you don't, you shouldn't have written that program.
So yeah.
I think the environment to program "Buran" used such a language (that is, they'd draw flowcharts instead of code).
Nvidia is such a stupid fucking company. It's just slapping different designs onto TSMC chips. All our "chip companies" are like this. In the long run they are all going to get smoked. I won't tell you by whom. You shouldn't need a reminder.
Designing a chip is something completely different from manufacturing them. Your statement is as true as saying TSMC is such a stupid company, all they are doing is using ASML machines.
And please tell me, I have no clue at all who you're talking about.
The Chinese? I think their claim to fame is making processes stolen from TSMC work using pre-EUV lithography. Expensive AF because slow but they're making some incredibly small structures considering the tech they have available. Russians are definitely out of the picture they're in the like 90s when it comes to semiconductors and can't even do that at scale.
And honestly I have no idea where OP is even from, "All our chip companies". Certainly not the US not at all all US chip companies are fabless: IBM, Ti and Intel are IDMs. In Germany IDMs predominate, Bosch and Infineon though there's of course also some GlobalFoundries here, that's pure play, so will be the TSMC-Bosch-NXP-Infineon joint venture ESMC. Korea and Japan are also full of IDMs.
Maybe Britain? ARM is fabless, OTOH ARM is hardly British any more.
Amazon is fabless for their chip design unit, there all little mini design units for shit like datacenters.
It's hilarious you're saying that because Intel labelled itself an investor in USA foundry projects you think they are exempt from this. Okay man, go work at the plants in Ohio and Arizona. Oh wait, they don't fucking exist bruh
Intel, Ti and IBM all made chips before pure-play and fabless were even a thing, and are still doing so. Intel has 16 fabs in the US, Ti 8, IBM... oh, they sold their shit, I thought they still had some specialised stuff for their mainframes. Well, whatever.
Of all companies, the likes of Amazon and Google not fabbing their own chips should hardly be surprising. They're data centre operators, they don't even sell chips, if they set up fabs they'd have to start doing that, or compete with TSMC to not have idle capacity standing around costing tons of money. A fab is not like a canteen which you can expect to actually be in use all the time so there's going to be no need to compete in the restaurant business to make it work.
And that's only really looking at logic chips, e.g. Micron also has fabs at home in the US.
None of those companies even make a blip on global chip production though. Are they for research or something? Why should I give a shit about a tiny technically existing fraction of production that will never expand?
Go look at where there has been actual foundry production for decades. None of the companies you mentioned even exist in foundry. Who cares if they have A facility or two? That's just part of figuring out what they're going to order from TSMC.
The US has the know-how to produce modern chips at scale, or at least not too far behind in strategic terms. You could bring all production home if that's what you wanted, it'd cost a lot of money but it's simply a policy issue. And Amazon wouldn't suddenly start to run fabs they'd hire capacity from Intel or whomever.
...you'd still be reliant on European EUV machines, though. Everyone is, if you intend to produce very modern chips at scale. But if your strategic interest is making sure that the DMV has workstations and the military guidance computers that's not necessary, pre-EUV processes are perfectly adequate.
You are the one moving the goalposts with your boasts about how these companies make up LITERALLY an INFINITESIMAL portion of global chip production. Even if you cut out Samsung and TSMC they wouldn't be global players.
No, we can't just bring all production home lol. We've been saying we will for years. Where is the foundry in Ohio dude? Where is the Arizona foundry that's supposed to bolster TSMC production?
Lol yeah sure go ask ASML how their business is doing rn in light of the US chip war sanctions. European manufacturing is in as dire a state as the US now due to financialization and now the skyrocketing energy costs.
People said this about our military production too. "Oh, Russia messed up now, we're going to get serious and amp up our military production." 🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🗓️🗓️🗓️🗓️ (time loudly passing and nothing happening)
How many times is it going to take for people to learn it gets transmuted directly into stock buybacks lmao? We don't have the electrical grid to build up our manufacturing base in the modern world yet. The US is a giant casino for the elite of our empire full of slums.
We don’t have the electrical grid to build up our manufacturing base in the modern world yet. The US is a giant casino for the elite of our empire full of slums.
You won't hear me disagree with that. But to say, and I quote you directly:
It’s just slapping different designs onto TSMC chips. All our “chip companies” are like this.
While Intel might very well take the tech crown (gate all around with backside power) from TSMC this year is wildly incorrect.
European manufacturing is in as dire a state as the US now due to financialization and now the skyrocketing energy costs.
And no European manufacturing is not in nearly as dire a state as in the US. For that to be the case we'd have to have as shoddy infrastructure and decades-long underinvestment and offshoring as the US has. The US has in fact a more advanced chip industry than the Europe: We're good at the basic science, we're good at bulk production of specialised stuff, one thing that we're not great at is top-tier CPUs and GPUs, chips that are their own products, what we produce is the usual "the thing that goes into a thing that goes into a thing you buy". Like, random example, pretty much every smartphone in the world uses a Bosch gyroscope and they produce those things in-house.
But that doesn't mean that the US is fucked, in the least: If need be it would be able to spring back to life quite quickly, Thing is, needs do not be, so if your worry is elite casinos maybe don't focus so much on chips and incorrect statements about US capacity there but said elite casino directly.
Yeah the casino bit is the most important part for sure. In light of how financialized everything is, huge costs, massively inflated financial asset & real estate prices etc, labor costs, it's more likely for Detroit to spring back into being an industrial hub.
We focus all of our political energy on monopolizing the top of the value chain TSMC is a part of and we can't replace it with our own production bc it's so crucial for cutting costs down. They can't even expand the production for lower end chips (ROI isn't there) now so Russia and China are gonna scoop up orders from expansion in the many industries that use them (low end chips were like 20% of TSMC's revenue recently, iirc). Which will help them develop their higher end foundries which they definitely can make I mean Rosatom produces super high quality Xray mirrors and the Chinese govt won't balk at industrial investment or high tech training programs.
ASML's whole position in this convoluted supply chain means they only make those shipping container sized thingies with the rube goldberg machine of mirrors hooked up to a gallium plasma light thingy, and that ultimately limits the minimum nanometer size of the circuits made in the fabrication units they ship out. If I'm getting that right 🤪. This is really futuristic stuff I'm talking about now but the next-next gen fabrication units beyond Russia and China catching up could even be hooked up to a particle accelerator. That's pretty hard to export in the same way.
I just don't see how we can politically or financially solve these problems in the US or EU lol. We're kind of caught by the balls as workers no?
You don't need to fab chips to have a job. Let the Taiwanese have their speciality you have yours what's wrong with that.
Also TSMC's company culture is excessively Confucian you probably wouldn't want to work there anyway. It's not just the company and culture that makes the company but also things like Taiwanese universities churning out masses of highly-skilled electrical engineers, basically the only reason TSMC even agreed to that European joint-venture is because Dresden's universities have been focussed on that exact field for decades, even before reunification. For a similar reason you couldn't just take Zeiss and move it out of Jena: They need the local university to funnel students into their workforce. There's no better place to study optics in the world than Jena.
Which actually brings me to another point: All these are labour aristocracy jobs, not just trained but highly educated, comparable to a doctor at a hospital. They have a lobby, they have a good bargaining position. Worrying about them won't do anything for the burger flipper at your local fast-food joint who tends to have neither. It also won't really do much for the injection moulding machine operator producing tea sieves (sorry I was just admiring one it has stainless steel mesh embedded in it, not easy to produce, made in Germany, not cheap but oh gods is that thing worth the extra three bucks (it was five)).
sure, they're labor aristocracy jobs bc they're at the tip top of the global supply chain, but most people do not partake in that at all, or management etc, or legal/medical/whatever other high end shit, and 50% of the US is in crappy service work like mcdonalds literally.
no matter what industry you work in you can only be pessimistic here lmao unless you're like in finance or useless c suite shit
i'm not crying for the TSMC foundry or trying to work there. i hope the NATO+ intelligence services edge from high end chip production being under our control is unseated, it would be good for all of us
what's going on with TSMC is indicative of wider issues with all kinds of US industries I'm in solar and frankly I plan to gtfo in the long term to a more interesting area of development. I don't expect it to make my life easier per se but there are a lot of reasons.
Aaaaaa once upon a time Germany was world leader in solar. Then a conservative government came along and slashed subsidies in ways that noone could adopt to (mostly because suddenly, against everyone's expectations, and without tapering) and now the US of all places has more of a market share, though the bulk of course is Chinese -- who bought German tech for cheap at bankruptcy auctions.
All that is certainly annoying, OTOH you gotta admit that keeping walking after shotgunning your own feet several times in a row does mean that you have some rather solid feet.
Oh also insurance prices and shit like that here are a nightmare. Legal is too obviously. That's why Nike could never just move all their production here even thought it would be trivial to teach people to make shoes. The convoluted global supply chain is the whole point
None of those companies even make a blip on global chip production though
Neither does TSMC, high end chips is just a tiny part of the number of chips (albeit an important and lucrative part of the market).
TSMC is alone at the top is because it's so damn expensive and the market is not that big, there's basically no place for a competitor. Anyone trying to dethrone them has to have very deep pockets and a good reason not to simply buy from TSMC. The Chinese might be able to pull it off, they have the money and a good reason.
As a developer building on top of LLMs, my advice is to learn programming architecture. There's a shit ton of work that needs to be done to get this unpredictable non deterministic tech to work safely and accurately. This is like saying get out of tech right before the Internet boom. The hardest part of programming isn't writing low level functions, it's architecting complex systems while keeping them robust, maintainable, and expandable. By the time an AI can do that, all office jobs are obsolete. AIs will be able to replace CEOs before they can replace system architects. Programmers won't go away, they'll just have less busywork to do and instead need to work at a higher level, but the complexity of those higher level requirements are about to explode and we will need LLMs to do the simpler tasks with our oversight to make sure it gets integrated correctly.
I also recommend still learning the fundamentals, just maybe not as deeply as you needed to. Knowing how things work under the hood still helps immensely with debugging and creating better more efficient architectures even at a high level.
I will say, I do know developers that specialized in algorithms who are feeling pretty lost right now, but they're perfectly capable of adapting their skills to the new paradigm, their issue is more of a personal issue of deciding what they want to do since they were passionate about algorithms.
In my comment elsewhere in the thread I talk about how, as a complete software noob, I like to design programs by making a flowchart first, and how I wish the flowchart itself was the code.
It sounds like what I'm doing might be (super basic) programming architecture? Where can I go to learn more about this?
Look up visual programming languages. When you apply a visual metaphor to programming it really is basically just really detailed and complex flow charts.
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