Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I’ll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don’t believe me.
Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of “vibe-coding”, but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can’t spot any although we are looking intently.
And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What’s even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would’ve taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.
I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn’t a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It’s a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don’t know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.
And it all changed so fast. I don’t think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.
I work very low level embedded stuff, and over here LLM still can’t do shit, outside of some very specific applications, and everyone pro enough could do it just as fast anyway. However, I do witnessing the death of profession here too, people practically over the course of a year stopped being able to think for themselves. Most of the people are doing debugging through LLM, asking it the most benine questions.
At this point, I just wish I will die before the total collapse.
I work as an embedded developer as well. I would have agreed with you some months ago. Now it can recognise a full proprietary compiler by one of its flag, which is used maybe a handful of companies. Scarry. I am 99% sure it “learned” by previous attempts by developers. Aka the AI company stole the conversations and trained the new model on them. The uC we are using is non public, only we have it, yet somehow the AI knows about it. The only thing it cannot do is grabbing an oscilloscope to debug the HW…
They don’t just stole the information, every company voluntarily agreed to give it to them the second there was a possibility that they maybe can get rid of developers.
I have the theory that this is also why the models recently got so good, because they have all these proprietary code bases and knowledge from very large companies in their datasets, must be a dream for Anthropic et al.
By the written contract, they cannot use the data for traning our company gives them. (according to our lawpersonel, I did not read the contract)
Also developers had to sign additional NDA to be able to read the specs. And it is strictly forbidden to give AI access to restricted documents. Yet it learned somehow. That is stealing.
I have to agree, the recent jump from shitty as best to “oh fuck i will be replaced” was due every fking company jumped on the hype train and shared everything, and they even pay for it.
Yeah we shouldn’t forget that they probably don’t care about stealing, they are criminals. In their head they probably justify it somehow. And even if there will ever be legal consequences, they probably pay a fine and move on. Even if their dataset were ever leaked and everything was exposed, we would not be surprised and say “told ya!” and they would look into the camera like ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (shrug) and a laughtrack starts playing
You can hook it up to a saleae logic analyzer via plugins. And for oscilloscopes, there are remote controllable ones, so that’s cooked too. A colleague of mine now really just sits in front of the hardware and does what claude tells them to