alt Hacker NewsI'm with you on this. At my employer, I feel like we are looked down upon if we don't take the lazy approach and let the ai attempt to one shot whatever it is we're working on.
One reason I'm reluctant to hand over all of my work to the ai is I don't want to forget how to program or let my skills deteriorate. Another reason is I don't want to become dependent on ai and find myself in a situation where I'm not able to fly/navigate/land the airplane if my auto-pilot or ai malfunctions or fails.
Then the last reason I don't want to take the lazy approach: When I've done "one shot tests" a lot of times the ai will try and take some lazy half-ass shortcut that we would not accept if it were a human doing the work. A lot of times it just doesn't do what you ask it to do.
Where I've found ai extremely helpful though is asking questions about our codebase, or asking it to build me a function that takes in a, b, c arguments and spits out x, y, z.
AI really is one of the greatest things mankind has ever produced, but I don't think it's so good yet that it can replace humans completely. Using it as a form of leverage though I think is what people should be doing. I suppose we'll see what happens to developers who let the ai take over completely. Some people are arguing that if you don't let the ai takeover completely your career is doomed, but personally I think you might be doomed if you forget how to fly the airplane by hand.
Like I mentioned here elsewhere: AI replaces the IDE/editor, not the thinking. We now just work one abstraction level higher, but your ability to architect solutions is as relevant, if not more so, than ever before. I design test cases, architectural plans, review the output, do verification. AI just writes the code and helps me with research. If your job can be entirely offloaded to AI then I’d question if your job was that needed to begin with, but writing code was never the job, engineering was. These are just tools to do the job with, they aren’t the job itself.
We solve business problems through technology and to me it’s quite concerning how many developers think their job was knowing syntax of a particular language. Nobody besides themselves care about the syntax of a particular language, certainly the business doesn’t care. I question if retaining your knowledge of programming languages is that important anymore, but your ability to read code if needed (after all, most programming languages are quite similar so it’s not that hard), do architectural and systems thinking, yes. More than ever before.
Honestly, the fear-mongering around AI replacing developers seems to really just expose the developers who never learned architectural and systems thinking, and were just translating Jira tickets to code. While I do not wish job loss upon anyone, I’m not very surprised if those types of jobs will disappear.