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Am I the only software engineer greatly worried and disturbed by AI ? (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by fievel@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm in a similar place to you career-wise. Personally, I'm not concerned about becoming just a "debugger." What I'm expecting this job to look like in a few years is to be more like "the same as now, except I've got a completely free team of "interns" that do all the menial stuff for me. Every human programmer will become a lead programmer, deciding what stuff our AIs do for us and putting it all together into the finished product.

Maybe a few years further along the AI assistants will be good enough to handle that stuff better than we do as well. At that point we stop being lead programmers and we all become programming directors.

So think of it like a promotion, perhaps.

[–] dutchkimble@lemy.lol 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Why would there be a team of AIs in this scenario under the human, instead of just one AI entity.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The role of the human is to tell the AI what it's supposed to do. If you're worried about AI that's sophisticated enough to be completely self-directed then you're worrying about AGI, which will be so world-changing that piddly little concerns such as "what about my job?" Are pretty trivial.

[–] dutchkimble@lemy.lol 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No, I meant keeping the human directing things but they could do it with one AI under them

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Well yes, then. That's what I said. You'd be a programmer who had free underlings doing whatever grunt work you directed them to.

Or are you questioning my use of the term "team" for the AIs? LLMs are specialized in various ways, you'd likely want to have multiple ones that handle different tasks.

[–] dutchkimble@lemy.lol 1 points 9 months ago

Yeah I meant the team part. Learnt something new, I thought all AI was more or less equal!