Having an AI help you code is like having a junior developer who is blazing fast, enthusiastic and listens well. However it doesn’t think about what it writes. It does no testing and it doesn’t understand the big picture at all. For very simple tasks, it gets the job done very fast, but for complex tasks no matter how many times you explain it. It is never going to get it. I don’t think there’s any worry about AI replacing developers any time in the foreseeable future.

This sort of black box magic irks me to no end. Nobody understands it!

And that’s why it’s not going to swallow the world. It’s a toy, not a tool.

Tools behave consistently and predictably. You know what you call a tool that doesn’t behave consistently and predictably? “Broken”, that’s what.

Maybe I’m just feeling threatened, or turning into “old man yells at cloud”.

I was “old man yells at cloud” about cryptocurrency for years, and now it’s dead, exactly as I predicted.

Sometimes, the old man is right.

This is based on someone else’s reply I read once. Developers have been trying to put themselves out of their own jobs since the beginning. Automating/scripting things, creating tools, IDEs, etc.

Development is so much more than generating/writing boilerplate code. Code plays such a small role as opposed to figuring out how to solve a problem or even figuring out what the problem is in the first place.

I spent several days figuring out why an HTTP POST in prod wasn’t working. But an identical one was working locally. Turns out there was an application server change that deceased the max request param size. The Dockerfile was configured so that the patch version (semver) was updated automatically. This was a super interesting challenge (felt like Sherlock Holmes with this one).

Try having ChatGPT/etc. figure that one out.

All of this hubbub might produce some kind of toolset that could augment what we already do (i.e. IDE). But replacing people entirely? I don’t think so.

AI can code assist; it’s quite helpful for that. Predictive text, learning a less familiar language, converting pseudo, etc.

But it couldn’t possibly replace senior developers long-term. It just looks new and exciting, especially to people who don’t truly understand how it works. We still need to have human developers capable of writing their own new code.

1. AI is entirely derivative, it’s just copying the human devs of yester-year. If AI does the majority of coding then it becomes incapable of learning, thus necessitating human coders anyway. It also is only going to generate solutions to broad-strokes problems that it already has in its dataset, or convert pseudocode into functional code (which still requires a dev know enough to write pseudo).

2. It also currently has no way of validating what it writes. It’s trying to replicate what our writing looks like contextually, it doesn’t comprehend it. If it ever starts training on itself as it ages, it will stagnate and require human review, which means needing humans that understand code. And that’s not including the poor practices it will already have because so many devs are inconsistent about things like writing comments, documentation, or unit testing. AI doesn’t have its own bias but it inevitably learns to imitate ours.

3. And what about bug-testing? When the AI writes something that breaks, who do you ask for help? The AI doesn’t comprehend the context of the code its reading if you paste it back, it doesn’t remember writing it. You need people who understand how the code works to be able to recognise why it might be breaking.

AI devs are the fast food of coding. It will never be as good quality as something from an experienced professional. But if you’re an awful cook, it still makes it fast and easy to get a sad, flat cheeseburger.

I’ve worked with devs who are the equivalent of line cooks and are also producing sad, flat cheeseburgers: code of poor quality that still sees production because the client doesn’t know any better. IMO, those are the only devs that need to be concerned, because those are the ones that are easy to replace.

If AI coding causes any problems within the job market for devs, it will be that it replaces graduate/junior developers so well that fewer devs get the mentoring or experience to become seniors, and the demand for seniors will rack up significantly. It seems more likely that developers will split into two separate specialisations, not that our single track will be replaced.

I see LLM AIs acting more as an assistant rather than being the primary contributor in software projects.

For example, I’m starting a very ambitious personal project and wanted to practice writing a proper project plan and requirements document.

I had no clue where to start, so I pulled up ChatGPT and after some prompting I now have workable rough-drafts that just need some fine details added in and I can focus on actual programming.

I think the part that annoys me the most is the hype around it, just like blockchain. People who don’t know any better claiming magic.

We’ve had a few sequence specific architectures over the years. GRU, LSTM and now Transformers. They were all better than the last at the task of sequence specific transformations, and at least for the last one the specific task was language translation. We eventually figured out these guys have a bit of clairvoyance too, they could make accurate predictions based on past data, or at least accurate enough to bet on, and you can bet traders of various stripes have already made billions off that fact. I’ve even seen a transformer based weather model. It did OK, but transformers are better at language.

And that’s all it is! ChatGPT is a Transformer in the predictive stance. It looks at a transcript of a conversation and thinks what a human is most likely to say next. It’s a very complex transformation of historical data. If you give it the exact same transcript, it gives the exact same answer. It is in the literally mathematically rigorous sense entirely incapable of an original thought. Any perceived sentience is a shadow of OpenAI’s army of annotators or the corpus it was trained on, and I have a hard time assigning sentience to tomorrow’s forecast, which may well have used similar technology. It’s just an ultra fancy search engine index.

Anyways, that’s my rant done I guess. Call it a cynical engineer’s opinion. To be clear I think it’s a fantastic and useful technology, and it WILL change how we interact with machines. It can do fancy things with the combination of “shell” code driving it’s UI like multi-step “agents” or running code, and I actually hope OpenAI extends it far into the future, but I sincerely think any form of AGI will be something entirely different to LLMs, or at least they’ll only form a small part of it as an encoder/decoder for it’s thoughts.

EDIT: Added some paragraph spacing. Sorry, went into a more broad AI rant rather than staying on topic about coding specifically lol

To cool down your boss, you can always tell him that he’s putting your company at great legal risk, there’s no reason to think that LLMs are not violating copyright laws and software licenses, and moreover the case might settle differently in different countries (in case you export your code).

I know what you mean! I just started in development recently and the amount of my colleagues (that I am supposed to learn from) who use ChatGPT for a lot more than they should is super annoying to me. I have a background in natural language processing but decided to go into software development because the programming was always more fun to me.

Recently some of my colleagues were looking for a package for a specific framework to do a specific task. And they just asked ChatGPT which is just NOT A SEARCH ENGINE. It came up with something that wasn’t even close to what we needed, but somehow no one looked into it. I did a quick search, read some threads on reddit and found something a lot better in 5 minutes. Luckily the Project Manager listened to me, but it was honestly so weird, because I felt like I was somehow weird for suggesting to look at what other devs recommend instead of just going with what a language model suggests, that doesn’t even use recent data.

AI LLMs are the best rubber duck. Like a rubber duck, it’s probably not going to “solve” anything for you directly, but LLMs can be a great tool to unlock your potential.

I think everyone in the software industry is feeling this right now. It was the same way with NFT’s, Blockchain, AR, Even back in the late 2000’s everyone wanted Social Media (crazies). This too shall pass.

Maybe in 6 months, maybe in 2 years, we will hit a point where the limitations and use case are understood well enough and it will just be another tool in our belts and not the end all.

My advice, just smile to your boss and say “sure let’s try it”. Learn something new and look forward to the next one.

I agree with you - I think my main issue is that using LLMs to write code is a crutch, and over time the quality of software will decrease because it will be made by a program perfected to generate the most likely next word, rather than understanding what it’s doing. If anything, having a basic understanding of LLMs makes me trust them less.

I will cautiously say that these tools have their use for non-programmers. For example, I have to store some data in the format that would be easy to plot. I could spend half an hour doing that in Origin each time and hope its quirks won’t crash it… or I could use my rudimentary Python knowledge to shove comments into Copilot and correct my output by trial and error and have an ugly script that would nonetheless do the task every time in 5 seconds. Or I could learn to actually program and have non-ugly scripts. But I probably won’t in the foreseeable future, because it’s very time-consuming and what I do with AI tools is for myself, not for production.

For those who program for life it’s a different story. I won’t give up my primary research tasks to AI and I hope programmers won’t give up their primary job to AI too.

They have “AI” twelves times in their bio! If they don’t understand it who does?!

That’s usually a good sign they don’t understand it at all

I’ve recently started using CodeWhisperer and I’ve found I use the creation aspect much less than I do auto-complete. That may change in the future, but right now it’s pretty nice starting to type something and VSCode completes what I was going to type.

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