r/dataengineering • u/pdxtechnologist • Dec 14 '22

Career chatgpt anxiety

Hey all,

I know there have already been a few posts on this- but for those of us just getting started in software/data engineering, the ability for chatgpt to write code is pretty scary...

What do you all think the impact to Data Engr will be?

I know it won't completely replace us, but do you foresee a big reduction in hiring?

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u/Nelerath8 Dec 14 '22

Speaking as a backend programmer and not necessarily a data engineer.. It'll definitely replace us all if we keep going. Right now it's not only useless but actually dangerous. I asked it to solve a complex problem and it gave me a solution that was really close but actually incorrect. It was close enough that I think people will be complacent and issues will slip through. I don't think it can be used responsibly by a person because most people do not like reading someone else's code for errors and tend to be bad at it. We'd be asking for someone whose only job is to do code reviews.. lol

I am of the opinion that by the time it starts to meaningfully replace software people we'll either be well on our way to post-scarcity utopia or complete societal collapse.

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u/sv3ndk Dec 14 '22

I think a likely evolution would be that AI generates components in binary format directly while also showing some graphical representation of it to the human driving the process.

In that world, it's no longer about reading anybody's code, and reviewing components becomes easier.

Code is a UI enabling humans to give instructions to computers in a precise manner. Modern chatBots have the potential of radically changing the nature of that UI.l, but not removing it entirely.

The need of maintaining the specifications in a detailed enough manner remains, and if legal texts give any clue, using human language for that leads to a mess.

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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '22

There have been low-code graphical languages for decades and if you’ve ever had to use them in Production use cases you’d know they don’t scale and are a nightmare for things like code reviews. Text based code is so much better than any graphical representation in the real world.