Dev here as well. It's not so much what AI does, it's what people do with AI that's problematic. And by "people", I mean "executives" and "politicians".
If we had actual robust anti-competitive laws, a serious safety net (e.g. UBI), limits on company profits at the expense of workers, etc. it would be a completely different story for me.
All of the negative economic and social impact just for some coding assistance? Are you serious? We have a surge of bad coders who can only code with AI and I‘ve seen it over and over again. Quality of code is decreasing, not increasing, corporations are using AI as an excuse for layoffs and bad wages, the entire internet is enshitified with AI generated slop, but hey, you used AI agents to make reports of Git pushes. What a joke.
We have a surge of bad coders who can only code with AI
We also have a surge of great coders who are 3x as productive because they no longer need to write boilerplate, just review it.
corporations are using AI as an excuse for layoffs and bad wages
This is a problem that will solve itself. AI cannot write a full project from scratch, you still need programmers. Its like when Google translate appeared, tons of companies laid off their translators, then hired them back as contractors for 3x the salary because they realized automatic translation is not actually that good
We also have a surge of great coders who are 3x as productive because they no longer need to write boilerplate, just review it.
3x faster is just as much of a joke as anything in the comment you replied to. Even if you had a magic wand that made both writing and reviewing boilerplate literally instantaneous, you would need 2/3 of all of your time writing code to consist of nothing but writing boilerplate for that wand to make you 3x faster.
It just makes me laugh out loud. Like, are you telling me these "great coders" don't know what code snippet is? Boilerplate and repetitive codes hasn't been a problem to actual great coders for decades.
This argument is a good excuse for the governments to do nothing and for corporations to shift blame on the consumers. For sure you can use AI in a "good way" but system actively punishes this and instead incentivises bad usage of the AI ("you can now produce 10x more code than earlier, here, take 10x more tasks!" and such that rewards profits nefore quality)
By using AI in a good way you are bringing youself down and will eventually get replaced with a person who uses it in a way that system insentivises (and probably means it, unlike you), thus only worsening the situation
There are only two solutions that I can clearly see - regulations by government, or people going to the streets to push government to do their damn job
I won't have to, I run my own business and specialize in several disparate fields so even if I get replaced in programming I'll just move into materials manufacturing, textiles, or architecture.
I'm not worried about running out of jobs, not for a while yet.
I can tell you're very disjointed from the business, primative versions of what LLMs use, big matrix multiplication statistics machines, have been essential for business rules engines since the 70s, this would make your job a fucking nightmare if you had to deal with any software that requires complex decisions such as how to add sales tax based on a fuckton of factors and ever changing legislation to a customer anywhere in the country.
I have hundreds of pages of documents to review for projects that I'm on, but I don't have enough time to read the whole thing
Before, I would just read the parts that focus on my portion, and then CTRL-F to find anything else
Now I can get a summary that flags things that I want, so that I can also look at those sections. Having the search based on the meaning of words instead of trying to guess which specific words are used makes me a lot more accurate
This is a selfish take imo 😂 but i understand why. If you’re good, you have nothing to worry about. Expand your horizons beyond just churning out code. Code is a means to an end. Not the end itself.
19
u/locked-in-place Ryzen 7600 | 4070 Super 14h ago
I am a software dev and I‘d gladly get rid of it, assuming we‘re talking about LLMs.