I was ju…. Let me backtrack. I get emails of Medium posts from Medium.com, and Ido not know why. Around a year ago, I signed up for many email lists (and canceled maaaaany), but I do not recall Medium being in the mix. In any case, I just read a Medium post about using AI chat bots for writing code, and it made some good points.
When you took that software dev job, you wanted to write code. Moreover, your education revolved around writing code. But now, your profession mostly entails looking for esoteric bugs. The chat bot doesn’t use logic, so the bugs that may occur are disconnected from the software itself. As a result, the manner in which you’re accustomed to debugging is fundamentally different than the way in which you need to debug now.
The problem here is that the nature of the software developer’s work has changed entirely. A decade ago, when you started your career, you addressed challenges that related to the manner in which you approached problems. Now, by contrast, you are looking for the bugs the chat bot created, with no ability to concisely answer discrete questions.
That may be appealing to the managerial caste, but it is inherently unenjoyable for those people who sought engineering jobs to….. engineer.
Honestly, when I think about it in this context, I am much more amenable to what Ed Zitron says regarding “business idiots.” I, myself, have used ChatGPT for Linux system tasks, but I examined the commands one by one before entering anything. I realize that is simply not what many folks are doing nowadays. Whereas these chat bots can be helpful to businesspeople writing toy code quickly, that is not what technologists are doing, and conflating the two creates a false equivalence.