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

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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] 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I use GitHub Copilot from work. I generally use Python. It doesn't take away anything at least for me. It's big thing is tab completion; it saves me from finishing some lines and adding else clauses. Like I'll start writing a docstring and it'll finish it.

Once in a while I can't think of exactly what I want so I write a comment describing it and Copilot tries to figure out what I'm asking for. It's literally a Copilot.

Now if I go and describe a big system or interfacing with existing code, it quickly gets confused and tends to get in the weeds. But man if I need someone to describe a regex, it's awesome.

Anyways I think there are free alternatives out there that probably work as well. At the end of the day, it's up to you. Though I'd so don't knock it till you try it. If you don't like it, stop using it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

This. I've seen SO much hype and FUD and all the while there are thousands of developers grinding out code using these tools.

Does code quality suffer? ONLY in my experience if they have belt wielding bean counters forcing them to ship well before it's actually ready for prime time :)

The tools aren't perfect, and they most DEFINITELY aren't a panacea. The industry is in a huge contraction phase right now so I think we have a while before we have to worry about AI induced layoffs, and if that happens the folks doing the laying off are being incredibly short sighted and likely to have a high impact date with a wall coming in the near future anyway.

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

Its* big thing