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.
I see LLM AIs acting more as an assistant rather than being the primary contributor in software projects.
For example, I'm starting a very ambitious personal project and wanted to practice writing a proper project plan and requirements document.
I had no clue where to start, so I pulled up ChatGPT and after some prompting I now have workable rough-drafts that just need some fine details added in and I can focus on actual programming.
Yeah, I agree with most not so interesting code (which is surprisingly much, if I think about it, especially average frontend/backend apps, client side oriented boilerplaty code (say e.g. React UI...)).
But coding a nice smart architecture, something novel/innovative (I think where the art of software engineering really lies IMHO)... well I'm not even thinking anymore about using AI (for now at least), it just confuses me, writes dumb code, and writing back and forth with it is cumbersome (to get better code), so that I just code it myself (being a fast typer is reallly helpful I think...). (I'm using it often though as some kind of StackOverflow replacement, but letting the AI code...? nah).
I think it'll likely take a few years still where I really seriously can/have to think about using AI productively in these cases (where it may even teach me a few things about language features I haven't known yet)...