Well, looks like we’re done here. Lemmy, Reddit, Facebook and Twitter can pack it in because no we can have AI handle social media for us.
Guess it’s finally time to go outside, then.
Well, looks like we’re done here. Lemmy, Reddit, Facebook and Twitter can pack it in because no we can have AI handle social media for us.
Guess it’s finally time to go outside, then.
Honestly, I’ve spent a bunch of time playing with various AI tools recently and my conclusion so far is that while the tools are impressively capable and can definitely ease the burden of routine tasks, I’d still want to hire people if I needed something done that needs actual creative thinking.
An AI like Copilot can certainly help make a developer’s life much easier, but it can’t replace them entirely. All it is, in the end, is a better rubber duck, which can actually give helpful feedback or even produce whole code snippets for you, but you still need someone with an actual human brain to put it all together in just the right way.
For now… It seems to be getting better at an alarming rate. When I started using it last year it took several tries to get an answer that was about 75% correct. Now it can produce code that is 90-95% of what I need from a single prompt. I’m sure my prompting ability has improved over the course of the year, but the AI has certainly improved too. Coders aren’t needed for creative thinking, there are plenty of creative people who can’t code. I think it’ll be a while before it completely replaces coders, but it’s probably going to reduce the number of coders needed in the very near future. My job has been pushing us hard to use their licensed copilot within our IDEs and they’re tracking everything. I’m not sure the extent of what they can track, but they can certainly tell how often we use it because they’re giving us reports on its usage.
Even if that’s so, it still needs you in order to tell it WHAT to produce (and to get rid of the 5-10% errors that may still be present).
Also, consider that you may well be able to produce a single module that way, but a complex application consists of hundreds, if not thousands of these, and AI cannot yet meaningfully put them together as far as I know.
Yes, it may very well end up weeding out some of the bad coders whose only job was doing the dirty work of copy and pasting answers from StackOverflow, but as long as you got a brain in your head, I’m pretty sure you’ll still be able to find a job.
I hope you’re right, because I love what I do now, and it took me 20 years to get to where I am.