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

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 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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[–] viralJ 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Could you elaborate? I don't have a deep knowledge of the field, I only write rudimentary scripts to make some ports of my job easier, but from the few videos on the subject that I saw, and from the few times I asked AI to write a piece of code for me, I'd say I share the OP's worry. What would you say is something that humans add to programming that can't (and can never be) replaced by AI?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Generative neural networks are the latest tech bubble, and they'll only be decreasing in quality from this point on as the human-generated text used to train them becomes more difficult to access.

One cannot trust the output of an LLM, so any programming task of note is still going to require a developer for proofreading and bugfixing. And if you have to pay a developer anyway, why bother paying for chatgpt?

It's the same logic as Tesla's "self-driving" cars, if you need a human in the loop then it isn't really automation, just sparkling cruise control that isn't worth the price tag.

I'm really looking forward to the bubble popping this year.

[–] viralJ 2 points 7 months ago

This year? Bold prediction.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It can't reason. It can't write novel high quality, high complexity code. It can only parrot what other had said.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

90% of code is something already solved elsewhere though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

AI doesn't know if the code copied is correct. It will stright up hallucinate non existing libraries just because they seem to look good at first glance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Depends on how you set it. A RAG LLM verifies up against a set of sources, so that would be very unlikely in state of the art.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

I think the need for programmers will always be there, but there might be a transition towards higher abstraction levels. This has actually always been happening: we started with much focus on assembly languages where we put in machine code, but nowadays a much less portion of programmers are involved in those and do stuff in python, java or whatever. It is not essential to know stuff about garbage collection when you are writing an application, because the compiler already does that for you.

Programmers are there to tell a computer what to do. That includes telling a computer how to construct its own commands accordingly. So, giving instructions to an AI is also programming.