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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] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This might cheer you up: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2024/01/25/copilot-research.aspx

I don't think we have anything to worry about just yet. LLMs are nothing but well-trained parrots. They can't analyse problems or have intuitions about what will work for your particular situation. They'll either give you something general copied and pasted from elsewhere or spin you a yarn that sounds plausible but doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Getting an AI to produce functional large-scale software requires someone to explain precisely the problem domain: each requirement, business rule, edge case, etc. At which point that person is basically a developer, because I've never met a project manager who thinks that granularly.

They could be good for generating boilerplate, inserting well-known algorithms, generating models from metadata, that sort of grunt work. I certainly wouldn't trust them with business logic.

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

I think you raise a very good point about explaining the problem... Even us as "smart humans" have often great difficulty to see the point while reading PM specs...