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Am I the only software engineer greatly worried and disturbed by AI ? (lemm.ee)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by fievel@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] fievel@lemm.ee 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Well I seen, I even code reviewed without knowing, when I asked colleague what happened to him, he said "I used chatgpt, I'm not sure to understand what this does exactly but it works". Must confess that after code review comments, not much was left of the original stuff.

[–] Adalast@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If I am going to poke small holes in the argument, the exact same thing happens every day when coders google a problem and find a solution on Stack Exchange or the like and copy/paste it into the code without understanding what it does. Yes, it was written initially by someone who understood it, but the end result is the exact same. Code that was implemented without understanding the inner workings.

[–] knightly@pawb.social 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The difference being that googling the problem and visiting a page on stackoverflow costs 50-500 times less energy than using ChatGPT.

[–] Adalast@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Really? I haven't done the ChatGPT thing, but I know I have spent days searching for solutions to some of the more esoteric problems I run into. I can't imagine that asking an AI then debugging the return would be any more intensive as long as the AI solution functioned enough to be a starting point.

[–] knightly@pawb.social 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

That's the thing, how do you determine whether or not the "AI solution functions enough" without having a human review it?

The economics aren't there because LLM outputs aren't trustworthy, and the kind of expertise you'd need to validate them is functionally equivalent to that which could be employed to write the code in the first place.

"Generative AI" is an inefficient solution to a problem that's already been solved by the existence of coding support forums like StackOverflow. Sure, it can be neat to ask it for example code or a bedtime story, but once the novelty wears off all you're left with is an expensive plagirism machine that won't even notice when it confidently lies to you.