Asklemmy

43736 readers

1240 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

202

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]

155 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This might cheer you up: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2024/01/25/copilot-research.aspx

I don't think we have anything to worry about just yet. LLMs are nothing but well-trained parrots. They can't analyse problems or have intuitions about what will work for your particular situation. They'll either give you something general copied and pasted from elsewhere or spin you a yarn that sounds plausible but doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Getting an AI to produce functional large-scale software requires someone to explain precisely the problem domain: each requirement, business rule, edge case, etc. At which point that person is basically a developer, because I've never met a project manager who thinks that granularly.

They could be good for generating boilerplate, inserting well-known algorithms, generating models from metadata, that sort of grunt work. I certainly wouldn't trust them with business logic.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I think you raise a very good point about explaining the problem... Even us as "smart humans" have often great difficulty to see the point while reading PM specs...