I’m a dev. I’ve been for a while. My boss does a lot technology watch. He brings in a lot of cool ideas and information. He’s down to earth. Cool guy. I like him, but he’s now convinced that AI LLMs are about to swallow the world and the pressure to inject this stuff everywhere in our org is driving me nuts.
I enjoy every part of making software, from discussing with the clients and the future users to coding to deployment. I am NOT excited at the prospect of transitioning from designing an architecture and coding it to ChatGPT prompting. This sort of black box magic irks me to no end. Nobody understands it! I don’t want to read yet another article about how an AI enthusiast is baffled at how good an LLM is at coding. Why are they baffled? They have “AI” twelves times in their bio! If they don’t understand it who does?!
I’ve based twenty years of career on being attentive, inquisitive, creative and thorough. By now, in-depth understanding of my tools and more importantly of my work is basically an urge.
Maybe I’m just feeling threatened, or turning into “old man yells at cloud”. If you ask me I’m mostly worried about my field becoming uninteresting. Anyways, that was the rant. TGIF, tomorrow I touch grass.
This sort of black box magic irks me to no end. Nobody understands it!
And that’s why it’s not going to swallow the world. It’s a toy, not a tool.
Tools behave consistently and predictably. You know what you call a tool that doesn’t behave consistently and predictably? “Broken”, that’s what.
Maybe I’m just feeling threatened, or turning into “old man yells at cloud”.
I was “old man yells at cloud” about cryptocurrency for years, and now it’s dead, exactly as I predicted.
Sometimes, the old man is right.
AI can code assist; it’s quite helpful for that. Predictive text, learning a less familiar language, converting pseudo, etc.
But it couldn’t possibly replace senior developers long-term. It just looks new and exciting, especially to people who don’t truly understand how it works. We still need to have human developers capable of writing their own new code.
-
AI is entirely derivative, it’s just copying the human devs of yester-year. If AI does the majority of coding then it becomes incapable of learning, thus necessitating human coders anyway. It also is only going to generate solutions to broad-strokes problems that it already has in its dataset, or convert pseudocode into functional code (which still requires a dev know enough to write pseudo).
-
It also currently has no way of validating what it writes. It’s trying to replicate what our writing looks like contextually, it doesn’t comprehend it. If it ever starts training on itself as it ages, it will stagnate and require human review, which means needing humans that understand code. And that’s not including the poor practices it will already have because so many devs are inconsistent about things like writing comments, documentation, or unit testing. AI doesn’t have its own bias but it inevitably learns to imitate ours.
-
And what about bug-testing? When the AI writes something that breaks, who do you ask for help? The AI doesn’t comprehend the context of the code its reading if you paste it back, it doesn’t remember writing it. You need people who understand how the code works to be able to recognise why it might be breaking.
AI devs are the fast food of coding. It will never be as good quality as something from an experienced professional. But if you’re an awful cook, it still makes it fast and easy to get a sad, flat cheeseburger.
I’ve worked with devs who are the equivalent of line cooks and are also producing sad, flat cheeseburgers: code of poor quality that still sees production because the client doesn’t know any better. IMO, those are the only devs that need to be concerned, because those are the ones that are easy to replace.
If AI coding causes any problems within the job market for devs, it will be that it replaces graduate/junior developers so well that fewer devs get the mentoring or experience to become seniors, and the demand for seniors will rack up significantly. It seems more likely that developers will split into two separate specialisations, not that our single track will be replaced.
-
I see LLM AIs acting more as an assistant rather than being the primary contributor in software projects.
For example, I’m starting a very ambitious personal project and wanted to practice writing a proper project plan and requirements document.
I had no clue where to start, so I pulled up ChatGPT and after some prompting I now have workable rough-drafts that just need some fine details added in and I can focus on actual programming.
Yeah, I agree with most not so interesting code (which is surprisingly much, if I think about it, especially average frontend/backend apps, client side oriented boilerplaty code (say e.g. React UI…)).
But coding a nice smart architecture, something novel/innovative (I think where the art of software engineering really lies IMHO)… well I’m not even thinking anymore about using AI (for now at least), it just confuses me, writes dumb code, and writing back and forth with it is cumbersome (to get better code), so that I just code it myself (being a fast typer is reallly helpful I think…). (I’m using it often though as some kind of StackOverflow replacement, but letting the AI code…? nah).
I think it’ll likely take a few years still where I really seriously can/have to think about using AI productively in these cases (where it may even teach me a few things about language features I haven’t known yet)…
Nope, I fully agree with you.
These “AI” tools have no more understanding of what they crap out than a toddler who has learned to swear (someone else made that comparison, I’m just borrowing it).
Have you ever done a code review with someone, asked about a specific part, and they say “I dunno; I copied it from GPT and it just seems to work” ? I have, and it’s absolutely infuriating. Yeah, they could have copied the same from Stack Overflow, I suppose, but I’d treat it the same. But somehow they expect copy/paste from an “AI” to get a pass?
Even without dipping into the “replacement theory” of it, these kinds of tools just allow people who don’t know what they’re doing to pretend like they do while creating a mountain of technical debt. Even experienced devs who use it are starting down a slippery slope, IMO.
Yeah that’s one of the major issues I have with it. It gives people a way to take their responsibilities, delegate it to an AI, and wash their hands of the inevitable subpar result. Not even just in programming, I think over time we’re going to see more and more metrics replaced with AI scores and businesses escaping liability by blaming it on those AI decisions.
Back in the realm of programming, I’m seeing more and more often people “saving time” by trying to use GPT to do the first 90% but then just not doing the last 90% at all that GPT couldn’t do.
Oh God, I can see it now. Someone makes an AI for filtering job applications, it’s great, all the employers use it. Before a human ever sees a resume, the AI decides whether to silently discard it. For reasons known to literally no one, the AI doesn’t like your name and always discards your resume, no matter how many times you change it. Everybody uses the same AI, so you never get a job again. You end up on the street, penniless, through no fault of your own.
According to this Ted talk (at about 8:15) Amazon tried a resume filtering AI but discovered it was filtering out women.
Yes, and it’ll eventually be worked out to the point that it’s mostly accurate, but there will always be edge cases like the one I described above; they’ll just be rare enough that nobody cares or even believes that it’s happening.
Now, humans reviewing job applications are also subject to biases and will unfairly reject applicants, but that only shuts you out of one company. AIs, on the other hand, are exact copies of each other, so an AI that’s biased against you will shut you out of all companies.
And, again, no one will care that this system has randomly decided to ruin your life.
