aevai think it's neat how every time i make something i get a little better at making things, and every time you rent the ability to make things from a slop machine you get a little worse at making things. imagine how talented we'll both be after a few years of this :3
mds2 (Michael Sch-sko)@aeva yeah, this worries me. I've got fear of falling behind on the one hand and fear of skill atrophy on the other, plus I don't know where the machines will be in another (1 year, 5 years, whatever)
@areactis let's suppose the evangelists are right and their god machine is the real deal and it'll only keep getting better and better. if you went all in on ai, everything you invest time in now is going to be obsolete later, but also the promise is any fool will be able to operate it, so any ai job is going to eventually be considered unskilled labor and compensated accordingly.
@areactis we don't have to consider the case where the evangelists are not lying about what it is right now, because there is ample empirical evidence already that these so-called "tools" do not actually save time and rely on skilled workers to prop them up. if you embrace the tools now all you will be doing is shoveling shit in the wind
@areactis in any case, the best thing you can do strategically right now is keep your skills sharp, and a really good backup plan is to either learn and master a skill that computers can't do at all or specialize in a domain that is not well represented in any training sets and do you best not to let any of your work in that domain end up in future training sets
@areactis if you embrace ai and the ai stuff really does "win" the only thing you will have of value to the leisure class is your willingness to be a liable party for when the machine fucks up, which it will do frequently
@areactis everyone who is going along with it right now is helping create a future where the majority of programming jobs are minimum wage liability shields who also have to manage teams of virtual slaves, and the minority of the programming work will be performed by a dwindling pool of highly paid contractors who are periodically hired to fix crises created by the first group. the second group will dwindle because the turn over will be higher than the replacement rate
@areactis and also in this future, the countries where all the good tech jobs are and produce all the high tech products people actually want to use will be the ones that never adopt this shit
@areactis alternatively, if you're not adverse to get rich quick schemes that are likely to blow up spectacularly any day now and aren't particularly worried about the ethics, you could probably be the one who comes away from all this laughing by getting one of those mythical highly paid ai jobs, hold your nose through it for a few years, live frugally and use the money to go back to school and career change to something that will benefit your local community after the coming crash.
@aeva yeah, typically what I end up doing when I go that route is that I go into something vision related and end up specializing in classical techniques that are applied downstream of the ML magic (sometimes this involves meshes, sometimes image processing, once I got to do some tracking/controls adjacent stuff). Which was fun work back before the AI coding agents got good enough that it no longer made sense to ignore them. Honestly it's probably still fun, I also made the mistake of taking on a project that puts me inside the ML bits because I wanted to learn more about the ML bits. And *that* has turned into a few hard lessons about how knowing one set of things really well doesn't translate into knowing other things really well, especially if I don't already have decades of experience in the other things.
Also also, the roles I land in these domains aren't nearly as lucrative as the ones my spouse reads about in the news and wants me to get.
But yeah, the coding agents feel like they're too helpful to not use, but also too dangerous to use heavily, and I haven't settled on a middle ground that works for me. If you think that the right middle ground is "don't use them at all", I'm open to hearing you out.
@areactis the research I've seen so far says that ai coding tools make you less productive but they also are good at convincing you that you were more productive. so to me it seems like this is a great opportunity to get ahead, just do what you need to do to cheese any metrics your employer may be keeping on your ai use, but don't actually use the tools.
@areactis of course, that would require working for a company that is capable of recognizing who their top performers are, and if you're being graded on how many ai tokens you spend or whatever, you're probably not at such a company
@areactis but also, it seems like now is not really a good time to be looking for work as a programmer if you don't want to do this stuff. if you have stable work, your best bet might be staying, and if you have the free time, relying on hobby programming without AI is a good way to keep your skills sharp.