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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] 6 points 10 months ago

Your fear is in so far justified as that some employers will definitely aim to reduce their workforce by implementing AI workflow.

When you have worked for the same employer all this time, perhaps you don't know, but a lot of employers do not give two shits about code quality. They want cheap and fast labour and having less people churning out more is a good thing in their eyes, regardless of (long-term) quality. May sound cynical, but that is my experience.

My prediction is that the income gap will increase dramatically because good pay will be reserved for the truly exceptional few. While the rest will be confronted with yet another tool capitalists will use to increase profits.

Maybe very far down the line there is blissful utopia where no one has to work anymore. But between then and now, AI would have to get a lot better. Until then it will be mainly used by corporations to justify hiring less people.