THIS is Why Devs Are Wary of AI
Photo by Samuel Berner on Unsplash
It is (looks at watch) 2024 and LLMs are proliferating our lives as software engineers.
I know many software engineers who are worried about the viability of their chosen profession, typically because they feel they might be out of a job. I don’t think that is a realistic danger —and I want to tell you why you really should be worried about the prevalence of AI in the field of software development.
AI Breeds Fear in…the Inexperienced
I get why some of my colleagues are concerned about their jobs. I laughingly say they shouldn’t fear it because AI is completely unable to eat ramen!
The fact is that AI assistants and Copilot are going to change what it means to be a developer. Easier tasks are going to become, well, easy. We can generate simple algorithmic solutions at the click of a button and transplant them right into our code. Even better, we can use these tools to understand the context of our codebase and generate code that fits right in.
For these simple coding tasks, there is a danger that quick and easy suggestions will mean there isn’t much quick and easy work for developers to do.
Who is completing these quick and easy tasks? Inexperienced developers. It’s understandable junior developers are beginning to ask where their next job may come from, as AI can deal with the type of problems these developers often need to deal with.
Copy-Paste Danger
You see when inexperienced devs are given quick and easy short-term fixes they often take it. That means these developers are using copy-paste solutions that they barely understand and introducing them into codebases.
This is problematic when this code is introduced without being properly checked and certainly not refined for reuse or maintainability.
I’ve seen junior developers paste whole blocks of code into ChatGPT and simply ask it “Why doesn’t this work? Sure, it sometimes gets the right answer, and the developer might copy-paste a solution back into the codebase, but I’m unsure about the quality of that work. When I say unsure about the quality of the work, I ensure it failed code review.
So, What Should We Be Scared Of?
Devs themselves know what we should be working on in the world of AI. It’s not just about solving a problem; this is about producing great code.
Take a look at the following graph:
Developers themselves feel that they should be measured on code quality. That encompasses execution and maintenance and should be the focus of us all going forward.
So, What Should We Be Wary Of?
In a world where many of us work from home collaboration has taken a back seat.
Collaboration is at the core of what makes developers most productive, satisfied, and impactful.
In this world of AI, we might just have forgotten what makes us the best developers (and what it is that no AI can replace): collaboration is key.
We should not forget who we are or what we do well as developers, AI or no AI.
Conclusion
As developers, we need to work on our environments. Whether that means engaging with our colleagues, going into the office or just how we can operate in a more collaborative environment. We should be thinking of more than just the code.
AI can help with coding issues, but the fundamentals of our job aren’t going away. Just think about that for a minute rather than just copy-pasting.