But I knew the task would be tricky

Is it just me or isn't this not even that tricky (just a bit of work, so I agree with him on the free evening thing, esp when you are a bit rusty)? Anyway, note how he does give a timeframe for doing this himself (an evening) but doesn't mention how long he worked on the chatgpt stuff, nor does he mention if he succeeded at his project at all

E: anyway what he needs is an editor.

shuf -n 100 /usr/share/dict/words

I would have expected JS standard library to contain something along the lines of random.sample but apparently not. A similar thing exists in something called underscore.js and I gotta say it's incredibly in-character for JavaScript to outsource incredibly common utility functions to a module called "_".

Language bashing aside, there's something to enjoy about these credulous articles proclaiming AI superiority. It's not the writing itself, but the self-esteem boost regarding my own skills. I have little trouble doing these junior dev whiteboard interview exercises without LLM help, guess that's pretty impressive after all!

ah, the NP-complete problem of just fucking pulling the file into memory (there’s no way this clown was burning a rainforest asking ChatGPT for a memory-optimized way to do this),

It's worse than that, because there's been incredibly simple, efficient ways to k-sample a stream with all sorts of guarantees about its distribution with no buffering required for centuries. And it took me all of 1 minute to use a traditional search engine to find all kinds of articles detailing this.

If you can't bother learning a thing, it isn't surprising when you end up worshiping the magic of the thing.

Ah yes, the future of coding. Instead of directly searching for stack overflow answers, we raise the sea level every time we need to balance a tree.

AI chuds got the wrong message about the guy that tried to use tensorflow to write fizzbuzz.

Edit: I looked it up. Tensorflow fizzbuzz guy is also an AI chud it seems

Our puzzle generator printed its output in an ugly text format... I wanted to turn output like that into a pretty Web page that allowed me to explore the words in the grid, showing scoring information at a glance. But Iknew the task would be tricky: each letter had to be tagged with the words it belonged to, both the across and the down. This was a detailed problem

I'm so confused. how could the generator have output something that amounts to a crossword, but not in such a way that this task is trivial? does he mean that his puzzle generator produces an unsorted list of words? what the fuck is he talking about

@self This was the point where I started wanting to punch things:

“At one company where I worked, someone got in trouble for using HipChat, a predecessor to Slack, to ask one of my colleagues a question. “Never HipChat an engineer directly,” he was told. We were too important for that.”

Bless his heart. That, dearie, isn’t “engineers are so special”, it’s managers wanting to preserve old-fashioned lines of communication and hierarchy because they fear becoming irrelevant. Gatekeeping access to other people’s knowledge to make yourself important goes back millennia.

I felt like there was a 100% chance that there was a python library that you could just import and use in two lines.

Turns out it's like 4 lines depending on which of the multiple ones you use.

I do love internet people who make cool things because they are smarter than me and share.

Really love the bit about how gpt is able to tackle the simple stuff so easily. If an original insight, I take my hat off to you. I came to the edge of it, but never quite really saw it as you point out.

If anyone else can't load archive.ph due to having normie Google DNS like me, here is the URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft

Yah I skimmed thru this article a couple days ago when I came across it.

The author did not bother doing any legwork.

He claims to be a programmer, but doesn't want to spend a little bit of time investigating a tool that helps him code faster.