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AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

semiengineering.com

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Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#21

Post by chasd00 »

xXSLAYERXx wrote: post #10

Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can…

I'm similar ( turning 50 in a couple month, wife+2 kids etc) and was telling my wife this morning that the world of software development has definitely changed. I don't know what it will look like in the future but it won't look like the past. It seems producing the text that can be compiled into instructions for a computer is something LLMs particularly good at. Maybe a good analogy is going from a bare text editor to a modern IDE. It's happening very fast though, way faster than the evolution of IDEs.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#22

Post by hibikir »

xXSLAYERXx wrote: post #10

Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can…

You'd have to do even less copy-pasting. The switch to some agent that has access to your source code directory speed things up so much, the time spent pays for itself in the first day.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#23

Post by xXSLAYERXx »

SockThief wrote: post #16
xXSLAYERXx wrote: post #10

Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can…

That is the most down to earth summary of all things AI I've heard so far! Good luck with the cart and be good. :)

Thank you SockThief!

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#25

Post by mikkupikku »

Swizec wrote: post #9

The main thing to understand about the impact of AI tools: Somehow the more senior you are [in the field of use], the better results you get. You can run faster and get more done! If you're good, you get great results faster. If you're bad, you get bad results faster. You still gotta understand what you're doing. GeLLMan Amnesia is real.

Agreed. How well you understand the problem domain determines the quality of your instructions a s feedback to the LLM, which in turn determines the quality of the results. This has been my experience, it works well for things I know well, and poorly for things I'm bad at. I've read a lot of people saying that they tried it on "hard problems" and it failed; I interpret this as the problem being hard not in absolute terms, but relative to the skill level of the user.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#26

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Ancalagon wrote: post #4

I still feel like with all of these tools I as a senior engineer have to keep a close eye on what they're doing. Like an exuberant junior (myself 10 years ago), inevitably they still go off the rails and I need to reign them in. They still make the occasional security or performance flaw - often which can be resolved by pointing it out.

I asked a niche technical question the other day and ChatGPT found fora posts that Google would never surface in a million years. It also 100% lied to me about another niche technical question by literally contradicting a factual assertion I made in my question to prime it with context. It suffers from lack of corpus material when probing poorly documented realms of human experience. The value for the human in the chain is knowing when to doubt the machine.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#28

Post by DiscourseFan »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #6

I am very tired of seeing every random person's speculation (framed as real insight) on what's going to happen as they try to signify that they are super involved in AI and super on top of it and therefore still worthy of value and importance in the economy.

Yeah if you actually work in AI you usually can’t say much at all about what’s going on.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#29

Post by falloutx »

chasd00 wrote: post #21
xXSLAYERXx wrote: post #10

Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can…

I'm similar ( turning 50 in a couple month, wife+2 kids etc) and was telling my wife this morning that the world of software development has definitely changed. I don't know what it will look like in the future but it won't look like the past. It seems producing the text that can be compiled into instructions for a computer is something LLMs particularly good at. Maybe a good analogy is going from a bare text editor…

I was saying this yesterday, There will be people building good software somewhere, but chances to it happening in current corporate environment is nearing zero. Change is mostly in the management, and not in the Software Development itself. Yeah we may be like 50% faster but we are expected to be 10x devs.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#30

Post by victrflow »

Swizec wrote: post #9

The main thing to understand about the impact of AI tools: Somehow the more senior you are [in the field of use], the better results you get. You can run faster and get more done! If you're good, you get great results faster. If you're bad, you get bad results faster. You still gotta understand what you're doing. GeLLMan Amnesia is real.

Word.
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