31–40 of 183 posts
Have you used any of these AI tools? If you have, you should feel more confident not anxious. It will make bad programmers worse and good programmers better.
Your fears will manifest in reality. Just stop being afraid.
Your statement can have multiple interpretations. I assume you mean this one: Your fear will be a self-fulfilling prophecy; to prevent that, stop being afraid? Of course that's like telling someone who is depressed, to "just be happy".
I recently listened to a conversation between Lex Fridman and Stephen Wolfram [1]. Stephen said something that stuck with me for a while. Something along the lines:
GPTs are statistical word guessing machines. They regurgitate the average of the internet. You can get around that by placing with temperature and top-k, but that'll only make them less accurate, and increase the chances for them to hallucinate.
You, however, are an expert. Better than the average of the internet. Years of experience, and likely with higher standards. You understand the requirements, architect maintainable systems, and align with the company goals. You learned how to read requirements from context and between the lines.
Yes, GPTs can do highly complex things, and sometimes it feels magical or even scary. But you'll have to prime them to do so, and you'll have to guide them. They are your junior programmer, and you are their lead. You understand context, and they don't (simply because they don't have any).
Start to accept that from now on you have your personal junior dev. Learn to guide him into the right direction, and learn to provide accurate tasks. I'd also suggest looking into GitHub copilot chat to see where this is going.
If we're lucky, they'll get better with time and lots of research, but that's (likely) none of your concerns.
Uneducated opinion:
From this point on, I think it's likely the corpus they consume gets worse because they are starting to consume their own generated, average-of-the-internet content. You built your own Reddit bot, and know how easy it is to get generated content out there. It's a problem that isn't solved yet, and with time, it's becoming even more difficult because the number of different public models (which suffer from the same challenges) is steadily increasing, and therefore detection of such content gets a lot harder. The technology might get exponentially better, but in the end it boils down to the corpus they consume and learn from. This will slow things down, and will give you some time to learn to use these tools to your advantage, not see them as competition.
If it were that easy for AI to step in and replace developers, then we'd have seen the same thing with "codeless" frameworks.
Maybe one day in the distant future it will be a different story. But I'd wager you'd be dead before that happens.
Really? What projects? I think its telling that you haven't replied to any of the comments here - is this post just BS?
A take that really summed up how I feel about all this hysteria around LLMs and ChatGPT specifically: People are praying to it, treating it like an Oracle. Anything you can dream up, GPT can do. Its exhausting.
I think you might want to give yourself a break or change of scenery because your post sounds like the burnout is doing all the talking for you and AI is just a convenient external factor to blame. Maybe find a coach or therapist to help lower the intensity and explore what you’d want in life beyond being a top earner.
You can only run at 100% capacity for so long before the exhaustion takes over and your thinking loses clarity. I’ve been there, more than once. Something has to make way for your recovery, ideally giving you space to enjoy what life brings you.
This strikes me as a little absurd, but perhaps it is common for "developers" to misunderstand what value they actually add. AI won't change the value you add, any more than autocomplete or code generators and scaffolds do. The vast majority of programming is about facilitating, automating and improving business processes. The program artifact only has value as a tool to enable some business processes. A website faci…
I recently had ChatGPT "build" me a simple ruby graphql hello world-app. That was useful to me since I could easily read and understand the 20 or so lines of ruby, recognized the imported gems etc.
It wouldn't have helped the people in my company that I build software for one with. Many of them can create complex spreadsheets to solve certain problems - but they can't go from a sample api to something connected to a database and a web front-end. And especially not a system with continuous delivery, continuous improvement (features/bugfixes) or something remotely secure.