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 know what you mean! I just started in development recently and the amount of my colleagues (that I am supposed to learn from) who use ChatGPT for a lot more than they should is super annoying to me. I have a background in natural language processing but decided to go into software development because the programming was always more fun to me.
Recently some of my colleagues were looking for a package for a specific framework to do a specific task. And they just asked ChatGPT which is just NOT A SEARCH ENGINE. It came up with something that wasn’t even close to what we needed, but somehow no one looked into it. I did a quick search, read some threads on reddit and found something a lot better in 5 minutes. Luckily the Project Manager listened to me, but it was honestly so weird, because I felt like I was somehow weird for suggesting to look at what other devs recommend instead of just going with what a language model suggests, that doesn’t even use recent data.
Exactly, the Internet is still a thing! “Oh but it’s cool for code snippets.” Have you heard of our Lord and Savior StackOverflow?