Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I'll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don't believe me.
Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of "vibe-coding", but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can't spot any although we are looking intently.
And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What's even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would've taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.
I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn't a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It's a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don't know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.
And it all changed so fast. I don't think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.
Here's the thing, though. Give it a generation (and in this industry, a "generation" is basically the amount of time it takes one class of grads to get through college, or possibly at the outside maybe two) and there will be no one left with the skillset required to effectively babysit the LLMs anymore. Everyone who used to have those skills but leaned on AI and stopped coding themselves will have let them atrophy, and the upcoming crop of junior developers won't know how to do anything but prompt the chatbot.
It's this right here. Nobody will be able to look intently, because no one will have the knowledge of what to look for anymore. You are able to effectively manage the stupid machine's output because you actually know more or less what functional code looks like and how it works. Once that skill has been squeezed out of the industry it's going to be utter chaos.
Yes, that's pretty obvious to anyone in the industry. But like many catastrophies mankind can see decades ahead, nothing will be done about until the consequence bite hard. I'll be old by then.
I'm sort of surprised there's no conscious effort to counter that. In other areas where automation has taken over they will ensure that people can still do the work manually. I visited an automated metro system a while ago, and they explained that even though certain lines are GoA 4 (in other words so highly automated they don't need staff on board anymore), they still have people operating the trains manually every once in a while, specifically so that they don't forget how to do it if need be, and that the new recruits can learn as well.
Nobody wants to be the company "wasting" money on training young coders. This is the inevitable decay caused by Capitalism.
That probably wasn't a privately run Metro then. In private industry it's usually cheaper to risk an accident than pay for all those man hours.
Yes, to be fair it was, at least practically. It was one of these government owned companies - so that they're still expected to work kind of as a private company. So sort of an in between thing.
Are you? I've not seen many people ever pay much attention to potential problems until it's way too late.
It's like how you can walk into a restaurant and retail establishment now and it's not uncommon to interact with an employee that doesn't know how to do the simple math required to make change during a transaction.
I'm stuck using MS Teams at my job, and I've noticed changes to the UI, removing of visual cues and triggers, which I can only assume they're doing to get people to ask their stupid chatbot how to make a change.
Eventually this is going to bite hard, but it'll only bite the working class, so the people in power do not give a shit.
Almost a graduated here, here’s my small rant (kinda).
For context: I rarely use LLMs cuz there’s no fun on vibe coding, not to mention the shit ton of problems its usage carries (economical, environmental, social, ethical, skills decline, etc)
The other day I was in the classroom using my Actual Intelligence (AI) to do a python project, when a group of randoms came by and asked what I was doing, they were looking at me like if a was some sort of caveman, because apparently I’m one of the few guys that still codes by hand.
Sometimes I feel bad for them, it’s depressing to see everyone getting stupider so quickly, but I can relate to that feeling of wanting to do absolutely nothing from day to day.
In most of my classes, I’m the only one answering questions to the point that sometimes I get banned from answering (although I don’t know if it’s because everyone is kinda shy or if it’s truly because they don’t have an idea of what’s being talked about)
My own experience of almost 2 decades as a Freelance senior software developer, mostly coming in to work on top of and even fixing existing codebases of large custom-made applications which were for years in Production in mainly large companies, which generally had layer on top of layer of different coding styles and even design approaches because multiple people worked in them each thinking "I know best" and doing their own thing instead to trying to work within the existing style, is that getting to the point of understanding it at all levels takes many months, and that's even after one is experienced enough at it to have discovered shortcuts like learning and identifying the coding and design style of specific engineers and even their typical mistakes (people tend to be pretty consistent in the mistakes they make) as a way to accelerate understanding, detection of problems and figuring out were and how it's safe to change code and design without it cascading to problems elsewhere.
All this to say that picking up and fixing a real life system in Production which was mostly AI created and hence doesn't even have the patterns for coding and design choices and mistakes that humans have, will take many months, maybe more than a year PER SYSTEM even for somebody who is senior and highly experience at it.
So fixing the AI produced stuff will have giant costs which probably more than offset the savings at creation time from using AI.
Now, some would say that you can just get the AI to regenerate the whole thing to fix it, however that has two problems:
So, yeah, full regen just at best moves the problems around and pisses users off.
That's like saying few are left knowing assembly. It's just not needed anymore. Could it be needed? Sure. Are you going to get a job easily with that? No.
Someone needs to maintain compilers though right ?
I see no reason why people can't learn to do this task.
I learned to write an operating system kernel in college. Not because I would ever need to do that in a job, but because it was considered important to learn how stuff worked, to gain a deeper understanding to make architectural decisions. I also learned to write assembly, for the same reason. Similarly, good educations in the future will likely teach people to code, even if they will never code in their jobs.
One child policy has done a number on China. Even more sinister example is Ethyl gas or gasoline with lead. that went for almost a century. Was also just wondering what ancient cities were like when they dumped their waste out on the street.
It is absolutely astounding our species has survived as long as it has.
Why would new learners not learn what to check...?
When we went from machine code to assembly people were very negative about it. Same again when moving to high level languages. And of course this continued with every single development since then and now it continues with LLMs. Always negative about it, no more skill, etc. the exact same arguments really.
This argument is flawed, as I just took a break from reading disassembly to scroll a bit. Assembly is the human readable representation of machine code. It is relevant today (eg embedded development).
Also each move to higher level comes with its own set of issues and trade offs. I think you somewhat correct to correlate with the past advancements, but LLMs fundamentally different: It is not a new higher language, its normal language. Also it cannot grab an oscilloscope and debug HW issues which are wrongly documented by the supplier.