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.
I get it, both your and his perspectives. At the end of the day, I think there is still some alignment: you probably both want to do more with less. For you, I suspect you wouldn't mind avoiding the tedious boilerplate that comes with many projects. For him, greater efficiency of delivery without risking burn out of his reports.
With any technological innovation, there's a period of adoption where everyone tries to understand where it should slot into the world; this time is no different. All the traits that made you successful are still relevant, and with some creativity, you might find these technologies are able to automate large portions of the work which you don't find engaging, freeing you up to focus on your strengths.