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Christopher Mims

What Will AI Do to Your Job? Take a Look at What It’s Already Doing to Coders

Software is eating the software industry

Companies turn to generative AI tools to save money on programmers

“If I were an investor, and my companies were thinking about hiring hundreds of engineers, I’d say, well, maybe instead you can use AI to be more productive.”

(my latest for The Wall Street Journal)

wsj.com/articles/ai-jobs-repla

WSJ · What Will AI Do to Your Job? Take a Look at What It’s Already Doing to CodersArtificial-intelligence software is eating the software industry, as companies turn to generative AI tools to save money on programmers. It’s a sign of what’s to come for many white-collar workers.

@mimsical I finally started using chatGPT to write boilerplate code. It’s made starting new projects so much faster. Still, you need to know what to ask and to know when it’s wrong, so I don’t see it replacing devs - and we still need junior devs to be able to step up when more experienced devs leave. The slowest part of my work is still just waiting on requirements and QA.

@mimsical What you’ve covered here squares really well with my own experience of AI at work. We’re using it to assist on code and some marketing copy, though its outputs usually need refinement and I can’t foresee its ultimate impact. Perhaps against my own intuition and against the conclusions of a lot of the broader writing/“college essay”-centric coverage of in particular, AI often feels more “off” when writing copy than code. So I’m glad you went deeper on the code part.

@mimsical If I were an investor, I’d wonder where “senior” engineers are going to come from if the company replaces all the entry-level engineers with AI. But I suppose my short-term investing interests don’t have to align with what is best long-term for the company.

@michaelgemar @mimsical there are many senior developers who went into management and their skills are rusted (like mine) but they might not have so many people to manage now. I tested ChatGPT (v4) and it could code for me reasonably well. Thankfully, I still haven’t forgotten how to decompose the task into requirements and architecture and debug the end result, which is all that was needed. I changed maybe 5 lines of code out of the few screens produced by ChatGPT

@tuzoff @mimsical Sure, this works *now*, but when the current senior folks retire, who will actually know how to evaluate and fix code? If no junior people are coming in, how do you get senior people?

@michaelgemar @mimsical well, the juniors will have to study a bit more. Now there are so many wannabes who maybe studied coding for a few months total, no CS or even engineering degree, and learned to do shitty stackoverflow-driven development and actually make some decent money and switch jobs every year being constantly fired. We’re gonna return maybe back not to the eighties or nineties, but hopefully noughties

@tuzoff @mimsical But companies are talking about getting *rid* of juniors, replacing them with LLM-based systems. There won’t be anyone to “study a bit more”.

@mimsical This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.