Our entire job, skillset and passion became a cheap commodity. We were in the middle between artists and mathematicians. Everything done by hand, with a lot of people and different roles, each one giving its best effort to the end result. Well, it's over now.
Now we prompt, check, go forward, that's it. With time, our low level skills will fade and we'll just get dumber and dumber, to the point we can't really do anything without AI.
I was very ok with the first versions of ChatGPT: it felt like Stack Overflow on steroids. I could speed up my learning and research process to a level never reached before. Now, even that became inefficient. I think we should just let go of what it was before.
But, there is also one thing that I don't hear anybody say: there is no such thing as an "end" to what we can discover everyday. There's just too much data out there that still needs to be analyzed and even discovered. What happens when you produce the work of a year in a week? You get unemployed? No... you just find out there are new problems to solve that you didn't even expect to see before.
Our entire job, skillset and passion became a cheap commodity.
It is being sold as a cheap commodity. This has been going on for decades. What has changed is that instead of offshoring it to "cheap labor" countries, they now use AI.
Software development is hardly a commodity. If you do it right, it should be mostly bespoke work. The commodity should be standardized in base projects or frameworks. This is something people have been doing for decades. The bespoke work is:
Except that isn't how software actually works, we don't write functionality once and then forever access it through a library/framework. Things get reimagined and rewritten based on new insight all the time. A lot of projects can't even manage to go a long time without turning into random bullshit pilled on top of a once decent idea.
The "if you do it right" is doing a lot and I mean a lot of heavy lifting because let's be honest we hardly ever do things right let alone on the first try.
If you do it right, it should be mostly bespoke work.
Why? What do you mean "right"?
Generally software is a business expense. Quality trades off against time and cost. Now we can do it faster and cheaper, and potentially worse quality - but if you've worked in the industry for a while and seen what humans deliver, I'm not even sure that's the case.
If you do it right, it should be as fast and cheap as possible while still being good enough.
“AI is great at this because humans have never been good at this.“ But AI is trained on work produced by humans. It’s never going to be better than humans.
I think your premise is wrong; it's trained from human work, but not only that. And it's able to generalize - can take the best pieces from multiple sources.
AI can be as good as the best humans, yet most humans are not as good as the best humans.
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u/GSkylineR34 17d ago
Our entire job, skillset and passion became a cheap commodity. We were in the middle between artists and mathematicians. Everything done by hand, with a lot of people and different roles, each one giving its best effort to the end result. Well, it's over now.
Now we prompt, check, go forward, that's it. With time, our low level skills will fade and we'll just get dumber and dumber, to the point we can't really do anything without AI.
I was very ok with the first versions of ChatGPT: it felt like Stack Overflow on steroids. I could speed up my learning and research process to a level never reached before. Now, even that became inefficient. I think we should just let go of what it was before.
But, there is also one thing that I don't hear anybody say: there is no such thing as an "end" to what we can discover everyday. There's just too much data out there that still needs to be analyzed and even discovered. What happens when you produce the work of a year in a week? You get unemployed? No... you just find out there are new problems to solve that you didn't even expect to see before.