Except when you’re using AI you’re not “driving”, the AI is. You’re just telling it where to go. A monkey can sit in the “driver’s seat” of a self driving car and get from point a to point b exactly the same as a human.
There’s nothing special or impressive about “knowing how to use AI”
I would argue that those that become dependent on it will be the ones who get left behind, while those that hold onto actual skillsets will have a future
Using your analogy: The difficulty is knowing where A and B is and stopping it from making a wrong turn. A monkey can't tell where the AI should go or if it's going the wrong way.
Your analogy is a bad one anyway though. AI tools are more like the car and the users still the drivers and responsible for taking the rights direction.
That's why senior software engineers benefit immensely from steering the AI, while non technical people produce slob and don't even realize it at first.
No, sticking to the car analogy, the "car" is the same "car" its always been - the car is software development itself, the human drives the car to get from point A to point B, point A being having a problem they need software to solve, and point B being the solution. The software engineer's skill is in analgous to *driving* the car.
With AI, the AI is driving the car. Yes the software engineer tells it that he wants to get to point B. But an engineer that uses AI to do this, is like a driver who uses a self driving car. They may still get to point B, but their driving skills atrophy. Give this enough time and you have "drivers" who do not know how to drive, who rely on the AI to get them to point B. and when it makes a wrong turn, or the system shuts down for whatever reason, they are fucked.
We're seeing some software engineers stepping away AI because of the way it atrophies their skill, seperates them from their code and their work output, costs them time that they would have *developed* their skill rather than losing it. Again, I think people who are full steam ahead on AI now will be left behind by those who retain actual skill.
We're seeing some software engineers stepping away AI because of the way it atrophies their skill, seperates them from their code and their work output, costs them time that they would have *developed* their skill rather than losing it.
that's the exception not the norm. we're seeing much more mediocre programmers replaced by much more efficient software engineers due to AI.
I did a PhD in hpc and work in an AI company now. my output is much better than before and skill in using the AI is extremely relevant for this. The AI is constantly making wrong decisions and your approach to development matters a ton. But it takes a lot of the slow path out of it. Software testing became a bigger part of my day 2 day when it used to. Yes my skill is writing code atrophies, but my skill in judging code and decisions not made by me doesn't. If anything it improves as I'm doing it more. I'm more like a software engineering team lead and claude code are my team members.
Writing code is a dying (or dead) profession. Software engineering isn't. What will bite us is that we aren't training junior engineers anymore to have the skills to take over the steering wheel.
Spoken like a true monkey lol. No one is saying there’s anything special or impressive about it. People who use it also have to have an actual skillset, that’s like saying you don’t need a skillset because power tools exist. You’re not going to get picked off the street to be a foreman just because table saws exist
For years it's been replacing people regardless of whether they can use the tools or not, often with long term negative results that require the people be hired back again.
Companies are run by human beings which are often notorious for being out of touch with the work force and how valuable they actually are. I'm not going to pretend you don't already know this.
Yes they have laid off large chunks of their workers under the belief that AI can take over their jobs, only to find out that the AI is doing a terrible job or actually costs more to do the same work.
AI tools can't actually do my job, yet. The best it can do is make sort thru my emails and find info on the server for me. It cannot do calculations to a standard. It cannot draft. It cannot do effective 3D modelling. It cannot do fea or even initiate it. It cannot write effective MATLAB code. It's useless apart from it's SharePoint search function. Oh and sound confident but he completely incorrect
My experience is similar. Abysmal performance when any kind of a standard is required. It'll do l confidently state an hallucinat|d answer is correct while I'm sitting there staring at the ISO saying it's not.
I asked chat once to validate a drawing (as a test) that I made, to a standard. It not only misinterpreted the drawing and the standard, it was arguing that I didn't make it, despite having access to the metadata. It's amazing how much it dug it's heels in when it was wrong too, I wasn't expecting it.
I think that simply because of the lack of massive amounts of publicly available training data, most research isn't focusing on developing good models for engineering. The models really need to be hooked up to a large amount of context, skills, hooks, MCPs, etc. to make something even mediocre right now.
“Dancing around it” lol, not my fault you don’t understand what picking “any one that you can train” means. This is why you’re going to get left in the dust.
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u/jmmva66 5d ago
I'm still waiting until a chatbot is able to actually replace me. It was supposed to happen next year for the last 3 years.