I was recently asked by a software engineering student (meaning, an upstart junior developer) about how I thought AI would impact their upcoming career and address their feeling of dread.
Their concern:
The way this stuff is moving scares me, and I don’t know where to stand now because if AI is able to determine 27-year-old bugs, what’s the point of a human who studies cybersec etc. if a model can identify such a longstanding issue in a codebase overnight? And who’s to say that these models will eventually be perfected to the point where they make no mistakes? Kinda demotivating. And makes me feel like there’s no point in learning anymore. At least that’s how I think of it; if we can make models stop hallucinating, stop making any form of error, which I believe we actually can do because it’s just a load of math and logic at the end of the day (right?), then learning anything CS related has lost relevance.
Below was my response:
I hear you. I’d be lying if I said AI won’t affect our industry – it will. The feat you mentioned is exactly why I’m enjoying AI these days. I’m enjoying being an architect and being able to steer the direction of the system as a whole. The AI engines of today can look through an entire codebase for certain issues in ways that would take me hours, days, weeks, and even then I’d miss them. But they can, without ego or sleep, consume an entire codebase and tell me “oh yeah, this IS a problem”. Now, it didn’t know there was an issue until I explained the architectural issues I was looking for. It’s an LLM – it can’t be creative. It can only “surmise.” That’s the difference with humans vs. LLMs – creativity.
Working together with these models has been life-changing. I’m more excited about development than in a long time. Developers can now “work towards a goal” and let the agents wire things up. Think of it like building a car. Robots in factories put pieces together based on an engineering plan. In our case, they’re writing code. The engineers are still necessary for “the big picture” and accountable to the final result. No computer will ever replace that (and shouldn’t), because only the humans can be held accountable.
Will this change in the future? Maybe. You’ll drive yourself insane trying to predict the future. You can try to prepare for it, but how do you prepare for something you don’t know? Exactly. Help things go right, and less things will go wrong. It’s kind of all you can do.
In the meantime, you can write software faster, and more efficiently, than ever before. You can also make mistakes faster, and more efficiently, than ever before. Have fun on your way to the finished product 🙂
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