AI frightens me
I'm sure many of us here are developers, so I suspect many of you will feel empathy for what I wrote in this post. And even though you might disagree partially or totally with my point of view, it is at the end of the day how I perceive the industry, and my gut feelings cannot be based but on this.
In my company there has been a huge push towards making sure us developers use AI, and while I have to admit that some tasks have become simpler (as in not having to waste time on writing (regression) unit test cases), in reality my productivity hasn't increased a whole lot as I still have to review from top to bottom whatever generates.
So, no reason to complain, right? Well... Not really...
- Higher ups are now assuming we can do 5x more work, and so they sell us we were able to do so: managers proposing projects with stricter timelines based on those assumptions; and if we don't overwork then we have to face repercussions.
- If you vibe code for a long time, you will gradually lose your programming skills. The problem is not vibe coding itself, but the lack of brain exercise that happens when we relegate the code-writing tasks to an AI.
- The code quality of the project goes down: the issue I think is not that AIs cannot write decent code per se, but that instead that "prompt engineers" don't worry about what gets generated as long as it compiles and passes the test cases.
When us professional developers write code by ourselves, we are always careful about code complexity and maintainability, and not because we have a markdown file telling us to do so, but because if we don't, then we are going to end up between a rock and a hard place when a new feature is requested.
On the other side when we don't hand-hold AIs, they end up making mistakes that we miss, and when we hand-hold them, then they lack any initiative into paying technical debt.
And if some time in the future the cartel of AI companies stop subsidizing them, we will have to deal with these codebases by ourselves.
So, in summary it feels like a mixture of job insecurity with the extra pressure that the temptation of short term gains produces.
#ai
Apr 03 · 5 weeks ago · 👍 gritty, zinricky, Half_Elf_Monk, bsj38381, Pidu
4 Comments ↓
I still hate the insufferable hype ai is surrounded with, and I'm also getting tired of people dooming about ai as well like it's the end of the world. (Don't get me wrong, I'm still not a fan of ai-bros treating gen-ai like a deity that can't make mistakes.) I also hate "vibe-coding" too, and I'm starting to hate the word vibe too at this point.
❤️ fairlygood · Apr 03 at 17:10:
Yeah, I think most people are experiencing AI fatigue to some extent.
Completely get OPs point of view though. If I were a developer, I’d be feeling pretty unsettled right now.
This is spot on how I view the current situation.
👻 darkghost · Apr 04 at 11:35:
I used an AI to vibe code up a limited replacement for a statistical program my company currently spends thousands of dollars per seat per year on. But I do have some history of dev work so I extensively tested it (UI and statistical engine) including on real data whose outcome I knew and edge cases. I did in a week what would have taken months of back and forth with a dev team. I was also able to make the UI more relevant to the scientists than the expensive package which was designed by and for statisticians.
Pretty neat stuff, but I have a limited number of tools I could use this for. And it clearly gets dumber the longer I work with it. So I wouldn't try anything more ambitious than this.