LLMs are glorified "LMGTFY" tools. AI assistance doesn't make people experts at anything. Some genz vibe coder isn't getting your job guys calm the heck down.
I think people who are afraid that AI coding is going to replace them should try using it a bit seriously. They should be quickly reassured.
What worries me more (on coding related impact of AI - because of course all the impact on fake news and democracies are much more worrying IMO) is having to deal with code written by others using AI (yes, people can write shity code on their own, but with manageable pace)
I'm not worried that LLMs, as they currently and foreseeably (i.e. 18 months) are, will be a good substitute for high quality developers like me.
But oh boy have I seen a lot of mediocre coders get away with mediocrity for a long time — there's a big risk that employers won't care about the quality, just the price, for long enough that the developments in AI are no longer foreseeable.
As someone whos a bit older, and remembers the latter wave of offshoring, I can tell you that quality doesn't matter.
Yes, fake news driving by AI slop is a big problem, but that is only enabled by social media personality fiefdoms.
The shit is going to hit the fan if 10% of the highest paid US working population is laid off for AI outsourcing. That kind of social change brings revolution. and thats before the fracture of US social fabric.
Because a lot of devs were getting a free ride off the back of ten years of zirp money, and firing people is a sure fire way to pump your share options.
With the .com crashes through 2000 and 2001, it wasn't until well after 2005-2008 until pay had started to come back up, and still without the crazy signing bonuses. We're still in the down trend, and the industry is bigger today, so longer/larger impact.
Not only that, but it's pushing market rates down significantly. I'm making about 60% of what I made the past few years... I could only handle not having income for so long. I was juggling two jobs for a while, but just couldn't manage it. Hoping to pick up some side work to fill the gaps. Have to face it, a lot of the high pay contract software jobs have just dried up for now.
I’m concerned that AI slop will affect open source projects by tilting the already unfavorable maintainer-contributor balance even more towards low-quality contributions.
Daniel Stenberg (from the curl project) has blogged a bunch about AI slop seeping into vulnerability reports[1], and if the same happens to code contributions, documentation and so forth that can help turning a fun hobby project into something you dread maintaing.
You don't need an equal replacement to lose your job, just a good enough and more economical one.
Lots of graphic designers lost their jobs or at least a lot of their work now that image generation models have gotten decent at rendering text. Now any idiot can whip up some advertising graphics at half the quality of a designer, but in 1/10th the time and 1/100th the cost (or even for free!). It doesn't matter that it looks like ass and makes no sense in context, they produced an acceptable result for a fraction of the cost.
Quality does not matter in the market, it never has. Whoever can produce the most slop at the lowest price nearly always wins. Yes, there are exceptions, many of them even. But not enough to employ nearly as many of us as there are now.
The fear may just be a result of thinking about who is making the decisions. I know I'm good, my peers know I'm good. But how far up in management chain does that knowledge go?
What worries me more (on coding related impact of AI - because of course all the impact on fake news and democracies are much more worrying IMO) is having to deal with code written by others using AI (yes, people can write shity code on their own, but with manageable pace)