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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]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

Those are also the main uses cases I use it for.

Really good for getting a quick overview over a new topic and also really good at proposing different solutions/algorithms for issues when you describe the issue.

Doesn't always respond correctly but at least gives you the terminology you need to follow up with a web search.

Also very good for generating boilerplate code. Like here's a sample JSON, generate the corresponding C# classes for use with System.Text.Json.JsonSerializer.

Hopefully the hardware requirements will come down as the technology gets more mature or hardware gets faster so you can run your own "coding assistant" on your development machine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

That's been my experience as well, it's faster to write a query for a model than to google and go through bunch of blogs or stackoverflow discussions. It's not always right, but that's also true for stuff you find online. The big advantage is that you get a response tailored to what you're actually trying to do, and like you said, if it's incorrect at least now you know what to look for.

And you can run pretrained models locally already if you have a relatively beefy machine. FauxPilot is an example. I imagine in a few years running local models is going to become a lot more accessible.