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.
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.