Asklemmy

44004 readers

321 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

202

Am I the only software engineer greatly worried and disturbed by AI ? (lemm.ee)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

157 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Ok let's give a little bit of context. I will turn 40 yo in a couple of months and I'm a c++ software developer for more than 18 years. I enjoy to code, I enjoy to write "good" code, readable and so.

However since a few months, I become really afraid of the future of the job I like with the progress of artificial intelligence. Very often I don't sleep at night because of this.

I fear that my job, while not completely disappearing, become a very boring job consisting in debugging code generated automatically, or that the job disappear.

For now, I'm not using AI, I have a few colleagues that do it but I do not want to because one, it remove a part of the coding I like and two I have the feeling that using it is cutting the branch I'm sit on, if you see what I mean. I fear that in a near future, ppl not using it will be fired because seen by the management as less productive...

Am I the only one feeling this way? I have the feeling all tech people are enthusiastic about AI.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm in a similar place to you career-wise. Personally, I'm not concerned about becoming just a "debugger." What I'm expecting this job to look like in a few years is to be more like "the same as now, except I've got a completely free team of "interns" that do all the menial stuff for me. Every human programmer will become a lead programmer, deciding what stuff our AIs do for us and putting it all together into the finished product.

Maybe a few years further along the AI assistants will be good enough to handle that stuff better than we do as well. At that point we stop being lead programmers and we all become programming directors.

So think of it like a promotion, perhaps.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Why would there be a team of AIs in this scenario under the human, instead of just one AI entity.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The role of the human is to tell the AI what it's supposed to do. If you're worried about AI that's sophisticated enough to be completely self-directed then you're worrying about AGI, which will be so world-changing that piddly little concerns such as "what about my job?" Are pretty trivial.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

No, I meant keeping the human directing things but they could do it with one AI under them

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Well yes, then. That's what I said. You'd be a programmer who had free underlings doing whatever grunt work you directed them to.

Or are you questioning my use of the term "team" for the AIs? LLMs are specialized in various ways, you'd likely want to have multiple ones that handle different tasks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Yeah I meant the team part. Learnt something new, I thought all AI was more or less equal!