The Reason AI Won’t Take Your Coding Job
Photo by Tom Parkes on Unsplash
I think that the AI revolution is not quite the revolution it has been made out to be, at least in terms of coding and programming.
When I say that I think, I do of course mean I’ve developed an opinion based on the academic literature. Don’t worry though, The Secret Developer has read through the relevant information and knows you don’t need to be concerned about your software development job (at least not yet).
Here is why.
What AI Can Do (and What It Can’t)
AI systems for generating code like AlphaCode and ChatGPT are large language models trained on millions of lines of code. Since these systems are trained on GitHub code repositories, they have access to many small-scale coding problems.
As a result, AI is great at the type of coding problems FAANG companies use to separate the wheat from the chaff. It can answer many of these types of questions even if the context and the detail of the code are changed.
For you, dear software developer, this might mean the types of questions you are asked at your next interview are different, but this isn’t too scary for software devs all things considered.
The thing is that these tools are far from capable of handling large-scale computing applications. If you are currently working in the industry, these are the types of applications you are currently working on. This protects your current job but also has an interesting side-effect.
People ARE using AI Code in Production
In my current position, we are using GitHub Copilot to create production code. Candidates are coming into the recruitment funnel who use AI for their applications and expect to be able to use these tools during their work.
This is a different approach from another company in the same area and sector I interviewed with recently, who commented that they never used AI and probably never will, yet I have heard that they are using AI tools internally in any case.
Here’s the deal — developers are using AI to create their code in my experience. Your job is protected since…
The Result of AI Code is Jobs for Us
The code for larger pieces of work isn’t great. AI is great for simplification and automation. Since our senior developer copy-pasted from Stack Overflow I’ve become more aware about what is going on in the world of software development.
Standards are dropping, and over time, software developers are entering the profession, unable to complete simple tasks without the Internet or AI. professional developers are unable to understand and process simple coding tasks without tools.
As more developers copy—paste code without understanding it we are storing problems up for the future. Since AI is poor at coding in larger codebases we will need experienced developers to put this code into order.
The only people who will be able to do this are more experienced developers. At the end of the day software development and engineering isn’t about knowing how to code, it’s about understanding what to code and why. The other part is communication (and good communicators are favored in Agile) and AI isn’t capable of a fun conversation on Monday morning.
Conclusion
AI isn’t going to take your job away. It might make it harder for newbies to enter the profession and git gud, but for more experienced developers there isn’t anything to worry about.
Sleep easy. We are the future of coding, and we aren’t short of problems to solve so instead of panicking about AI we should work on those.