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.
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.