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.

  • Hamartiogonic
    15·
    10 months ago

    Copilot is just so much faster than me at generating code that looks fancy and also manages to maximize the number of warnings and errors.

    • EmergMemeHologram@startrek.website
      2·
      10 months ago

      It’s fast and helpful for things that are a stack overflow post away from your code, but comes with a trust cost.

      It often has subtle wrongness that you need to fix, and humans are really bad at that.

      Example: yesterday GPT4 produced a fraction reduction function with bugs for me (it had a potential divide by zero, and 4/4 would reduce to 0/1). I asked it to create a scrolling number animation like a slot machine or counter and it just applied a 3d rotation on a loop to the text so it flipped around forever.

      Gitclear found that lines of code written with LLMs/copilot had twice the rate of turnover (revision and rewrites) than human code.

      It’s still useful, but it is a lower quality coder.

      • Hamartiogonic
        1·
        10 months ago

        Yeah, stuff GPT writes tends to require lots of tweaking. Normally I just make it write some boring scaffolding type of code and then I’ll actually make it functional. Here are the variables, use that function, write a loop that does these tricks etc.

        Occasionally, GPT also proposes using a new function I wasn’t aware of, but those moments are gamble though. It can be genuinely useful or it can end up being wild goose chase that leads nowhere and you end up using your old style regardless. If you know what you’re doing, you can easily evaluate if the proposal is worth trying out. If you’re stepping into unknown territory (which I do on a daily basis), you just can’t know for sure. It could be awesome or it could be a total waste of time.