Am I the only software engineer greatly worried and disturbed by AI ?
Am I the only software engineer greatly worried and disturbed by AI ?
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.
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I'd like to thank you all for all your interesting comments and opinion.
I see a general trends not being too worried because of how the technology works.
The worrysome part being what capitalism and management can think but that's just an update of the old joke "A product manager is a guy that think 9 women can make a baby in 1 month". And anyway, if not that there will be something else, it's how our society is.
Now, I feel better, and I understand that my first point of view of fear about this technology and rejection of it is perhaps a very bad idea. I really need to start using it a bit in order to known this technology. I already found some useful use cases that can help me (get inspiration while naming things, generate some repetitive unit test cases, using it to help figuring out about well-known API, ...).
Many have already touched on this, but you hit the nail on the head with the third paragraph. Always smart to prepare but any attempt to use this to reduce workers will go horribly. Saving isn't crazy in this regard but wouldn't plan on it being long term until LLMs can become less expensive, have better reasoning and most importantly have at all better performance on longer context windows without impact on performance. These aren't easy solves, they brush up on fundamentals limits of the tech