A few thoughts on jippity

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jippity pratically made this site -it's incredible when you think about it. Like, not only did it do the basic html which is probably a pretty trivial task for any machine, but it also worte css and put it in context with the site. That's a little more impressive. But on top of that it wrote js and python that works -there was a lot of back and forth and trial and error but it works. This seems not so trivial.

I hear every day from smart people in a mocking voice "jippity is gonna kill programming jobs", then returning to their normal voice "no it isn't you dummies". Understand that I am not a programmer at all, I can be walked through a hello world and sorta kinda get it, but beyond that I'm less than useless. I flatter myself that I can sorta see how the pythong and js work on this site. I sorta can, sometimes, kinda'.

so bear that in mind when I say this: I see no reason llms won't take over a lot of coding in the near future. I see no reason why they won't get to a point where they are better than the best human programmers alive. Dismissive laughs of real programmers give me pause, sure, but there's a famous anecdote that comes to mind: In 1933 Ernest Rutherford was giving a lecture where he called the idea of extracting energy from atoms "moonshine". One day later Leo Szilard, having read about Rutherford's talk, came up with the idea of a nuclear chain reaction.

I'm no phycisist. I'm no programmer. But it seems unlikely that LLMs, reinforcement Learning, Neural Networks, et. al. won't surpass the best of our programmers.

If this sounds convincing to you, ysk that I've been wrong. A lot.