Every Family Dinner Now

Even if ai took over 90% of all coding work, that still wouldn't affect more than maybe two hours a day.

We do this every 15 years. For anyone less than 15 years into their career, welcome to the party.

Let's see if I can save you some energy:

• Yes, it made my job massively easier.
• No, it didn't replace me.
• Yes, it allowed a bunch of new people to also do the job I do. Welcome newbies!
• No, my salary didn't go down, relative to inflation.

It turns out that the last mile to a successful product delivery is still really fucking hard, and this magic bullet tool also didn't solve that.

Now... Am I talking about...?

• AI?
• Web frameworks?
• English like programming language syntax?
• A compiler with built-in type checking?
• All of the above.

Edit: Formatting for readability.

lol, I'd love to see the fucking ruin of the world we'd live in if current LLMs replaced senior developers. Maybe it'll happen some day, but in the meantime it's job security! I get to fix all of the bugfuck crazy issues generated by my juniors using Copilot and ChatGPT.

Being a programmer is a lot like being a tradesperson. A tradesperson has a lot of flexibility in what they can do. They can work for a company, work freelance, or start their own business.

Programming gives you the same flexibility, the most important bit being that you can do it for yourself.

AI is going to struggle with larger complex tasks for a long time coming. While you can go to it and say 'write me a script to convert a png to a jpg' you can't go to it and say 'Write me a suite of tools to support business X' or 'make me a fun and creative game' A good programmer isn't going to be out of work for a long time.

1. People vastly overestimate the abilities of AI.
2. Developers vastly overestimate their own abilities.
3. There are people on any level of seniority that would be perfectly replaced by a noise generator.

It literally cannot come up with novel solutions because it's goal is to regurgitate the most likely response to a question based on training data from the internet. Considering that the internet is often trash and getting trashier, I think LLMs will only get worse over time.

I’ve been through so many rounds of layoffs in the last five years, I’m completely out of fucks. I just want to watch it all burn and tend my garden at this point.

Who do they think will be using the AI?

AI threatens to harm a lot about programming, but not the existence/necessity of programmers.

Particularly, AI may starve the development of open source libraries. Which, ironically, will probably increase the need for employed programmers as companies accrue giant piles of shoddy in-house code that needs maintaining.

I have no other skills that would pay anywhere close to what this career pays. I'd need to go back to school and become a surgeon or something. I don't think they let people become surgeons at 50 years old, and I don't have the energy for an internship and residency. I'm just hanging on and hoping that it doesn't all vanish in the next few years. I'm also spending time learning how to leverage AI, since I think that'll put me a step ahead. Good luck to all of us, we're going to need it!

Any gains from LLM now would barely offset the complexity bloat introduced in enterprise applications in the last decade alone. And that’s not even taking into account the sins of the past that are only hidden behind the topsoil lair of cargo cult architecture.

I feel pretty secure in my job, because in the future I’ll talk to the customers so the AI doesn’t have to instead of the engineers.

Didn't ChatGPT become very bad recently? It used to give really working code but now it gets things wrong and doesn't follow context. It gives code but when you ask it to improve by give more context, it ignores the previous answer and give wrong code.

It even sometimes answers by saying it does not have the answer for questions that it answered few months ago.

I'll start worrying about artificial intelligence when customers can generate requirements specific enough for actual intelligence to decipher.

Kinda hard to build a prompt when they don't even really know what they want until they've seen what they asked for.

Could AI repair a bicycle?

That would be awesome.

Or "digest" a hoard of used bicycle parts and secrete assembled bikes.

This is why I've sided with the enemy and my career involves educating people on how to build AI automation.

Robots, maybe some jobs, but good luck eliminating the need for repair men and engineers.

In pharmaceuticals, AI will not replace workers in manufacturing or laboratory. It's even far more useful for drug discovery. There is a recent report of AI designing a new and effective antibiotic, in which the research and development for such drugs have basically stopped since the 1990s because bacterial antibiotic-resistance tend too evolve too quickly for antibiotic discovery to keep up.

Edit: i meant bacterial antibiotic resistance

Wait, y'all have parents that understand and/or care what you do for a living?

Yea, I tried to use AI for my work, it seems to have zero clue about the software I asked about but it pretends it does. I think I'm safe.

We had an ai demo at work last Friday where we just were showing off a local running llm with some test input. Best part was the demonstrator had it output something unexpected and they were like "I've ran this twenty times and it has never said that". Lol. We're alright but it's incredibly useful already it's pretty exciting.

I would love AI to replace me and anything I can do to speed that up I would do it.