Ok let’s give a little bit of context. I will turn 40 yo in a couple of months and I’m a c++ software developer for more than 18 years. I enjoy to code, I enjoy to write “good” code, readable and so.

However since a few months, I become really afraid of the future of the job I like with the progress of artificial intelligence. Very often I don’t sleep at night because of this.

I fear that my job, while not completely disappearing, become a very boring job consisting in debugging code generated automatically, or that the job disappear.

For now, I’m not using AI, I have a few colleagues that do it but I do not want to because one, it remove a part of the coding I like and two I have the feeling that using it is cutting the branch I’m sit on, if you see what I mean. I fear that in a near future, ppl not using it will be fired because seen by the management as less productive…

Am I the only one feeling this way? I have the feeling all tech people are enthusiastic about AI.

  • As an example:

    Salesforce has been trying to replace developers with “easy to use tools” for a decade now.

    They’re no closer than when they started. Yes the new, improved flow builder and omni studio look great initially for the simple little preplanned demos they make. But theyre very slow, unsafe to use and generally are impossible to debug.

    As an example: a common use case is: sales guy wants to create an opportunity with a product. They go on how omni studio let’s an admin create a set of independently loading pages that let them:
    • create the opportunity record, associating it with an existing account number.
    • add a selection of products to it.

    But what if the account number doesn’t exist? It fails. It can’t create the account for you, nor prompt you to do it in a modal. The opportunity page only works with the opportunity object.

    Also, if the user tries to go back, it doesn’t allow them to delete products already added to the opportunity.

    Once we get actual AIs that can do context and planning, then our field is in danger. But so long as we’re going down the glorified chatbot route, that’s not in danger.