My god, Charity Majors can write. As Simon Willison says, this “is an absolute barnstormer of an essay”. It’s less about AI, more about why hiring junior engineers is so important. https://lnkd.in/dNqjtEyn
Most of engineering is figuring out what problems to even solve in the first place. No LLM can possibly do that since it is categorically and fundamentally incapable of cognition. All it does is figure out probabilities of what word comes after the last one. That's it. I can't wait for the AI fad to die. Inevitably whatever comes next will be worse. Docker/microservices was gonna change the world, then "Web3"/blockchain nonsense, and Big Data before that. Fads are dumb.
Writing and maintaining code is really the least important part of IT work. It’s crucial to understand that the code supports business processes and business rules that change over time, and that each business process is designed to generate a specific set of business value. We need to understand the business purpose of the systems we write and support, be aware of how and why the underlying processes and rules have changed over time, and be able to work with business leaders to create “future proof” systems and processes that continue to generate business value in the face of changing market conditions. These are skills that I don’t expect AI programs to have soon, or ever.
I feel like we don't have to "worry"; so much as the current generation of tools is poorly optimised to the development problems that matter. Rubocop/black/etc do a lot for understanding the mechanics of your code and fixing formatting. To do this.. they basically parse and interpret chunks of your code. Stick them in a CI pipeline though and you solve a trivial but time-consuming part of code review - argument about things that don't matter. What's the AI version of this? Automatically generating unit tests your low level model/method will fail? Fuzzing, but meaner? Automatically optimising queries?
‘…the unholy love child of Stack Overflow search results plus Google’s “I feel lucky”’ - This was gold from start go end. Well done
Senior Software Engineer at Dusty Robotics
1moI feel like all of the people running around screaming that AI is coming for our jobs (in whatever industry) need to read this.