Ask HN: Developers, are you afraid of AI taking your job in the next 5 years?

Relevant discussions,

Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33941868)

Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36567918)

Ask HN: Does AI progress also fill you with dread? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33913132)

hello,

no.

at least not in the next 5 y ;)

why?

imho. (!)

development != writing code.

writing code is the minor task of a (software-)developer.

and this is the only part where current "AI" is of any help - eg. pre-trained neuronal networks.

for me this is somehow ... "instead of searching the internet" for help - and find it on stackoverflow, reddit or some other q&a platform - i ask the language-model to help me - nice, but again: in the end nothing really new!

the main task of development is to understand an existing problem of my customer and solve it in a decent way.

to do this, a developer has to communicate with all stakeholders - technical and non-technical - of the project etc...

writing code is just the expression of this understanding.

sure ... at some point in time in the future, we'll have "hard AI" which will be lets call it "human-like" ... but until then, (software-)development will just be "augmented"*) by existing "AI" solutions but not overtaken :))

*) again: imho. very similar like we moved from "reading books about programming" to "searching the internet for solutions" to solve smaller sub-problems ...

cheers t.

Not really. But let's face it, AI can do the job faster than a human, but someone has to review it's code, though. It kind of reminds me of GitHub Copilot, it would possibly output a GPL-licenced snippet, and it wouldn't warn the user.

Nah. I used to not have to worry about deploying and monitoring software - we had an ops guy! Now there's still an ops guy but all the programmers have to do it too, we just call it devops now.

Taking of the AI stack might make us hire a few more people.

No, I still don’t believe in AI being able to produce things by itself.

The human using the AI will need to articulate the exact things he wants.

That’s exactly what programming is all about.

But I am sold on the idea of AI being a good copilot though.

can an AI build an entire functioning backend with tests, DBs, queues, ..?

can an AI debug/profile/.. entire distributed backend, find what's wrong and add at least one integration test so it won't happen again?

can an AI setup all the devops pipelines, setup monitoring and alerting?

can management trust what an AI spits and put it in prod?

if the answer is no to one or more to the above, then my job is secure.

the better question..

am I using the latest GPTs to do my work and save a lot of time and get more things done? hell yes

We'll always need a human in the loop to make sure the code is correct and does what it's intended to do. I will be one of those (paid) humans.

Afraid? No. 90% of software dev jobs are reimplementing the spreadsheet. Let the AI do it: I’m sure tired of it.

Only if I also refuse to adopt AI.