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This reminds me of a convo I had a few days ago with my mid-20s daughter, who is a dev at a large successful tech company. When I asked her how the AI rollout was going, she said she hated it, for 2 reasons: 1) it's being crammed down their throats from "up high" without real thought being put into it, more like "AI everything" is some kind of executive mantra; that is a common refrain in companies 2) AI is taking away the aspect of the job she enjoys -- and the reason she switched to dev in the first place (her degree is in chemE) -- which is to write code, and replacing it with the aspect of the job she dislikes, which is PQA. So now instead of being a developer -- which she worked hard to get to and is quite good at, she's being reduced to a QA person, going over agent-generated code (generated by her or more likely, others on her team; she's one of the senior devs). It's sapping her creativity and inspiration, and pretty soon she's just going to be phoning it in. It's a shame. It saddened me to hear this and makes me think how this might affect society in a negative way. It's not that AI itself is the core problem, but the way that companies are "implementing" it, _is_ a problem. 3) AI doesn't actually properly do the actual mundane and time-consuming-but-soul-sucking tasks that she would like to offload to AI. This has more to do with how it's integrated into the company, their code base, etc. It's like people who say "I want AI to do my dishes so I can write letters instead of writing my letters so I can do the dishes." Some people just want to see results and don't care about the process. So writing an LLM prompt or figuring out the code, is the same to them. But for others, the journey is the goal. It's like how some people still want to craft furniture by hand when they could just get a machine to spit it out. |