The study doesn't cover the long term effects of using generative AI on a project, which is the deskilling of your workforce.
Because development will become an auction-like activity where the one that accepts more suggestions wins.
Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
61–70 of 532 posts
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd also expand it to "languages/frameworks that I'll never properly learn". I'm not great at remembering specific quirks/pitfalls about secondary languages like e.g. what the specific quoting incantations are to write conditionals in Bash, so I rarely wrote bash scripts for automation in the past. Basically only if that was a common enough task to be worth the effort. Same for processing JSON with jq, or parsing wit…
Oh god yes, LLM for bash scripting is fantastic. Bash is one of those languages that I simply don't want to learn. Reading it makes my eyes hurt.
You could try zx[1]! I prefer it to Bash scripting.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#63Reminds me of a situation I've been in a few times already:
Dev: Hey einpoklum, how do I do XYZ?
Me: Hmm, I think I remember that... you could try AB and then C.
Dev: Ok, but isn't there a better/easier way? Let me ask ChatGPT.
...
Dev: Hey einpoklum, ChatGPT said I should do AB and then C.
Me: Let me have a look at that for a second.
Me: -Right, so it's just what I read on StackOverflow about this, a couple of years ago.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd also expand it to "languages/frameworks that I'll never properly learn". I'm not great at remembering specific quirks/pitfalls about secondary languages like e.g. what the specific quoting incantations are to write conditionals in Bash, so I rarely wrote bash scripts for automation in the past. Basically only if that was a common enough task to be worth the effort. Same for processing JSON with jq, or parsing wit…
Oh god yes, LLM for bash scripting is fantastic. Bash is one of those languages that I simply don't want to learn. Reading it makes my eyes hurt.
Bash is a terrible language in so so many ways and I concur that I have no interest in learning its new features going forward. I remember how painfully inadequate it was for actual computation and its data types are non existent. Gross.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh god yes, LLM for bash scripting is fantastic. Bash is one of those languages that I simply don't want to learn. Reading it makes my eyes hurt.
You could try zx[1]! I prefer it to Bash scripting. [1] https://github.com/google/zx
You could, but then your script won't run anywhere except your own system, as opposed to running basically everywhere...
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve noticed this more and more since 2020. A lot of people who entered the field in the past 6 or so years are here for the money, obviously. Nothing wrong with that at all, but as someone with a long time programming and technology passion, it’s sad to see that change.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with enjoying the high pay, no – I definitely do. But yeah, it’s upsetting to find out how few people care. Even moreso when they double down and say that you shouldn’t care either, because it’s been abstracted away, blah blah blah. Who do you think is going to continue creating these abstractions for you?
...Someone else who thinks of actual web applications as an abstraction.
In the olden days, we used to throw it over to "Ops" and say, "your problem now."
And Junior developers have always been overwhelmed with the details and under pressure to deliver enough to keep their job. None of this is new! I'm a graybeard now, but I remember seniors having the same complaints back then. "Kids these days" never gets old.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#67My hunch - it's just a hunch - is that LLM-assisted coding is detrimental to one's growth as a developer. I'm fairly certain it can only boost productivity to a certain level - one which may be tedium for more senior developers, but formative for juniors. My experience is that the LLM isn't just used for "boilerplate" code, but rather called into action when a junior developer is faced with a fairly common task they'…
Why I recommend something like CoPilot over ChatGPT to juniors wanting to use AI.
At least Copilot you’re still more or less driving, whereas ChatGPT you’re more the passenger and not growing intuition.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#68I wonder if the study includes the technical debt that more experienced developers had to tackle after the less experienced devs have contributed their AI-driven efforts. Because my personal experience has involved a lot of that in one of the companies listed in the study. Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. PMs love them th…
> Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. PMs love them though.
Bingo, this, so much this. Every dev i know who loves AI stuff was a dev that I had very little technical respect for pre AI. They got some stuff done but there was no craft or quality to it.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#69A 26% productivity increase sounds inline with in my experience. I think one dimension they should explore is whether you're working with a new technology or one that you're already familiar with. AI helps me much more with languages/frameworks that I'm trying to learn.
That might be. It might also be a consequence of how flexible people at different stages in their career are. I have seen mostly senior programmers argue why ai tools don't work. Juniors just use them without prejudice.
I find their value depends a lot on what I'm doing. Anything easy I'll get insane leverage, no exaggeration I'll slap together that shit 25x faster. It's seen likely billions of lines of simple CRUD endpoints, so yeah it'll write those flawlessly for you.
Anything the difficult or complex, and it's really a coinflip if it's even an advantage, most of the time it's just distracting and giving irrelevant suggestions or bad textbook-style implementations intended to demonstrate a principle but with god-awful performance. Likely because there's simply not enough training data for these types of tasks.
With this in mind, I don't think it's strange that junior devs would be gushing over this and senior devs would be raising a skeptical eyebrow. Both may be correct, depending on what you work on.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience is juniors using them without prejudice and then not understanding why their code is wrong
I am seeing that a lot - juniors who can put out a lot of code but when they get stuck they can't unstick themselves, and it's hard for me to unstick them because they have a hard time walking me through what they are doing.
Is that so new? We used to complain when someone blindly copied and pasted from stack overflow. Before that, from experts-exchange.
Coding is still a skill acquisition that takes years. We need to stamp out the behavior of not understanding what they take from copilot, but the behavior is not new.