The Secret Developer Unmasked
Photo by Alexandru Zdrobău on Unsplash
Recently The Secret Developer has been struggling with certain aspects of coding, and it seems that there is an obvious reason why their performance has changed (and not all for the better).
It’s time to pull back the curtain and explain what has happened to The Secret Developer over the last couple of years and what we can learn from it — how you can undergo the change The Secret Developer has undergone.
Improvements in The Secret Developer’s Coding Performance
The Secret Developer always found LeetCode annoying, even when passing interviews with their skills.
Recently their LeetCode performance has increased by a factor of 100. Just feed them the coding question and they’ll answer in real-time.
Sure, sometimes the code doesn’t work at all but The Secret Developer has those code examples cracked.
Decline in Understanding the Codebase
The Secret Developer’s performance has declined at work. Many of their Pull Requests simply don’t work, and where they have to interface with dependencies their work is a mess.
The bugs written in their code are difficult to solve, and some code they provide simply will not compile at all.
People have started to wonder about the performance of The Secret Developer and question their role within the organization.
Decline in communication
The Secret Developer keeps replying to complaints on Slack with “Sorry for the confusion…” and they communicate in this overly formal way.
Their documentation is overly long and wordy, and difficult for fellow developers to understand.
They will not respond to video calls or go into the office under any circumstance.
Something is happening to The Secret Developer.
The Real Reason Behind the Change
The Secret Developer isn’t who you thought they were. They’ve been replaced.
By AI.
Their Herman Miller chair is empty and all of their work is now simply provided by a large language model.
Where did the human go? We just don’t know. Perhaps they’ve gone to work at a Dvorak keyboard factory? Perhaps they’re in a corner studying a book on combinatorics? Your guess is as good as mine, but they’re long gone.
How Did This Happen?
It was only a matter of time. AI has been writing serviceable code for some time now, but this is the first recorded case of someone being completely replaced by an AI.
A team of undercover AI researchers set out to clone The Secret Developer. The model has been trained on thousands of blog posts, tweets, and whiteboard scrawlings. The Secret AI bot is now a sarcastic self-interested developer who thinks they are somehow superior to their colleagues and enjoys debugging above all.
What This Means for you
You might think that you will not disappear and be replaced by an AI. The truth is The Secret Developer has deserved to be fired for some time and their communication skills are as poor as their relationships with their colleagues.
The only way you are going to survive in this new AI world is to integrate AI into your workflow and increase your code quality, communication, and teamwork.
If you can do these things I’ve a secret to tell you. No AI will be able to replace you (and you’ll probably get a promotion too).
Conclusion
The Secret Developer has a bright future in front of them. Whether you believe they have been replaced by an AI or were an AI all along the blog posts keep coming and illuminating our days with their experience.
The truth on this April Fool’s Day is the best software developers will not be replaced by AI, and you will not be replaced either. Isn’t that a hopeful thought?