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.
This sort of black box magic irks me to no end. Nobody understands it!
And that’s why it’s not going to swallow the world. It’s a toy, not a tool.
Tools behave consistently and predictably. You know what you call a tool that doesn’t behave consistently and predictably? “Broken”, that’s what.
Maybe I’m just feeling threatened, or turning into “old man yells at cloud”.
I was “old man yells at cloud” about cryptocurrency for years, and now it’s dead, exactly as I predicted.
Sometimes, the old man is right.
Having an AI help you code is like having a junior developer who is blazing fast, enthusiastic and listens well. However it doesn’t think about what it writes. It does no testing and it doesn’t understand the big picture at all. For very simple tasks, it gets the job done very fast, but for complex tasks no matter how many times you explain it. It is never going to get it. I don’t think there’s any worry about AI replacing developers any time in the foreseeable future.
in fairness… this is more a limitation of the current technology. your look at gpt4 and going not an expert. but what about gpt5 or 6… or some of the newer ideas like microsoft plan for 1 million token model using attention dialation mechnism. The point being we are still on the ground floor. And these models have emgerent functionality
1 billion*
But you can work with it to write all the tests/acceptance criteria and then have the AI run the code against the tests. We spent a lot of time developing processes for humans writing code, we need to continue integrating the machines into these processes. It might not do 100% of the work you’re currently doing, but it could do maybe 50% reliably. That’s still pretty disruptive!
This is a pretty apt analogy, I think.
We’ve been using copilot at work, and it’s really surprised me with some slick suggestions that “mostly work”. But I don’t think it could have written anything beyond the boilerplate my team has done.
(I also spend way too much time watching Copilot and Intellisense fight, and it pisses me off to no end.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
Your boss is on the first peak
This is based on someone else’s reply I read once. Developers have been trying to put themselves out of their own jobs since the beginning. Automating/scripting things, creating tools, IDEs, etc.
Development is so much more than generating/writing boilerplate code. Code plays such a small role as opposed to figuring out how to solve a problem or even figuring out what the problem is in the first place.
I spent several days figuring out why an HTTP POST in prod wasn’t working. But an identical one was working locally. Turns out there was an application server change that deceased the max request param size. The Dockerfile was configured so that the patch version (semver) was updated automatically. This was a super interesting challenge (felt like Sherlock Holmes with this one).
Try having ChatGPT/etc. figure that one out.
All of this hubbub might produce some kind of toolset that could augment what we already do (i.e. IDE). But replacing people entirely? I don’t think so.
Developers have been trying to put themselves out of their own jobs since the beginning. Automating/scripting things, creating tools, IDEs, etc.
As a developer I always thought this was sort of the point. If the mostly automated system doesn’t require less maintenance, make life easier for the user(s), or require fewer humans, I’m doing something wrong. Always feels a little bit like undermining your position, but when things do break you are also the person most likely to know the fix and fix it quickly.
AI can code assist; it’s quite helpful for that. Predictive text, learning a less familiar language, converting pseudo, etc.
But it couldn’t possibly replace senior developers long-term. It just looks new and exciting, especially to people who don’t truly understand how it works. We still need to have human developers capable of writing their own new code.
-
AI is entirely derivative, it’s just copying the human devs of yester-year. If AI does the majority of coding then it becomes incapable of learning, thus necessitating human coders anyway. It also is only going to generate solutions to broad-strokes problems that it already has in its dataset, or convert pseudocode into functional code (which still requires a dev know enough to write pseudo).
-
It also currently has no way of validating what it writes. It’s trying to replicate what our writing looks like contextually, it doesn’t comprehend it. If it ever starts training on itself as it ages, it will stagnate and require human review, which means needing humans that understand code. And that’s not including the poor practices it will already have because so many devs are inconsistent about things like writing comments, documentation, or unit testing. AI doesn’t have its own bias but it inevitably learns to imitate ours.
-
And what about bug-testing? When the AI writes something that breaks, who do you ask for help? The AI doesn’t comprehend the context of the code its reading if you paste it back, it doesn’t remember writing it. You need people who understand how the code works to be able to recognise why it might be breaking.
AI devs are the fast food of coding. It will never be as good quality as something from an experienced professional. But if you’re an awful cook, it still makes it fast and easy to get a sad, flat cheeseburger.
I’ve worked with devs who are the equivalent of line cooks and are also producing sad, flat cheeseburgers: code of poor quality that still sees production because the client doesn’t know any better. IMO, those are the only devs that need to be concerned, because those are the ones that are easy to replace.
If AI coding causes any problems within the job market for devs, it will be that it replaces graduate/junior developers so well that fewer devs get the mentoring or experience to become seniors, and the demand for seniors will rack up significantly. It seems more likely that developers will split into two separate specialisations, not that our single track will be replaced.
