> i haven't seen any evidence that an LLM will be capable of doing that on a non-trivial program any time in the near future
Or ever, given that the level of abstraction LLMs work at is completely wrong. They can approximate the syntax of things in their training corpus, but logic? The lights are off and nobody's home.
I've already had the GPT3.5-Turbo model walk through and step-by-step isolate and diagnose errors. They 100% can troubleshoot and correct issues in the code.
Literally you give it the code and the error and it can walk you through finding the solution.
When I say walk you through, I generally mean when you provide it a function but the error is caused by some input that doesn't conform to expectations. If the error were just a defect in the code it can generally point that out instantly.
Most bugs I've worked on relate to some weirdness that requires tracking down a specific nonobvious offending function. How would GPT help with that at all? Maybe if you know a particular function is wrong, and ask it to find a bug, but by then most of the work has already been done.
>If the error were just a defect in the code it can generally point that out instantly.
thats not fixing bugs, that's static analysis. Finding the solution to the specific problem that needs to be solved is a lot more difficult than identifying any problem and then solving it.
Figuring out the logic in code doesn't seem that different from figuring out the logic in other human produced text. At least it doesn't seem harder, if anything it's probably easier for a machine.
Yes, at the moment GPT4 and the like aren't all that good yet, but they have shown that they have started understanding semantics.
It all started this year, just a few months ago, remember? It will get only better from here, don't worry. Or do, not sure. Anyway, you can't avoid it.
Carpeting and nursing looks safe for now. Most other jobs are not. Some are very competitive already, like painting, writing, all sorts of design. Without AI it will be hard to find a job there. Driving, piloting will be mostly automated soon.
Rather then leaving it's better to adapt. AI is just one of technologies in the list. They come and go, that's the specific of IT. Except AI will stay, it will change with the time, but will never go away. Besides, it's the coolest thing right now. And will create new jobs around itself.
Or ever, given that the level of abstraction LLMs work at is completely wrong. They can approximate the syntax of things in their training corpus, but logic? The lights are off and nobody's home.