folekaule comments on Experienced software developers assumed AI would save them a chunk of time. But in one experiment, their tasks took 20% longer

[–] folekaule@lemmy.world 14 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Very true. I've been saying this for years. However, the flip side is you get the best results from AI by treating it as a junior developer as well. When you do, you can in fact have a fleet of virtual junior developer working for you as a senior.

However, and I tell this to the junior I work with: you are responsible for the code you put into production, regardless if you write it yourself or you used AI. You must review what it creates because you're signing off on it.

That in turn means you may not save as much time as you think, because you have to review everything, and you have to make sure you understand everything.

But understanding will get progressively harder the more code is written by other people or AI. It's best to try to stay current with the code base as it develops.

Unfortunately this cautious approach does not align with the profit motives of those trying to replace us with AI, so I remain cynical about the future.

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[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 17 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Usually, having to wrangle a junior developer takes a senior more time than doing the junior's job themselves. The problem grows the more juniors they're responsible for, so having LLMs stimulate a fleet of junior developers will be a massive time sink and not faster than doing everything themselves. With real juniors, though, this can still be worthwhile, as eventually they'll learn, and then require much less supervision and become a net positive. LLMs do not learn once they're deployed, though, so the only way they get better is if a cleverer model is created that can stimulate a mid-level developer, and so far, the diminishing returns of progressively larger and larger models makes it seem pretty likely that something based on LLMs won't be enough.

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[–] folekaule@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (4 children)

I'm a senior working with junior developers, guiding them through difficult tasks and delegating work to them. I also use AI for some of the work. Everything you say is correct.

However, that doesn't stop a) some seniors from spinning up several copies of AI and test them like a group of juniors and b) management from seeing this as a way to cut personnel.

I think denying these facts as a senior is just shooting yourself in the foot. We need to find the most productive ways of using AI or become obsolete.

At the same time we need to ensure that juniors can develop into future seniors. AI is throwing a major wrench in the works of that, but management won't care.

Basically, the smart thing to do is to identify where AI, seniors, and juniors all fit in. I think the bubble needs to pop before that truly happens, though. Right now there's too much excitement to cut cost/salaries with the people holding the purse strings. Until AI companies start trying to actually make a profit, that won't happen.

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[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago (3 children)

If LLMs aren't going to reach a point where they outperform a junior developer who needs too much micromanaging to be a net gain to productivity, then AI's not going to be a net gain to productivity, and the only productive way to use it is to fight its adoption, much like the only way to productively use keyboards that had a bunch of the letters missing would be to refuse to use them. It's not worth worrying about obsolescence until such a time as there's some evidence that they're likely to be better, just like how it wasn't worth worrying about obsolescence yet when neural nets were being worked on in the 80s.

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[–] folekaule@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

You're not wrong, but in my personal experience AI that I've used is already at the level of a decent intern, maybe fresh junior level. There's no reason it can't improve from there. In fact I get pretty good results by working incrementally to stay within its context window.

I was around for the dotcom bubble and I expect this to go similarly: at first there is a rush to put AI into everything. Then they start realizing they have to actually make money and the frivolous stuff drops by the wayside and the useful stuff remains.

But it doesn't go away completely. After the dotcom bust, the Internet age was firmly upon us, just with less hype. I expect AI to follow a similar trend. So, we can hope for another AI winter or we can figure out where we fit in. I know which one I'm doing.

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[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago (1 child)

There's a pretty good reason to think it's not going to improve much. The size of models and amount of compute and training data required to create them is increasing much faster than their performance is increasing, and they're already putting serious strain on the world's ability to build and power computers, and the world's ability to get human-written text into training sets (hence why so many sites are having to deploy things like Anubis to keep themselves functioning). The levers AI companies have access to are already pulled as far as they can go, and so the slowing of improvement can only increase, and the returns can only diminish faster.

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[–] folekaule@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

I can only say I hope you're right. I don't like the way things are going, but I need to do what I can to adapt and survive so I choose to not put my hopes on AI failing anytime soon.

By the way, thank you for the thoughtful responses and discussion.

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