So, software engineers, how are we making sure we're not replaced in five years by bad AI? Serious question. How are you making yourself irreplaceable?
@james not specific to engineers really, but I think UI design is a serious challenge that requires iterative prototyping and forethought. I don’t think LLMs are capable of that, certainly not at a Dieter Rams level, even though that’s a high bar to set for any designer.
I think humans will be designing things for other humans for a long time still. And software is part of that design/development pipeline.
@james serious answer: I don't. I doubt it will actually replace a dev in its entirety. If I'm wrong and it does, I'm going to have one heck of a time tearing them apart :)
@james I don’t think I can do this shit for 5 more years so I hope I will be changing careers.
@james I'm not. Software engineering is the art of telling a computer *precisely* what you want it to do, to make sure it does that, exactly that, and nothing more. 'AI' needs prompting to do the same. It's just a new programming language...
@james They already said I'll be replaced like 3 times during my career, kinda gets old and not scary. I'm doing nothing.
Since you ask, I don’t feel like trying to make myself irreplaceable for people (employers/clients/shareholders ) who don’t care about humans at all. Instead, I feel like trying to replace them (boycott their companies and organisations )
Easy to say, not easy to do ?
Certainly! Yet definitely something worth trying.
As for working on a daily/nightly basis to improve our own abilities: looks like business as usual for sw engineers. With or without chatxyz.
Am I wrong ? 🤓
🤞
@james because humans created the hideous mess that is the spatial reference list and good luck to any one synthetic or otherwise trying to understand it.
@james the core of my job is to take non-specific, and often contradictory, descriptions of what people want computers to do for them, and then make it happen. Until an LLM learns to do that I think I’m pretty much safe.
Having said that, I do worry about what happens to junior developers and people new to the industry. There’s value in people spending time doing relatively simple tasks that have been done before, it’s how you build up a mental model of things work.
@james real talk: if AI can replace me at my job in 5 year, it can replace me at anything else I would be much good at; but that’s ok because it will have replaced basically everyone but physical laborers. I’ll be far more worried about whatever the AI officer is making me do at the camp to worry about it.
@james AI can only write the code that it is prompted to write. My job is the opposite: I have to prevent 95% of potential code from being written. Product managers having ideas is not reason enough that code should exist. Side effects and downstream effects matter much more than non-devs realize.