The client wants to drag and drop their own personalized excel file with no guaranteed formatting or column order or data contract in order to import their data into our system <3

I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.

My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.

When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.

Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.

No, the customer wants a button that does a very specific thing.
He can't tell you what that is, though. You're the expert!
Also, can you put in more ads? And make it so the users can't close the tab until they bought something.

This is when the AI, in a microsecond, decided to destroy the human race.

I had a client once explain to me that his request for the 75% redesign of his mobile app would be simple because "it's just 3 pages"

That was the exact quote

I know that was hardly related to the post, but it reminded me of that and I needed to vent to my therapist (aka strangers on Lemmy)

Button that does something? That’s too advanced for me, I’ll use a library

You know what we, in the industry, call a detailed specification fo requirements detailed enough to produce software? Code.

Surprised there's no one in the comments going bat shit crazy that this was made by AI. Are we not doing that anymore?

Managers about to find out the hard way that all the requirements are in the brains of those they laid off.

I’m sure coding bootcamp and AI will turn them into leet hax0rs.

presses button; nothing happens

"Well see here! I wanted that button to do something!"

"Oh but it did! It wasted your time as well as mine!"

Whoa whoa, hold on there! You can't expect a product manager to come up with such detailed specs!

AI:

AI slop image, for this gag?

Customer requirements are basically always “I want what my Excel sheet used to do”.

AI Project Manager: Create a button on a webpage that, when clicked, displays an alert saying "Hello World!"
AI Programmer: "What a sensible requirement! Here you go."
AI Billing Department: "Project completed, that'll be 10 million dollars."
Client AI Payments Department: "Sounds right, paid!"

"Can we jazz it up a bit?"

This is a real request from a real manager. They have played us for absolute fools.

"Y'know, I've been thinking... The app is missing a couple of things, like This, and That, and it should also do This after That, but not That after This, and maybe even navigate to The Other Thing after 3 Launch events, while also not doing that if the user is under a Pisces moon in the 4th Year of Wilting..."

"So... you want a Rate the App pop-up with specific trigger conditions?"

"What?! No! I want one of those prompts with the stars and the redirect to the Store which lets people post reviews of the app, what are you even talking about?!"

AI Junior Dev: short-circuits

My wife had her first meeting with Chat Gpt today.

She went from a random question about her job to the AI offering to taking care of her LinkedIn page, and promoting alternative positions for her.

It feels to me the product manager is in trouble too.

Me: I need spec -- not just trust code Manager: You always make unnecessary demands, I'm replacing you AI: I would be happy to help you, if you could provide spec? Manager: god fuckin dammit

I honestly sometimes think to go into business myself just so I can write contracts that say "you will give us a fucking spec" and just keep billing while they fuck around not providing a spec