You get it. I don’t understand the people in tech burying their heads in the sand. If the question were AGI that is definitely disputable in terms of even the viability. But plain old AI is already here. It’s not even a baby anymore.
There’s no assumption made there. In IT 30 years of experience makes you a dinosaur. And you’re questioning what I’m talking about as if the jury is still out when it’s fait accompli. You’re clearly not plugged in.
Then you’re not dealing with cutting edge tech. Living in the past isn’t going to help you.
This is what I’m hearing too. One thing my friend did mention was that without a nearly unlimited amount of tokens he’d run out really quickly.
My friend is a full stack programmer with over 15 years experience with one of the largest financial institutions. So he can handle what you’re talking about no problem. But what IS a huge problem is that the reason he has the requisite knowledge now is because he spent years learning best practices by doing the grunt work that’s going to disappear. So in a few years they might no longer have people with the skills to do things right and then what you’re describing will absolutely happen and build quality will go to hell. The assumption from big tech is by then the models will have improved enough it won’t matter by then.
My friend said early AI iterations were really bad at being opaque and that even now if you’re having it design the core architecture you’re going to have the problems you mentioned. But his job has basically changed to being focused mostly on being that architect. Using the metaphor of constructing a building. He used to have to do a lot of manual labor too, not just be an architect. Now he just has to tell the AI system what to build AND how. But the majority of the actual “construction” work is done by the AI system.
It’s not that they can’t be productive. Right now at least, what AI does is amplify how much work you can do. One of my friends codes for a big company that uses state of the art Claude models and he says that the system does 80-90% of the coding grunt work and the job is more of an editor and making sure everything is correctly annotated so that humans can understand what’s happening in the code in the future. This means that work that might have taken months he can complete in a week or two.
Hardly. It’s just that you’re disputing if something could happen when it already has.