Unlike some other comments, I don't think there will be a dystopian future where humans will become cognitively switched off and everything will be delegated to machines.
(More likely: extinction of the human race?)
Anyway, I work as a programmer, and at work I see a lot of people massively overusing LLMs to generate user stories or basically write functional specifications.
This honestly hurts a bit, because I can see the quality level of my environment going down, but in the end I'm often the one fixing the problems that come from it.
I just think this is a transition phase, and in the medium-term future there will only be room for people who, AI-assisted ofc, know how to apply logic in the best possible way.
(I'm just an idiot writing things at 1.30 AM on a Saturday, local time.)
I was about to reply to you with a ridiculously long message using the example from before about the lifecycle of a user story, but I bored myself halfway.
So I'll try to extract the gist:
Without human assisting, based on my humble experience, there is always something that wasn't accounted for.
Even if my company is integrated with all the tools and you have infinite tokens, there's always some microservice that wasn't considered or a feature that is completely incompatible.
Or there's a MUCH simpler way of doing it.
I'm also noticing that there are non-technical people who, with the help of AI, are sometimes able to reason better about the bigger picture than some engineers.
A colleague of mine was telling me the other day that the "functional" role might eventually become unnecessary. With all the time saved by writing code faster, whoever actually understands what's happening underneath could just do it themselves.
It sounds a bit extreme to me, but I understand what he means.
To get back to a slightly more serious tone, when it comes to programming, for me the huge thing is: how it should be taught nowadays ?
And I don't know the answer, because my experience started when I was 12, writing a little game in C, and it took me years before I could make something that compiled decently.
If I had instant help for every thought I had, would I have learned why memory is allocated in certain ways or idk what else?
I don't know, maybe learning faster is better because you learn more ?
Anyway fortunately it's not my job to figure out the answer :'D
In Italy this is still a thing. Almost all city gas stations are "multi": If there are 4 pumps usually 2 are self-services, and the other 2 are with the operator that, if you require, it does check oil, clean windshield etc.
Incredible.
Lately, I’ve been going through a bit of an identity crisis.
I know I’m a passionate and not-so-bad developer, but with all this talk about AI, I couldn’t really understand if that was an end of an era for me.
But while reading this article, something clicked, it makes so much sense. It really made me feel better.
I think this quote is highly relevant, though I would guess you, as I am, are by no means a beginner, the matter of taste is the one at hand, I think. Humans matter, and furthermore, human taste can't be replaced (yet? at all? why would we want to?)
> human taste can't be replaced (yet? at all? why would we want to?)
People want to. People want to be told what to watch by an algorithm. They want music made by algorithms. They will eat whatever the reviews say they should. Reviews, etc are manipulated today. Why will future humans care what another human thinks? (I in no way endorse this view but the cynic in me sees it as almost inevitable in our AI-driven descent into idiocracy)
I find it helpful to think of the Amish. The Amish chose what technology to adopt not based on market demand, but on whether or not they collectively (at a democractic-ish government-ish level) think that technology will be good for their society.
In our society, we largely do not democratically choose what technology to adopt. We instead allow a small set of very rich people (commonly called Oligarchs) to choose for us. These people force their technology on our society regardless of whether or not the majority (or super-majority) want it, because doing so reinforces or expands their status as Oligarchs.
The Amish prove that we don't _have_ to do it that way. We can collectively change course if we want to, and plenty of people are fighting for that change. For example, Hawaii recently passed a law banning corporations from being able to spend on elections, and other states are looking to do so to. Polling for curtailing money in politics has over 70% support. Obviously we could lose our democracy, and the Oligarchs could capture the country. However, I choose to believe that enough of us working together can take back the country and make better choices about what technology we want to adopt.
It halves (or thirds or quarters or etc) available CPU cores, cache space, memory bandwidth, all the critical resources. So I expect that it's only applicable for small reads that you are reasonably certain won't be in cache and that it can only be used extremely sparingly, otherwise it will be nothing but a massive drain.
It's kinda sad SFML never get quoted, It was my framework ( after ALLEGRO ) where i learned c++ and I think it dosen't get much love nowdays even if it is very light and strong
Anyway, I work as a programmer, and at work I see a lot of people massively overusing LLMs to generate user stories or basically write functional specifications.
This honestly hurts a bit, because I can see the quality level of my environment going down, but in the end I'm often the one fixing the problems that come from it.
I just think this is a transition phase, and in the medium-term future there will only be room for people who, AI-assisted ofc, know how to apply logic in the best possible way.
reply