[rcconf]

Should we as developers put more effort into defending our craft? The movements in the artistic space with AI were very widespread and vocal, but we developers seem not to care. I feel like developers in general are a bit more quiet and timid with things and it leads to companies or entire industries taking advantage of us.

Am I the only one who feels like developers really need to be a bit more vocal in defending themselves, their craft, and even their sanity? Are we quiet because of the large salaries in the space?

I suppose the biggest question is how do you defend the craft but at the same time keep the advantage of automation and AI? (is it unions?)

[ActionHank]

Just leave it to run itself out.

Right now the sales pitch is "magical machine spits out any code you can imagine and it will all just work". This isn't the case now and I doubt it will be the case in the future.

It will get really good and make things faster and more easily, but you will still need to know how to use it to be effective and you will still need to understand the underlying tech to be the most effective.

It's like carpentry and powertools. Carpenters and slap together a whole house in a day, a big part being due to power tools. There are still carpenters who are all about the craft and traditional ways and they make amazing pieces of furniture and there are those who need to build houses, fast. Finally there are those who dip into carpentry and realise that it is a whole lot of new knowledge and a degree of understanding that was invisible to them before trying.

If you don't know what you're doing a power tool won't make you a great carpenter.

[willsmith72]

Depends on your motive. I enjoy the "art" of programming, but I enjoy even more using it to build cool stuff, make companies happy, start side projects or even businesses.

I've not seen any indication an AI legitimately replacing software engineering, rather enhancing it perhaps resulting in the need for fewer engineers for the same work. Even as an engineer that's a huge win.

The role is less coding, more engineering. I suppose if the "craft" is the coding part, you're right it may need defending, but to me that's not the craft

[rkuodys]

Totally in the same camp. How I see AI improvement- is that if you needed couple developers to launch something, now you can do it yourself. Meaning the cost of launch is lower and that I think should be appreciated not fighted against.

If developer is actually solving the problems, it's like giving a tractor to dig a hole in addition to shovel

[cheema33]

> Should we as developers put more effort into defending our craft?

Fight against AI tools? You are not likely to win that battle.

Horse carriage manufacturers would not have stopped car makers, regardless of how hard they tried or unionized. You have to adapt.

[petabyt]

Code doesn't really have the same 'human touch' the way art does. We've spent the past 20 years making libraries, higher level languages, UI frameworks, etc to make development faster. If there's any 'human touch' it's a lot higher level than just the lines of code. Art has mostly been the same for a very long time. Especially painting/drawing. For most people it's a passion and creative outlet. From what I've seen (some) AI investors say so far, they want to replace that creativity.

[colechristensen]

Art and technology used to be... the same. Almost nobody really wants the artistry that comes with well crafted code these days though. It's mostly just about being done.

[throw-the-towel]

And that applies to more that just code. Buildings, tools, cutlery, furniture, whatever -- everything used to have way more craftsmanship.

[soco]

Are you talking about the end products or about the process of creating them? The GP talks about the craft of the woodworker, not about the furniture. Me as a customer don't really care how the knife was made, as long it's a good looking sharp and sturdy knife. Same way, the customer of the AI produced software again will only care whether the software addresses their needs and has good UX. And I fully believe AI tools will give that, rather sooner than later, even if with human help.

[corytheboyd]

I don’t feel threatened by it, and I haven’t seen anything that warrants this reaction. Putting code into files is trivial entry-level stuff. Let me know when an automation flawlessly (as in 100% accuracy), consistently (not just once), and with truly arbitrary requests (not cherry-picked) pulls off systemic refactors and feature additions to one or more massive codebases full of poorly written, non-standard garbage. For the record, I find today’s AI tools useful, but they do not at all threaten my livelihood.

[colechristensen]

>Should we as developers put more effort into defending our craft?

No.

Nobody worried about optimizing compliers taking the jobs of assembly programmers.

Tools make us able to do _more_ not less. This is just one more. And it happens to be pretty good at doing obvious boring things that have been done a million times which most of us don't want to do anyway.

Like recently I needed to design a nice html error page, I don't have a designer to go to, and it wasn't really a big enough deal for that kind of thing anyway. Instead of having to dust off a bunch of web design skills and spend a long time figuring out fiddly little style sheet things... or just doing a terrible job... I asked AI to do it. 90% of the work was done in 10 seconds, then I spent 5 minutes polishing it. If I did it myself it would either have been a couple of hours to get something as nice or for the same 5 minutes I could have done a shit job. Nobody lost work because of AI that day, I was just able to do more important things than make an internal developer-facing error page look nice.

[kabes]

No, because

1. It's a fight you can't win

2. It might allow me to finally build the ideas I have. I have better things to do than striking a keyboard all day.

I can't wait for AI to replace me.

[MattGaiser]

No, as except for an elite artistic few, the defenders of unproductive ways or even those who refuse to aggressively upskill, end up poor with few prospects.

This is especially true in an industry where anyone can jump in (unless we want to lock computers behind licences).

I want the high salary to continue, so I will move where the tools take me. AI let’s me generate a ton more features in the same amount of time.

[richardw]

Quite a few responses to your questions based on current state of AI.

Firstly, this is never going backwards. It will only get more capable. There will likely be algo changes that unlock new capabilities over time. There are definitely areas that humans have the advantage but this is similar to the “god of the gaps” concept in that the area where people have an advantage will reduce over time.

There’s currently no real understanding in the model and it’s really amazing what we can do with hyper-autocomplete. Humans made that happen. We’re the ones doing the innovation.

We’ve long been in the business of automating jobs away. This time it’s our own.

For the foreseeable future, get good at leveraging it and stay current.

(Intuition: AI is also good at the business layers. It can probably produce better specs than many (not all) people paid to do it. It can generate ideas and communicate them in many formats. It’s super confident, so could easily be a consultant. I don’t think the business analysts and strategy people should be too confident.)

[samstave]

I am not a developer, but AI helps me to translate my thoughts more fluidly to real world things. I am learning a lot about development but it allows me to think openly and vaguely into the GPT and iterate to my intent and goal. I love it. Embrace it and find out how it can make a clone of you so you can have an harem of AI alts that @rcconf(N) can be thrown at a particular problem of your choosing.

Imagine having a bunch of them as a bot swarm of AIs that you can have an orchestration layer upon which itself is one of them tuned to manage them.

"In Lak'ech" Mayan: I am another yourself.

That will be great.

Also when you can adopt expert personas from others that are personal AGI lego.

[julianeon]

I think a crucial difference here is that images are (slightly) more defensible.

There are still some tells that indicate an image was AI created. It's enough to mark them as AI and discourage brands from using them, after pushback. At this point, the human difference is noticeable.

This isn't the case for code. No one can tell the difference between AI and human-generated code, not at the point at which users access it. And since there isn't there really isn't much to 'fight.'

[BurningFrog]

I suspect that developers and luddites are almost entirely separate groups of people.

[llama_drama]

The best defense is to keep improving as programmers. By constantly refining our skills and learning new technologies we maintain our relevanse and value. AI and automation are tools that can enhance our work, not replace it.

[hatenberg]

Pretty sure every single profession affected by industrialisation said the same...

This is just machines for the knowledge economy.

[Kiro]

The difference between AI art and AI code is that the latter can never be used for anything more than prototypes for someone who doesn't know how to code. For people who know how to code it becomes a super power.

[Retr0id]

I think developers just don't feel threatened by it, not yet at least. For software it's more of a "rising tide that lifts all boats".

I've yet to personally benefit from AI in any of my workflows, in any meaningful capacity, but I wouldn't complain if that changed.

[bongodongobob]

If AI is building better software why stop it? If it's not, what's the threat? What's to defend? Our right to build worse software? Prevent people from using tools as they see fit? What's course of action would you take?

[haliskerbas]

Losing my sweet, sweet TC is the threat.

[nsonha]

that's not how it works in Capitalism. You don't tell people not to do things, nor that they are doing things wrong and only you know better. People are going to employ AI and it will be proven more useful than human devs, or not. Best defense is showing your value to customers.

Personally, I don't find "craft"/"art form" to be the best way to think about technology either. Scientists don't think what they are doing is art (I think), so why should engineers think like that.