Asklemmy

I disagree with the other posts here that you're overreacting. I think that AI will replace most jobs (maybe as high as 85% at some point). Consider becoming a plumber or an electrician. Until the robots will become commonplace in 20 years from now, you will have a job that AI won't be able to touch much. And people won't run out of asses or gaming. So they'll be stable professions for quite a while. You can still code in your free time, as a hobby. And don't cry for the lost revenue of being a programmer, because that will happen to everyone who will be affected by AI. You'll just have another job while the others won't. That's the upside.

I understand that this comment is not what people want to hear with their wishful thinking, so they'll downvote it. But I gotta say it how I see it. AI is the biggest revolution since the industrial revolution.

If you are truly feeling super anxious, feel free to dm me. Have released gen AI tech though admittedly only in that space for about a year and a half and... Ur good. Happy to get in depth about it but genuinely you are good for so many reasons that I'd be happy to expand upon.

Main point though for programmers will be it's expensive as fuck to get any sort of process going that will produce complex systems of code. And frankly I'm being a bit idealistic there. That's without even considering the amount of time. Love AI, but hype is massively misleading the reality of the tech.

Imagine it's like having intern under you that helping you with everything, quality of the code will still be on you regardless

I’m less worried and disturbed by the current thing people are calling AI than I am of the fact that every company seems to be jumping on the bandwagon and have zero idea how it can and should be applied to their business.

Companies are going to waste money on it, drive up costs, and make the consumer pay for it, causing even more unnecessary inflation.

As for your points on job security — your trepidation is valid, but premature, by numerous decades, in my opinion. The moment companies start relying on these LLMs to do their programming for them is the moment they will inevitably end up with countless bugs and no one smart enough to fix them, including the so-called AI. LLMs seem interesting and useful on the surface, and a person can show many examples of this, but at the end of the day, it’s regurgitating fed content based on rules and measures with knob-tuning — I do not yet see objective strong evidence that it can effectively replace a senior developer.

Give Copilot or similar a try. AI or similar is pretty garbage at the more complex aspects of programming, but it's great at simple boilerplate code. At least for me, that doesn't seem like much of a loss.

If you are afraid about the capabilities of AI you should use it. Take one week to use chatgpt heavily in your daily tasks. Take one week to use copilot heavily.

Then you can make an informed judgement instead of being irrationally scared of some vague concept.

I'd like to thank you all for all your interesting comments and opinion.

I see a general trends not being too worried because of how the technology works.

The worrysome part being what capitalism and management can think but that's just an update of the old joke "A product manager is a guy that think 9 women can make a baby in 1 month". And anyway, if not that there will be something else, it's how our society is.

Now, I feel better, and I understand that my first point of view of fear about this technology and rejection of it is perhaps a very bad idea. I really need to start using it a bit in order to known this technology. I already found some useful use cases that can help me (get inspiration while naming things, generate some repetitive unit test cases, using it to help figuring out about well-known API, ...).

Have you seen the shit code it confidently spews out?

I wouldn't be too worried.

So far it is mainly an advanced search engine, someone still needs to know what to ask it, interpret the results and correct them. Then there's the task of fitting it into an existing solution / landscape.

Then there's the 50% of non coding tasks you have to perform once you're no longer a junior. I think it'll be mainly useful for getting developers with less experience productive faster, but require more oversight from experienced devs.

At least for the way things are developing at the moment.

Thought about this some more so thought I’d add a second take to more directly address your concerns.

As someone in the film industry, I am no stranger to technological change. Editing in particular has radically changed over the last 10 to 20 years. There are a lot of things I used to do manually that are now automated. Mostly what it’s done is lower the barrier to entry and speed up my job after a bit of pain learning new systems.

We’ve had auto-coloring tools since before I began and colorists are still some of the highest paid folks around. That being said, expectations have also risen. Good and bad on that one.

Point is, a lot of times these things tend to simplify/streamline lower level technical/tedious tasks and enable you to do more interesting things.

I'm in IT and I don't believe this will happen for quite a while if at all. That said I wouldn't let this keep you up at night, it's out of your control and worrying about it does you no favours. If AI really can replace people then we are all in this together and we will figure it out.

I'm not really losing any sleep over this myself. Current approach to machine learning is really no different from a Markov chain. The model doesn't have any understanding in a meaningful sense. It just knows that certain tokens tend to follow certain other tokens, and when you have a really big token space, then it produces impressive looking results.

However, a big part of the job is understanding what the actual business requirements are, translating those to logical steps, and then code. This part of the job can't be replaced until we figure out AGI, and we're nowhere close to doing that right now.

I do think that the nature of work will change, I kind of look at it as sort of doing a pair programming session. You can focus on what the logic is doing, and the model can focus on writing the boilerplate for you.

As this tech matures, I do expect that it will result in less workers being needed to do the same amount of work, and the nature of the job will likely shift towards being closer to a business analyst where the human focuses more on the semantics rather than implementation details.

We might also see new types of languages emerge that leverage the models. For example, I can see a language that allows you to declaratively write a specification for the code, and to encode constraints such as memory usage and runtime complexity. Then the model can bang its head against the spec until it produces code that passes it. If it can run through thousands of solutions in a few minutes, it's still going to be faster than a human coming up with one.

So, I asked Chat GPT to write a quick PowerShell script to find the number of months between two dates. The first answer it gave me took the number of days between them and divided by 30. I told it, it needs to be more accurate than that, so it wrote a while loop to add 1 months to the first date until it was larger than the 2 second date. Not only is that obviously the most inefficient way to do it, but it had no checks to ensure the one in the loop was actually smaller so you could just end up with zero. The results I got from co-pilot were not much better.

From my experience, unless there is existing code to do exactly what you want, these AI are not to the level of an experienced dev. Not by a long shot. As they improve, they'll obviously get better, but like with anything you have to keep up and adapt in this industry or you'll get left behind.

I use AI heavily at work now. But I don't use it to generate code.

I mainly use it instead of googling and skimming articles to get information quickly and allow follow up questions.

I do use it for boring refactoring stuff though.

In its current state it will never replace developers. But it will likely mean you need less developers.

The speed at which our latest juniors can pick up a new language or framework by leaning on LLMs is quite astounding. It's definitely going to be a big shift in the industry.

At the end of the day our job is to automate things so tasks require less staff. We're just getting a taste of our own medicine.

I'm not worried about AI replacing employees

I'm worried about managers and bean counters being convinced that AI can replace emplpyees