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.
Game developer here. Lots of people want to become the fabled “10x” developer (where did it even come from), but at best they’re just 1.1x developers, and at worst they’re even worse than before.
There were many deterministic tools for what AI can do. Save for some major differences: the AI doesn’t want you to spend weeks to months to learn a CLI tool, that has unintuitive key bindings, has unintuitive names for key operations; all while it can be controlled by natural language. The natural language is a trap, since it results in a very nondeterministic tool, while often the main problem is a previously elitist userbase that wants you to either never raise any question why it could get a GUI interface, or that they really gatekeep you from certain aspects to try to direct you into the right ways of using something. I got told by GDB users that I have to learn scripting, because that’s the big selling point of CLI tools, all while I couldn’t find anything about checking values in case of a break — it was
print, but they thought it was less important than writing scripts that automated stuff, or wanted me to learn an unintuitive name for a common process and then ask that. Some instead talked me about how much they loved reading manuals, and I should do the same (still didn’t find whatprintdid). This all while I could use RemedyBG on Windows, a fully GUI debugger, with everything having written onto the GUI, no lengthy manuals need to be read through to learn they call checking values as “abracadabra”.Art kind of has a similar issue. You don’t need to learn everything, however some elitists are really want you to leave certain styles behind the moment you hit your twenties. Or took the “good artists can do life paintings really well” way too seriously. And if you’re really unlucky, your main interaction with artists could be limited to these people.