Comment on It Turns Out That When Waymos Are Stumped, They Get Intervention From Workers in the Philippines

• NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  So I’m developer, I do mobile apps, and I do use Claude/GPT.

  I could be wrong, but I don’t foresee any imminent collapse of developer jobs, but it does have its uses. I think if anything it’ll be fewer lower end positions, but if you don’t hire and teach new devs, that’s going to have repercussions down the road.

  I needed to make a webpage for example, and I’m not a webdev, and it helped me create a static landing webpage. I can tell that the webpage code is pretty shitty, but it does work for it’s purposes. This either replaced a significant amount of time learning how to do it, or replaced me hiring a contractor to do it. But I also am not really any better off at writing a webpage if I needed to make a 2nd one having used it, as I didn’t lean much in the process.

  But setting it all up also did have me have to work on the infrastructure behind it. The AI was able to help guide me through that as well, but it did less of it. That I did learn, and would be able to leverage that for future work.

  When it comes to my actual mobile work, I don’t like asking it do anything substantial as the quality is usually pretty low. I might ask it to build a skeleton of something that I can fill out, I’ll often ask it’s opinions on a small piece of code I wrote and look for a better way to write it, and in that case it has helped me learn new things. I’ll also talk to it about planning something out and getting some insights on the topic before I write any code.

  It gives almost as many wrong/flawed answers as right answers if there’s even a tiny bit of complexity, so you need to know how to sift through the crap which you won’t know if you aren’t a developer. It will tell you APIs exist that don’t. It will recommend APIs that were deprecated years ago. The list goes on and on and on. This also happened while I was making the webpage, so my developer skills were still required to get to the end product.

  I can’t see how it will replace a sizeable chunk of developers yet, but I think if used properly, it could enhance existing devs and lead to fewer hires needed.

  When I hear things like 30% of Microsoft code is now written by AI, it makes sense why shit is breaking all the time and quality is going down. They’re forcing it to do what i can’t do yet.

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  • ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Thank you for the detailed response. Most opinions on this topic are very much so based on vibes rather than real experience, so it’s interesting to hear an informed opinion from someone on the inside.

    I hope to become a software developer one day too (it’s a slow process, because I’m teaching myself in my free time) so I sometimes worry if all the effort I’m putting in is even worth it if LLMs will be doing all the programming in a few years. Do you think that’s a concern? Will these tools continue to develop to that point or are they hitting a wall, like some people are saying?

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    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Most opinions on this topic are very much so based on vibes rather than real experience,

      Very much so. You can tell from the way certain people talk about it that they’ve never actually used it in any meaningful way.

      I don’t think LLM’s will be doing all the programming in a few years. They do keep getting better, but hallucinations are baked into how the system is designed, and unless they can solve that, it does feel like they are starting to reach a plateau. If they can solve it, I don’t think it would be an LLM as we know it today either, it would be a wholly other thing that we would need to reassess.

      Also, some jobs won’t want to use it for fear of copyright infringement issues, others won’t want to use it as a mean to stay pure. Did you see any of the Claire Obscure Expedition 33 stuff over 1 AI generated placeholder texture that was accidentally left in the game and promptly removed? They’ve now said they just won’t use AI at all so they can remain pure.

      I think learning to program is still a really good option even if it might be a little harder in the near future to get a job than before. In an ideal situation, hopefully you’ve found something you want to build for yourself so you can just keep learning off of that while benefiting from it, I find that usually works better motivation wise than building something random you don’t have an attachment to.

      That also gives you a project to talk about in interviews, where you can talk about how you built it, what decisions you made while building it, problems you encountered, how you tackled those problems, the steps to make it publicly available etc etc.

      Just don’t be too reliant on AI generated code while learning, or like I said with the website it helped me make, I didn’t learn much. You want to build your skills knowing how to use it as a tool, but not needing to use it at all.

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      • ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨47⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

        Interesting. And yeah I fid see that Claire Obscure Expedition 33 stuff actually haha.

        Thank you for your perspective and your advice! I appreciate it.

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