AI threatens to harm a lot about programming, but not the existence/necessity of programmers.
Particularly, AI may starve the development of open source libraries. Which, ironically, will probably increase the need for employed programmers as companies accrue giant piles of shoddy in-house code that needs maintaining.
The amount of code I’ve seen copy-pasted from StackOverflow to do things like “group an array by key XYZ”, “dispatch requests in parallel with limit”, etc. when the dev should’ve known there were libs to help with these common tasks makes me think those devs will just use Copilot instead of SO, and do it way more often.
I can't wait for my future coworkers who will be coding with AI without actually understanding the fundamentals of the language they're coding in. It's gonna get scary.
It literally cannot come up with novel solutions because it's goal is to regurgitate the most likely response to a question based on training data from the internet. Considering that the internet is often trash and getting trashier, I think LLMs will only get worse over time.
Hi, I don't want to say too much, but after being invited to some closed AI talks by one of the biggest chip machine manufacturers (if you know the name, you know they don't mess around), I can tell you AI is, in certain regards, a very powerful tool that will shape some, if not all, industries by proxy. They described it as the "internet" in the way that it will take influence on everybody's life sooner or later, and you can either keep your finger on the pulse or get left behind. But they distinguished between the "AI" that's floating around in the public sector vs. actual purpose-trained AI that's not meant for public usage. Sidenote: They are also convinced the average user of a LLM is using it the "wrong" way. LLMs are only a starting point.
Also, it's concerning; I'm pretty sure the big boys have already taken over the AI market, so I do not trust that it will be to the benefit of all of us and not only for a select group (of shareholders) that will reap the benefits.
Again, none of the people at this talk have anything to do with selling a product or pushing an agenda or whatever you think. There is no press, there is no marketing, there is no product - it was basically a meetup of private equity firms that discussed the implementation and impact of purpose-trained AI in diverse fields, which affects the business structure of the big single-family office behemoths, like an industry summit for the private equity sector regarding the future of AI and how some plan to implement it (mainly big non-public SFOs).
Sometimes people just meet to discuss strategy; no one at these talks is interested in selling you anything or buying anything - they are essentially top management and/or members of large single-family offices and other private equity firms. They are not interested in selling or marketing something to the public; they are not public companies.
It's weird how you guys react; not everything is a conspiracy or a marketing thing. It's pretty normal in private equity to have these closed talks about global phenomena and how to deal with it.
These talks are more to keep the industry informed. I get that you do not like it when essentially the big SFOs have a meeting where they discuss their future plans on a certain topic, but it's pretty normal that the elite will arrange themselves to coordinate some investments. It's essentially just the offices of the big billionaire families coming together to put heads together to discuss a topic that might influence their business structure. But, in no way is it a marketing strategy; it would, on the contrary, be negatively viewed in the public eye that big finance is already coordinating to implement AI into their strategy.
But feelings don't change facts. My point is if the actual non public big players are looking at AI in a serious matter, then so should you.
I never argued that I was in IT/Tech; I deal with investments and PE. I have nothing to do with IT or tech. My point is we, in the PE/FO sector, are going to invest in AI businesses in 24/25, not only in the "B2C market" but mainly in the B2B market and for internal applications. Whether you believe it or not, it's gonna happen anyway.
So Nvidia (or Intel or AMD) told you that you need to AI to stay competitive. Not only that, but you needed a bespoke solution. Not the toy version out on the net every can get access to.
Strangely enough, they have some wonderful products coming to market which would be just what you need to build a large training network capable of injesting all your company data. They'd be happy to help you on this project.
All they had to do to get you to drop your guard was invite you by name to a "closed talk".
Haha, lol, whats happening why do you hate me, just sharing an experience, an opinion?
it's not NVIDIA or AMD or any chip manufacturer, or someone who has a product to sell to you. Most of them are not even publicly traded but are organized in family office structures. They don't care about the B2C market at all; they are essentially private equity firms. You guys interpret anything to fit your screwed-up vision of this world. They don't even have a product to sell to you or me; it was a closed talk with top industry leaders and their managers where they discussed their view of AI and how they will implement purpose-trained AI into manufacturing, etc. It has nothing to do with selling to the public.
I have already said too much - just let me tell you if you think LLMs are the pinnacle of AI, you are very mistaken, and depending on your position in the market, you need to take AI into account. You can only dismiss AI if you have a position/job with no real responsibility.
So weird how you guys think everything is to sell you something or a conspiracy - this was a closed talk to discuss how the leaders in certain industries will adapt to the coming changes. They give zero cares about the B2C market, aka you as an individual.
Again, none of the people at this talk have anything to do with selling a product or pushing an agenda or whatever you think. There is no press, there is no marketing - it was basically a meetup of private equity firms that discussed the implementation and impact of purpose-trained AI in diverse fields, which affects the business structure of the big single-family office behemoths.
Being a programmer is a lot like being a tradesperson. A tradesperson has a lot of flexibility in what they can do. They can work for a company, work freelance, or start their own business.
Programming gives you the same flexibility, the most important bit being that you can do it for yourself.
AI is going to struggle with larger complex tasks for a long time coming. While you can go to it and say 'write me a script to convert a png to a jpg' you can't go to it and say 'Write me a suite of tools to support business X' or 'make me a fun and creative game' A good programmer isn't going to be out of work for a long time.
lol, I'd love to see the fucking ruin of the world we'd live in if current LLMs replaced senior developers. Maybe it'll happen some day, but in the meantime it's job security! I get to fix all of the bugfuck crazy issues generated by my juniors using Copilot and ChatGPT.
And when "web frameworks means we don't need web developers anymore" and when "COBOL is basically plain English, so anyone can code, so we don't need specialists anymore".
I was helping someone with their programming homework, every time copilot suggested anything he just blindly added it, and every time i had to ask him "and why do you need those lines? What do they do?", and he could never answer...
Sometimes those lines made sense, other times they were completely irrelevant to the problem, but he just add the suggestions on reflex without even reading them
I had to pull aside a developer to inform him that he "would be" violating our national security by pasting code online to an AI and that there were potentially repercussions far beyond his job.
Our team lead recently sent out two fresh juniors to tackle a task, with no senior informed. And of course, they were supposed to build it in Python, even though they had no experience with it, because Python is just so easy. Apparently, those juniors had managed to build something that was working ...on one machine, at some point.
On the day when our team lead wanted to show it to the customer, the two juniors were out of house (luckily for them) and no one knew where a distribution of that working state was. The code in the repo wouldn't compile and seemed to be missing some commits.
So, a senior got pulled in to try to salvage it, but the juniors hadn't set up proper dependency management, unit tests, logging, distribution bundling, nor documentation. And the code was spaghetti, too. Honestly, could have just started over fresh.
Our team lead was fuming, but they've been made to understand that this was not the fault of the juniors. So, yeah, I do think on that day, they found some new appreciation for seniors.
Heck, even I found new appreciation for what we do. All of that stuff is just the baseline from where we start a project and you easily forget that it's there, until it's not.
Writing the actual code is the easy part. Thinking about what to write and how to organize it so it doesn't become spaghetti is the hard part and what being a good developer is all about.
That sounds awful. Imaging going back and forth requesting changes until it gets it right. It'd be like chatting with openai only it's trying to merge that crap into your repo.