Fellow self taught dev here. You should already be prepared to spend your entire career continuously learning new skills. Coding will get easier, but that just changes the scope of what the role of developer includes.

Worrying about the future does not change it. We do have the power to change the world positively through our contributions to humanity through code. Be the change you want to see blah blah.

Have you ever used ChatGPT? It's good in sounding like it knows everything. But that's it. It will take lots of years till AI outperforms human beings. If it's even possible...

This is gonna sound gross, but work on those customer-facing skills. Being able to translate customer requirements into something that works for them will still be a thing. I don't expect AI will be able to do that part of the job for a while, savvy people will still be needed between idiot customers and the actual final product.

[removed]

The obvious choice is get into AI. It's not going away and it is going to change every other kind of engineering forever. In any case, don't be afraid of what's coming. You didn't sign up for this ride to annihilate yourself.

If you're a software engineer and you have this little understanding of ChatGPT and how it works, then yes you should be afraid for your job security, but not because of AI.

Concern is understandable, but I don't think I'd lose any sleep over it. The truth is that AI won't replace developers, developers using AI will replace developers who don't use AI. Adapting or exiting the profession is nothing new for us, We work in a field known for massive disruptions, and AI will be one of those.

It's just like when IDEs made programming much more approachable, software devs didn't disappear, instead the opposite happened and the industry expanded greatly. AI will make our jobs easier, and give the ability to code to a much broader audience. However think about how much of your job is actual coding vs problem-solving and designing solutions, topics that a simple transformer like chatgpt won't be able to emulate anytime soon.

Lmao that’s real tough right there

AI will not be developing features in enterprise applications and submitting pull requests. It will have a sidekick role to the developer providing aside such as code completion and saving you trips to Stack Overflow.

Feature requests and requirements are never so immaculately specified that the resulting code is objectively perfect. Edge cases, unconsidered situations, or integration flaws will always cause iteration and rollback in the development lifecycle. Identification of these defects and gaps will be a human exercise and the person in charge of correcting the software will be... the software engineer.

Whether you're using VSCode or VSCodeGPT, the code deployed and maintained for a business will be the responsibility of humans. They just may be more efficient in doing so because they leverage evolving tools such as AI.

The fear mongering is what you see with any new tech. I genuinely, to my core, believe that there is no near future where LLMs or AI replace engineers.

However, Engineers who make use of AI will replace Engineers who don't.

Look at something like Co-Pilot. The future is AI-assisted programming. We are not anywhere close to general AI that can actually code for a human. They hallucinate with regularity, and the more obscure the required knowledge, the more BS they make up to cover for it.

I work in devops, and the confidently wrong manifests it writes for Istio are... hilarious.

Everyone outside tech has been dealing with this fear for awhile. Sorry brother.

You are not a software engineer, you are a self taught web developer.

Advice I would give anyone concerned about competing with AI: change the context so you're not in direct competition.

One approach would be to ride the wave. Experiment with new AI-enabled tools as they are released, and learn their limitations. Then you will have a relative advantage over those unfamiliar with the tools, and will be able to identify potential ways to leverage and complement their capabilities. You'll then be able to provide expertise with regard to how to properly use these tools, and not overspend on tools which are a poor fit to the job at hand. Think Gartner, but more hands on.

Let me know if this works for you, but I expect the approach should get you past analysis paralysis and replace fear with reasoned concern.

Bro: embrace AI. It will be doing work for you. If you learn to use it, you'll be more efficient and faster at your job.

As someone cleverly said a few weeks ago: AI isn't going to steal your job. Some other programmer using AI will.

Be that programmer.

Nah you're in great shape and now is a better time than ever to be in this sphere.

Will your job look like it does now in ten years? All too likely not, but mine looks nothing like it did two decades ago and I am so thankful for that.

What you should do, though, is take a look at the trends that are happening right now in ML and AI in general. You will be working with GPT and other tech like it one way or another. We're on the ground floor of another really big technological revolution and you're just starting out, but at one of the best times.

I knew you were young based off of this post. Spend another 5 years in IT and you'll see why we have nothing to fear. We are still far away from actual AI. That's when we will have to start worrying.

[removed]

Hell if you're freaked out I am too. I gave up on coding and now I drive a forklift.

At least it shits out confidently wrong code. Unlike all of my offshore devs that assure me they will take care of something before I log back on; only to find they were stymied about 5 minutes into their shift by something they could Google and sat around all fucking day for me to do the needful.

Driving a forklift sounds a billion times cooler. Imagine if you could command a forklift army??!!

Im a gardener and technology has made my life as a gardener easier and government regulation of pesticides and fertilizers has made my knowledge set more valuable. It’s a lot of work but way better than sitting on a computer all day.

Can't say what's worse, wrong code or no code at all xD

Exactly this. We won't even have have fully automated driving for another decade. I remember saying that in 2016 and so many ppl thought we were a year or two max away, and I've heard that every year since. Honestly think outside of highways n such we may never get there.

You hiring? Like kindov exactly what I've been trying to get into. I've just passively been doing a lot of reearch on sustainable agriculture, partially for use in a science fiction book, but also because I think its the absolutely most promising way to do something about the big carbon problem we keep talking about. So its been a bit of a facination for me, and Ive worked in gardens and done landscaping and agricultural work before too.

Be really good at your job and don’t worry about it.

[deleted]

It's good that you are aware of what is going on. However, you're probably already relatively safe since you have a few years of experience. If you keep your skills current and don't become heavily indebted you'll have the resources necessary to change career later if necessary

The major problem will initially be junior developers entering the workforce with huge debt and finding themselves superfluous because of experienced developers running a next gen developer centric chatbot.

If this is your attitude to the most powerful development tool since sliced bread you're already a very poor developer. Quit while you're ahead, you've been replaced.

thanks for the laugh! good luck bro!

thanks dude!