To continue with the analogy though, how many architects create things that an engineer takes one look at and laughs at because it’s structurally impossible (hint: a lot). Knowing the deep parts of the code and how it works becomes even more invaluable otherwise you risk Chinese building practices (quick, looks good, falls apart 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.
That’s a hell of an assumption. Since we’re whipping out credentials, I’ve been in IT almost 30 years and I can tell you it’s not going to work like that.
I can see, in programming, how the current AI trend is displacing a lot of junior programmers who will not be senior programmers in 10 years due to the inability to obtain experience.
AI hasn’t come for DevOps or SysAdmins jobs either, but it’s ‘good enough’ to do help-desk/tier 1-type tasks. That limits the job pool for new IT workers and will create a future shortage of experienced workers.
I’m not worried about MY job, I’ve already accumulated the experience. It’s the new guys who are trying to get into support positions, where they are glorified knowledge base/Google searchers, who are having the hard time because AI CAN do search and summarization/RAG pretty effectively.
At least in my experience these models are pretty good now to write code based on best practices. If you ask for impractical things they will start doing ugly shortcuts or workarounds. A good eye catches these and you either rerun with a refined prompt, fix your own design or just keep telling it how you want to have it fixed.
You still gotta know how good code looks like to write it, but the models can help a lot.
To continue with the analogy though, how many architects create things that an engineer takes one look at and laughs at because it’s structurally impossible (hint: a lot). Knowing the deep parts of the code and how it works becomes even more invaluable otherwise you risk Chinese building practices (quick, looks good, falls apart 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.
That’s a hell of an assumption. Since we’re whipping out credentials, I’ve been in IT almost 30 years and I can tell you it’s not going to work like that.
I can see, in programming, how the current AI trend is displacing a lot of junior programmers who will not be senior programmers in 10 years due to the inability to obtain experience.
AI hasn’t come for DevOps or SysAdmins jobs either, but it’s ‘good enough’ to do help-desk/tier 1-type tasks. That limits the job pool for new IT workers and will create a future shortage of experienced workers.
I’m not worried about MY job, I’ve already accumulated the experience. It’s the new guys who are trying to get into support positions, where they are glorified knowledge base/Google searchers, who are having the hard time because AI CAN do search and summarization/RAG pretty effectively.
At least in my experience these models are pretty good now to write code based on best practices. If you ask for impractical things they will start doing ugly shortcuts or workarounds. A good eye catches these and you either rerun with a refined prompt, fix your own design or just keep telling it how you want to have it fixed.
You still gotta know how good code looks like to write it, but the models can help a lot.
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.