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 agree with you - I think my main issue is that using LLMs to write code is a crutch, and over time the quality of software will decrease because it will be made by a program perfected to generate the most likely next word, rather than understanding what it’s doing. If anything, having a basic understanding of LLMs makes me trust them less.