As always, I use the term “AI” loosely. I’m referring to these scary LLMs coming for our jobs.
It’s important to state that I find LLMs to be helpful in very specific use cases, but overall, this is clearly a bubble, and the promises of advance have not appeared despite hundreds of billions of VC thrown at the industry.
So as not to go full-on polemic, we’ll skip the knock-on effects in terms of power-grid and water stresses.
No, what I want to talk about is the idea of software in its current form needing to be as competent as the user.
Simply put: How many of your coworkers have been right 100% of the time over the course of your career? If N>0, say “Hi” to Jesus for me.
I started working in high school, as most of us do, and a 60% success rate was considered fine. At the professional level, I’ve seen even lower with tenure, given how much things turn to internal politics past a certain level.
So what these companies are offering is not parity with senior staff (Ph.D.-level, my ass), but rather the new blood who hasn’t had that one fuckup that doesn’t leave their mind for weeks.
That crucible is important.
These tools are meant to replace inexperience with incompetence, and the beancounters at some clients are likely satisfied those words look similar enough to pass muster.
We are, after all, at this point, the “good enough” country. LLM marketing is on brand.
There’s a good commentary about that in here:
https://www.itpro.com/software/development/aws-ceo-matt-garman-just-said-what-everyone-is-thinking-about-ai-replacing-software-developers
This is something often overlooked. You think you don’t need to develop staff so that your company, like, continues? OK, have fun with that.
I never thought I’d say this about an Amazon exec, but this guy seems to actually be based in reality.
My biggest frustration with “AI” is that we’re pretending automation is new. I don’t mean going back to the Industrial Revolution, but that’s been the whole point of code since its inception. Other than having faster pipes to vacuum up everything, this is very much linear.
Thing is, we used to know what the code actually did. These are snake-oil salesmen.
Least expensive employees? Does he mean salary wise? I was always under the impression software devs were paid well
You can easily overwork devs, and while their salary is higher than others a difference between 60k and 120k salaries is less than 60 employees to do manual work and 15 to automate it.
Plus when devs create a digital item that can generate a profit nearly indefinitely they are viewed as cost productive to MBA types. Versus janitors where for some reason we dont see a value at all in cause of no immediate profit from their position.
“Janitors’ content output is terrible.”