Afraid of AI
Posted by DirectTrade24@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 26 comments
Hi Everyone, I just started programming and am falling in love with it. But due to the ongoing 'AI will take away the jobs of programmers' news, I am losing hope. I was looking forward to build new things and work on the new technologies. Is the AI hype real? Will it really replace programmers after a few years? Should I even look at software engineering as a career? Please help me since I am the only child in my family and want to earn good money for my parents.
thma_bo@reddit
At the moment AI is sometimes a good support for programmers and makes our lives a little bit easier. But software development is more than just writing code. And here a skilled developer can't be replaced.
And don't believe all the marketing bla bla. Most messages about replacing jobs with AI is just a fantasy of marketing or the c level. I really want to see a CEO using AI to create software.
Careful-Lecture-9846@reddit
Ai is a tool, not a replacement. Especially when corporations need very very specific requirements.
aqua_regis@reddit
Oh, the daily "AI doomsday" post.
This matter has been discussed to infinity and back several times here and over at /r/cscareerquestions.
AI is far from replacing skilled programmers. All that AI can do is reiterate what has already been done and combine it (to a certain degree) into something similar new (and there is where it often starts to hallucinate).
AI is not "intelligent". AI, better said LLMs are just huge datasets that are trained to find the match with the highest statistical probability.
The hype is produced by mass media and by the companies that earn big bucks with it.
JetBiscuit65739@reddit
Ai dos not have limitations to what it can learn. It keeps improving and improving. It never makes the same mistake twice. I'd fear my job slightly more.
DeepBlueWanderer@reddit
I'm not sure if you are serious or not, but AI certainly repeats its mistakes over and over again.
Soft-Housing-7778@reddit
You are so wrong. AI is DEF taking over! Hence look at all the college protocols they are being trained on everything besides C.. so they learn copy and paste. Ai has already been built and there is NO NEED for further programmers! Only high ranking people that have been taught to code from scratch for years will be able to START work g on AI. Everyone else has missed it! Face the facts.. sorry guys!
Loginn122@reddit
U talk about skilled programmers but what about juniors
crazy_cookie123@reddit
How do you think new skilled programmers are made? Skilled programmers will eventually retire and need replacing, junior programmers need to be working and gaining skill to fill their shoes when that happens.
aqua_regis@reddit
There always will be junior positions available. Otherwise, companies will quickly run out of skilled developers.
Emotional_Echidna381@reddit
Yes the hype is real, you need to learn to work with AI
Koromae@reddit
You ever notice how some people can get more use out of AI than others? Maybe you've even looked into how to structure your prompts in order to get better results?
People are learning a specific way to talk to a computer to get the desired result.... which is what we in the business call "programming".
Another way to look at it is this, imagine you want to tell an AI to make an image of a tree with a blurry-ish background, and it doesn't look quite like how you envision it, maybe you tell it to make another one. You know what you want, you can "see" it in your brain, and some of these AI images even look great! Just... not exactly what you want (or your boss in a world where this is your job), so you keep trying and prompting and explaining to the AI. Still you don't get exactly what you need, so maybe you generate a few more, and it's close but not exactly that blur effect you envision. So you try and explain a bit more and generate more images and keep trying and trying and trying, but you can't get it to look like all those AI images that others are getting. Some other dude types in your exact prompt but instead of describing the blurry-ness you want, he adds to the prompt "bokeh filter" and immediately gets the picture you envisioned. You had a problem, and the AI could do part of it, but there was still a part of the process that broke the entire thing. What was that broke it all? You my dude, the person. You needed the right words to get the exact end result, that's what programming is, problem solving.
"Programming" sounds like the type of job where you spend all day typing at 200wpm fueled by nothing but coffee and math.... But it's not that. Programmers are problem solvers. I've told clients that they don't need me, they need Wordpress or Wix, and many of them are so grateful for solving the problem that they pay me anyway for the consultation and let me whip up a quick site for them using those tools. Hell, I don't think any actual employed programmer here could honestly tell me that "coding" takes up more than 40% of their job....
It's very common for the client to not even know exactly what they want either... or to change their mind halfway through the process... AI will replace programmers when it does 2 things. 1.) It gets better, cause WOW there are some WRONG answers it gives, it's kind of crazy. You can see this yourself, just talk to it for a few hours about your favorite subject, even if it's not academic, you will notice the flaws. And 2.) an even more impossible invention comes onto the market. And this invention I think is even more impossible than cold fusion or AGI.... That invention is "a client who can describe what they want to a machine"
Clients can't even tell me what they want.... yeah sure, they can definitely replace me.... all they have to do is.... describe what they want to AI..... lmao
JetBiscuit65739@reddit
tldr can i get a summary?
M4D_M1L3@reddit
Hey, I'm also learning programming (let's say - I work in marketing and I've discovered that Python/JS/SQL help me a lot in my work).
As for AI and how it will replace programmers - I think it's as possible as trains or taxis made it not worth learning to drive a car. Sure - some processes will be simplified, some positions will become redundant (if you can do the work of 1 person now, with AI you can probably do 1.5 - 2 times as much work), but the profession itself will probably not become redundant.
Problem-solving will still be necessary, planning how the solution should work will also not go away - and this is the essence of programming.
AI is an additional skill that helps in work.
panch_ajanya@reddit
Don't be afraid of AI. By using AI you can make your learning faster and more efficient than before.
AI can help you in multiple ways like asking for a topic, getting examples, refactoring of your code, getting best practices while writing code, debugging help.
AI actually makes you more efficient, better and smarter than before.
pticjagripa@reddit
I tried using AI to write code, I figured out it is more shit than junior devs at it, now I rarely use it.
It is great for a specific things, such as writing mappers, translating models and other menial tasks.
Fend_st@reddit
You should not be afraid, Artificial Intelligence is a young technology that in the near future will change the programming paradigm just as programming languages did.
It will become a higher level of abstraction as a programmer instead of fearing AI you should embrace it.
AI will be an essential technology for the software of the future and a powerful tool for programmers to create larger and more complex programs.
Although AI is currently a very young technology and its impact and usefulness has not yet been established, just as it happened with the Internet in its early days, if you like programming, don't stop learning everything you can and try to learn about AI as well.
HashDefTrueFalse@reddit
As a programmer that works on some projects that do complicated math things, I can confidently say that LLMs are nowhere near replacing me or the majority of my team, and there's no indication currently that they ever will. Maybe they'll improve, or maybe something else will come along. But there's really no point in worrying about things that may never be. Your fear just isn't justified. We cannot trust the output of these models enough to put the code straight into production, where it will deal with real user data. It must go through some verification process. That process should have humans at its centre providing quality assurance, if whomever is running things has any sense.
Gen AI is just another level of indirection. We still need people to look after the software that writes the software that writes the software that writes... Not to mention the complications that arise when aiming to claim Intellectual Property rights over code written with the help of LLMs. Lots of companies have simply disallowed use of these tools because they muddy the waters with regards to who authored what.
I have really only found AI tools useful for generating boilerplate (e.g. for class hierarchies), unit test setup/teardown, very simple suites, occasionally test/seed data that I can just copy/paste, and summary of documentation (but it makes things up, so its use can be limited here, depending on the specific case). Every time I've tried to use it to generate code to solve a complicated problem it has basically shat the bed on several fronts, so I gave up on that ages ago. I'll try again in the future.
It does not think, reason, or understand things. It does lots of vector math to predict the next word, repeatedly, given a starting prompt and lots and lots of text written by humans. (yes, major simplification I know). It's very cool, but its usefulness for novel programming (not clean/canned problems) is being overstated by people and companies with their own interests to further.
eruciform@reddit
will AI eventually replace everything?
yes
when?
who knows
but when it does, there will be no work left for anyone, so we better have a society that supports everyone so they can live and thrive without needing any monetary income
so if and when this occurs, we will all either be perfectly fine, or we'll be sharing a bread lines and guillotines experience; either way, making money will not be relevant
until then, as has been said in the other bajillion times that this has been posted that no one ever bothers to read first before posting, AI will continue to be glorifed extra powerful autocomplete
jonsca@reddit
I'd say work on the automobile assembly line, but all of those workers were replaced by robots in the 1970s. If you google it, you'll see many of the robots look just like people.
interyx@reddit
Uh oh guys, I think the autocorrect in my phone is going to start doing my interviews and sales calls.
LivingParticular915@reddit
AI is mostly an overhyped tool, pushed by big tech in the hopes that it will develop into something more before they run out of cash or investors fall back, but honestly no one can predict the future. It may turn into something more powerful or it may be proven as just another tech bubble. Either way, does it really matter? What do you have to lose? You work hard, develop your craft and potentially become a great developer making great money at a good company or you don’t because AI took over everything. At least you learned a cool skill and you can still take the entrepreneurial route and develop your own products (ie SaSS, chrome extensions, mobile app, etc) and potentially make even more money then you would working at a big tech company. Their’s merit in at least trying.
Careful-State-854@reddit
One day it will replace all jobs and us in the process, until that day we will go to work like any other day. that one day is still a bit far from now
Michaeli_Starky@reddit
AI is merely a tool. And flawed one to that. You have to learn to use it correctly, just the same as you have to learn other tools.
tms102@reddit
I think many companies are too slow in decision making and too untrusting of new technologies to have to worry about AI taking over most programming jobs any time soon.
I think skilled programmers will still be in demand for many years to come.
PatrickYu21@reddit
AI got pretty good but nobody knows what’s the future gonna be like. I’d say if you enjoy it, keep working on it. AI will probably replace other jobs first until some extend, but for now, it’s a great tool for programming.
LuccDev@reddit
I think AI hype is overblown but it has some truth It will probably change the job of software dev Replace ? Maybe, we don't know yet for sure I'd say go for it if it's something you like and don't see yourself doing anything else