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BornAgainBlue t1_j5lnqzb wrote

I've been a software developer for about thirty years now. This AI codes better than a college graduate, and can write unit tests in seconds. Personally I plan on using it to make myself more efficient. But yes, it's going to be an epic shift.

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imlaggingsobad t1_j5nlupm wrote

I said this exact thing about a month ago in the learnprogramming subreddit and got downvoted into oblivion.

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Sea_Emu_4259 t1_j5nqesz wrote

yes, they are right. Dont rely on crutches to learn as a beginner. It will badly impact you & you will be clueless. You still need to know what is good dev pratices, POO, design patterns or else you wont even recogniez them when used by AI. He is a senior dev' so it is different.

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XagentVFX t1_j5ntzkh wrote

Yh but thats not really the point here. Ai can learn magnitudes faster than a beginner. So if youre not already at the top right now, then youve not got much hope imo. The thing can already code, boy...

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mutantbeings t1_j5ocfpy wrote

It can write isolated code snippets.

In reality software dev nearly always includes multiple languages operating in different contexts on different devices; a whole file structure, a server, visual design aspects I simply cannot imagine being a near future thing.. I can’t ask chatgpt to do anything useful for me at work yet cause the scope is so hopelessly narrow.

GitHub copilot seems to have a knowledge of a whole application which is a lot more sophisticated already but the problem is still roughly; you still need a knowledgeable human to tell it exactly what to create.

If the future of software dev is just crafting prompts for an AI that will then go any produce the actual code; you will always still need experts that can tell it what to produce, and to look at that output and say “yea, this is right” or “hmm this is almost there but it’s inaccessible with a screen reader, I forgot to ask the AI to consider that” or even “wow this is fucked maybe the AI hit an error here or misconstrued my prompt completely” etc. Non-experts are not going to get good results because they won’t know what a good result even looks like, or what to ask for.

Like any tool it will settle into the industry and it’s not highly professionalised fields like software dev that are really highly at risk here.

And doing more with less labour is a good thing; it just depends on who gets to control the value produced. Under capitalism that might unfortunately be a privileged few; the bosses; but if we keep this tech as open source as possible then there’s hope.

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Sea_Emu_4259 t1_j5om0j3 wrote

Dev is not just about coding & also as mutanbeings wrote, current version is very narrowed. I would say like a teen witha 5 minute attention span.

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mutantbeings t1_j5obgu8 wrote

Try apply it to the work you’re doing. I have been. It falls over quickly; so far I’m finding it most useful to retrieve specific pieces of documentation I’m looking for rather than googling and then searching some long page for the right bit. Nothing more sophisticated than that is really very useful yet.

Just learn to use it as a new tool in your toolbox.

AI isn’t that different to any number of other tech advancements. Consider the electronic calculator. It didn’t replace mathematicians; they now just use it as a tool.

AI will be the same as this. Already is in many places.

GitHub copilot is what I’m watching though. An AI that can really understand a whole code project, file structures and servers, is going to be useful af (as opposed to chatgpt which only really gives isolated code snippets of extremely limited scope). Be excited about the new possibilities for us in software dev.

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red75prime t1_j5p8o0v wrote

Calculator replaced computers (people who did calculations) though. When the tool will become advanced enough for software architect or CEO to effectively wield it, it will spell the beginning of the end for programmers. I expect 10-20 years till then.

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