LLM thoughts
I'm going to use AI and LLMs interchangeably here. Whether LLMs represent true "intelligence" is up for debate. Either way, people are hellbent on calling LLMs "AI".
- You don't hate AI, you hate capitalism.
Software Engineering
There's going to be a lot of hatred of AI in the Software Engineering discipline in the future.
Some of this hatred will be on AI "taking away jobs." But the reality is that some wealthy person decided to reap the rewards of automation. This is not a new phenomenon. It's happened in many industries over time. And it will happen again.
ATMs didn't kill banking, the assembly line didn't kill factories. They changed them. They changed the customers and laborers relationship and experience with these industries.
Depending on the "type" of engineer you are, you will either mourn, or feel elation at the idea of AI writing code for you.
People hate AI in lots of ways
People hate AI in a lot of industries, especially creative ones (art, games, etc.).
AI is a soulless medium, leeching the life and meaning from an artform that is meant to convey emotion and experience.
In coding, tools have largely grown over time to offer more automation. IDEs, and frameworks are very common due to their ability to make the creation of something faster, more uniform. AI is an N+1 factor on top of this.
It is still possible to create garbage with AI, whether it's art, or code.
AI is not the paint, or the painter - it is the paintbrush. The canvas and the painter are still important parts in creating the work.
Code is cold and calculated. AI handles the drudgery. You still own the architecture, the specifications, the theory of the system. The interesting parts were never the typing.
Automation is the point
Making things easier and more accessible over time is the point of invention. We didn't create cars to make things harder. Planes were created because we couldn't teleport.
The trick is letting the tool do the boring parts so you can focus on the interesting ones. Ship something, then make it better. See also Software Convictions, Mostly Earned..
But the bill
Capitalism again, baby! We can't make the sun more scarce, so we don't build solar. We will certainly continue to burn fossil fuels until we are forced to stop. Perhaps we'll get fusion prior to the tipping point.
The cost isn't just environmental. It's human too. The pressure to keep up with tools that move faster than you do has a price. See Burnout.
Time to get comfortable
The nature of our work in software engineering is fundamentally changing. It's not a change we requested, but it's a change we have to learn to live with.
While there is plenty of hype around LLMs, there is also reality. LLMs are quite capable of automating away some of the toil of software engineering. And with that automation, they allow engineers to do more in less time.
With this new found power, we should also make the assumption that our work is changing from writing all of the code, to writing some of the code. And reading the rest of the code, which was generated. As such, it's time to change your working environment.
Get a hammock
Get a hammock. Ok, we don't actually have to get a hammock physically (although you could.) But we should all envision getting a hammock figuratively.
What I mean is that we should endeavour to make our workspaces fit the type of work we will be doing. That work has changed from ergonomics for typing, to ergonomics for reading. Ergonomics for thinking.