AI assistance is only making coders dumb, lazy and prone to replacement
We have stopped reading or even looking up official documentation, that has become an extinct skill today. And why would we if an LLM does it for us and tells us only what we need to be told to create that release or fulfill that urgent deadline.
What happened with AWS outage recently is only a brief foreshadow of what might eventually come to pass if this trend continues. Imagine a world where most programmers are primarily LLM prompters with a very shallow understanding of core programming skills or even operational skills pertaining to an app, framework or library. What will we do if a major outage or technical issue occurs then and no person around knows what’s really going on?
And that’s not even mentioning the replacement of human workers problem which is the most discussed topic these days. Eventually, the senior/mid management will think why do we even need these “prompt engineers”, let an agent do that work. After that, senior management will think why do we need these “prompt managers”, let another agentic AI that controls other agents do it! Eventually, the company will be run entirely by robots and shareholders will enjoy their wealth in peace!
As dystopian as the above scenario sounds, that’s the world we are eventually heading towards with all the progress in AI and the commerce oriented environment it’s evolving in. But it’ll still take decades at least considering the state of prevailing systems in public and private sectors. But until that happens, let us programmers equip ourselves with real old school skills which have stood the test of time - like scavenging documentation, referring to stack overflow and wikipedia for knowledge, etc. and coding with humility and passion, not this LLM crap.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 33.8 ms ] threadI mean... I still do it, but it's not like before LLMs I used those as the primary source. I just googled issues and checked stackoverflow first, then moved to the documentation (which is often a mess in smaller libraries).
> What happened with AWS outage recently is only a brief foreshadow of what might eventually come to pass if this trend continues
Is there a source that the issue was caused by AI tools? I've found out it was a DNS issue but there's no mention of the root cause, at least that I've found, nor AI or LLM mentions. And it's not like we didn't have outages before chatgpt
They allow us to travel further and faster (my experience, but many disagree).
At the cost of walking/exercising less.
And just like cars, it's up to us to keep a healthy dose of thinkering about code to keep our neurons well connected.
So just don't blindly vibe code and you'll do fine. For now.
If programmer is only the code-writer - then it is reasonable to agree with the post.
If on the other hand the developer is problem solver - well it just changes what problems you're solving. Somehow I don't see the future where CEO of any respectable company would sit with AI and ask Agent to develop features. You hire people who solves problems for you.
Jokes aside, as any tool, it depends on how you use it. I think the problem is not AI assistance but the ever existing urgency and lack of patience of nowadays, which leads to everything to be done as fast as possible with no toleration to any waiting time. This plus language models is a really band combination that would lead to a disaster way before AGI or anything like that is remotely close.
Brains & bodies, the minds that run on them, as well as the levels of consciousnesses with their context-switched/hopping awareness are not build the same, neither passively, nor actively.
If you propose to make the bulk of the people smarter and more competent vs just more productive you end up with smarter voters and more competent participants on the markets and in civil society.
Nothing big would change but smarter voters and news audiences have been a no-go, despite being a no-brainer, forever.
People are supposed to reason themselves into whatever enlightenment shines brightest during the time they grow up.
None of that is your problem. "It" is not everywhere. You can always build your own or join some net that doesn't even bother laughing about this shit. There's too much more.
I'm not hearing about any large lawsuits or customers migrating off the apps affected by the AWS outage... hell I'm not even hearing about migrations from AWS itself... meaning every party in the chain seems to be satisfied with what they're getting from each other despite the outage.
> What will we do if a major outage or technical issue occurs then and no person around knows what’s really going on?
If the outage is major enough we'll suddenly magically find enough money to actually pay an expert to figure it out. But turns out the world doesn't end when some bullshit apps go down and prevent people from working their bullshit jobs for a day.
You could make the same claim to make a case for the usage of any technology that simplifies the coding work, ie: using Java instead of assembly, usage of AWS instead of implementing your own infra, etc. With higher level languages, by freeing up developers from having to worry about specifics of memory management or syscalls, they could become more productive and focus more on the actual problems to solve. Some still understand the underlying because they work on that low level layer, but this is not needed anymore for most.
I think LLMs are another step in that direction, although with caveats.
Recruiters seem to be automating everything and it doesn't seem to make their work any more useful. Marketing people seem to generate a ton of slop. Even executives are starting to use AI assistance for writing memos and taking business decisions.
At some point, will nobody do anything anymore, like in Dall-E? Will we just lay down while we get AI slop force fed into our eyes?
I doubt it, but sometimes it does seem that way.