Ai will still have a hard time understanding the real needs. That is your added value. Understanding clients/your company and their needs. And thinking ahead.
Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
241–250 of 829 posts
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#242'Programmers' which are scared of ChatGPT, Copilot etc. would be scared as well of their IDE if they would ever read the manual of what is already easily possible with the tool they use daily
Horses which are scared of cars and trucks should just learn how to run faster...
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#243In my experience as the carrier of a developer progresses, it is getting less about coding, and more about other tasks. The difference is probably the strongest between a senior vs principal/staff software engineer. In the places I worked principal/staff engineers are looking after the overall design and architecture, negotiating with teams developing other components, helping management with planning, looking after the progress of other devs especially new joiners, etc, etc. I'd say it's about 15% coding at that level and 85% everything else.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#244An average programmer's main job is to track down and fix bugs that shouldn't exist inside software that shouldn't exist build on frameworks that shouldn't exist for companies that shouldn't exist solving problems that shouldn't exist in industry niches that shouldn't exist. I'm 100% convinced that, if someone comes along and creates something that actually obsoletes 95% of programming jobs, everyone would very quick…
I am actually finding amusing that managers will generate 100k lines project with AI and then will start figuring out that it does not work as they want to. Then they figured out actual developers are needed to fix it, either in a very strict way telling AI what should happen (i.e. higher level programming) or directly fixing code generated by AI.
You're assuming that the AI is even generating anything that will make sense to a human. It seems inevitable we'll reach the point that for SaaS the AI will do everything directly based some internal model it has of what it believes the requirements are (e.g. it will be capable of acting just like a live web server), whereas for desktop and mobile apps, while that paradigm still remains relevant, it will generate the compiled package for distribution. And I imagine it would be unrealistic to attempt reverse engineering it. Fixing bugs will be done by telling the AI to refine its model.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#245My hot take on AI code generation, which matches my understanding of how all of these GPTx models work: if you don't understand the output, you are far worse off using it than not.
At the moment, it works as a pretty powerful suggestion engine. It might suggest the wrong API to call, not handle the edge cases correctly etc. If you assume it does, or don't understand when it doesn't, you're in for a world of hurt.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#246A digital parrot, no matter how lifelike its utterances, cannot be genuinely creative. Writers of boilerplate and empty drivel will probably be replaced by language models, but not every software developer is like that.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
right now it will only solve problem someone else already knows the solution to, so not even at that. that said, I expect an ai assisted clerk to be order magnitude faster than not. it will be though for people at the bottom of the learning curve for a bit, but in half generation the educational offering will include how to work toghether with ai, massively improving worker productivity that is not to say it won't ha…
Having helped companies in traditional line of business to "streamline" their work processes, I am quite clear that many of the stuff that the West outsources into Asian countries will eventually be outsourced to AI. It is already so that in many industries there are hardly any traditional coder jobs on site, and having to explain every step to avoid it going off rails in offshoring assignments is hardly going to be…
There's no reason this couldn't happen, but surely it would require something better than LLM.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#248Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…
> His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. It might sound really crazy and stupid today, but when SQL came out, it's advertised as one of "program-generating" languages and was su…
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Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#249Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…
We tend to overestimate the impact of technological change in the near future, and underestimate it on the more distant future.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#250Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…
> Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don't seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you believe this skill set is going to go away? Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? You’re kind of assuming that systems will be generated from a one-shot prompt, but it seems more likely that an interac…
> Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec?
This is the doomsday argument. What would I do if there's a nuclear apocalypse before lunch? I guess I'll die like everyone else.
An AI sufficiently advanced to do that is also sufficiently advanced to run the entire business in the first place, and also argue cases in court, do my taxes, run for president and so on.
You either believe that transformers models are "it", or you haven't actually removed the problem of specifying requirements formally. Which, you know, is actually much harder to do in English than it is to do in C++.