this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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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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[–] AlteredStateBlob@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

I am om the product side of things and have created some basic proof of concept tools with AI that my bosses wanted to sell off. No way no how will I be able to sevrice or maintain them. It's incredibly impressive that I could even get this output.

I am not saying it won't become possible, but I lack the fundamental knowledge and understanding to make anything beyond the most minor adjustments and AI is still wuite bad at only addressing specific issues or, good forbid, expanding code, without fully rewriting the whole thing and breaking everything else.

For our devs I see it as a much improved and less snide stackoverflow and Google. The direct conversational nature really speeds things up with boilerplate code and since they actually know what they are doing, it's amazing. Not only that but we had devs copy paste from online searches withoout fully understanding the snippets. Now the AI can explain it in context.

[–] TheControlled@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

🙄 no I'm sure you're the only one

[–] eugenia@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I disagree with the other posts here that you're overreacting. I think that AI will replace most jobs (maybe as high as 85% at some point). Consider becoming a plumber or an electrician. Until the robots will become commonplace in 20 years from now, you will have a job that AI won't be able to touch much. And people won't run out of asses or gaming. So they'll be stable professions for quite a while. You can still code in your free time, as a hobby. And don't cry for the lost revenue of being a programmer, because that will happen to everyone who will be affected by AI. You'll just have another job while the others won't. That's the upside.

I understand that this comment is not what people want to hear with their wishful thinking, so they'll downvote it. But I gotta say it how I see it. AI is the biggest revolution since the industrial revolution.

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[–] coolin@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

I think your job in your current form is likely in danger.

SOTA Foundation Models like GPT4 and Gemini Ultra can write code, execute, and debug with special chain of thought prompting techniques, and large acale process verification on synthetic data and RL search for correct outputs will make this 10x better. The silver lining to this is that I expect this to require an absolute shit ton of compute to constantly generate LLM output hundreds of times for each internal prompt over multiple prompts, requiring immense compute and possibly taking longer than an ordinary software engineer to run. I suspect early full stack developer LLMs will mainly be used to do a few very tedious coding tasks and SWEs will be cheaper for a fair length of time.

I expect it will be 2-3 years before this happens, so for that short period I expect workers to be "super-productive" by using LLMs in the coding process, but I expect the crossover point when the LLM becomes better is quite soon, perhaps in the next 5 years as compute requirements go down.

[–] BolexForSoup@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

To answer your question directly: The debate has been going on in the broader public since ChatGPT 3 dropped

To answer how you’re feeling: that’s valid, because a lot of big pockets seem to not care at all about the ethical considerations.

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