Comment by sbiru93

13 hours ago

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.

Basing this on what, if you care to share?

  • (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