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Am I the only software engineer greatly worried and disturbed by AI ? (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Ok let's give a little bit of context. I will turn 40 yo in a couple of months and I'm a c++ software developer for more than 18 years. I enjoy to code, I enjoy to write "good" code, readable and so.

However since a few months, I become really afraid of the future of the job I like with the progress of artificial intelligence. Very often I don't sleep at night because of this.

I fear that my job, while not completely disappearing, become a very boring job consisting in debugging code generated automatically, or that the job disappear.

For now, I'm not using AI, I have a few colleagues that do it but I do not want to because one, it remove a part of the coding I like and two I have the feeling that using it is cutting the branch I'm sit on, if you see what I mean. I fear that in a near future, ppl not using it will be fired because seen by the management as less productive...

Am I the only one feeling this way? I have the feeling all tech people are enthusiastic about AI.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

i'm still in uni so i can't really comment about how's the job market reacting or is going to react to generative AI, what i can tell you is it has never been easier to half ass a degree. any code, report or essay written has almost certainly came from a LLM model, and none of it makes sense or barely works. the only people not using AI are the ones not having access to it.

i feel like it was always like this and everyone slacked as much as they could but i just can't believe it, it's shocking. lack of fundamental and basic knowledge has made working with anyone on anything such a pain in the ass. group assignments are dead. almost everyone else's work comes from a chatgpt prompt that didn't describe their part of the assignment correctly, as a result not only it's buggy as hell but when you actually decide to debug it you realize it doesn't even do what its supposed to do and now you have to spend two full days implementing every single part of the assignment yourself because "we've done our part".

everyone's excuse is "oh well university doesn't teach anything useful why should i bother when i'm learning ?" and then you look at their project and it's just another boilerplate react calculator app in which you guessed it most of the code is generated by AI. i'm not saying everything in college is useful and you are a sinner for using somebody else's code, indeed be my guest and dodge classes and copy paste stuff when you don't feel like doing it, but at least give a damn on the degree you are putting your time into and don't dump your work on somebody else.

i hope no one carries this kind of sentiment towards their work into the job market. if most members of a team are using AI as their primary tool to generate code, i don't know how anyone can trust anyone else in that team, which means more and longer code reviews and meetings and thus slower production. with this, bootcamps getting more scammy and most companies giving up on junior devs, i really don't think software industry is going towards a good direction.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I think I will ask people if they use AI to write code when I am interviewing them for a job and reject anyone who does.