Has AI been able to figure out conflicting and quickly changing product requirements and implement them on top of existing technical debt?
You'll be fine.
You'll be fine.
It will be able to do it even faster, better and more cheaply than a human can.
Take what you did in the past year. Write down every product decision taken, every interaction with other teams figuring out APIs you had, all the infra where your code is running and how it was setup and changed, all the design iterations and changes that had to be implemented (especially if you have external partners demanding it).
Yes. All that you'd have to input into the AI, and hope it outputs something decent given all that. And yes, you'll have to feed all that into AI all the time because it has no knowledge or memory of "on Monday the new company bet was announced in the all hands"
You will be fine.
That’s before you add any summarization, fine tuning or other tricks.
The thing that computers have always done much better than humans is deal with much larger volumes of information. The thing that humans have always done much better than computers is reason on that information better. Now the computers are coming for that too.
Hopefully.
Any grunt can feed meeting notes into an AI. And frankly, and AI can parse an audio recording on a meeting.
And yes, how can we forget that any audio of a meeting has just the correct and final specifications, and not meandering discussions about anything and everything. Can't wait to see a canhazcheeseburger in a financial app because people in the meeting had cats on camera, and people demanded to see them.
I mentioned a "Revert Norway tax code" elsewhere https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37680060 It was a bit tongue in cheek, but a similar requirement ended up with:
- six months of discussions involving almost 20 people
- 4 new BigTable tables
- Deployment of 4 new Dataflow jobs, and fixes to two other Dataflow jobs
- Several complex test runs across the entire system including a few recreations of last year's full data to test that nothing broke
Not a grunt job, definitely. And I'm 100% sure that people doing that would still have their jobs 10 years from now, even with AI.
It amazes me, really, that people who would otherwise boast about how rational they are, and how they follow logic etc. completely replace all their knowledge and expertise with child-like belief in magic when it comes to anything AI-related.
I'd be sacred too, but at least would be taking a rational approach to it. It's an adapt or die situation. Putting your head in the sand is just gonna get you mowed down.
The only ones scared in this conversation are you and others who literally say you're scared for your jobs and your careers because of a magical boogey man.
I don't see why it wouldn't understand piles of hotfixes on top of each other, or even refactor technical debt in tight coupling with existing or historical specification.
Or is there a reason this is not going to happen in a few years?
But the thing is conversations like the above ie. both external support and internal feature requests could theoretically be handled by a GPT-like system also ending up in a ai created custom specification that could both be implemented and documented by the ai system instead of humans?
I know we're a few versions out, but still.
It might become a better code assist tool some 10 years from now, but it won't be able to implement product decisions.
And that's not even taking into account all the advances we'll have with AI within the next decade that we haven't even thought about.
But yeah, you may be right.
Nope. It's still not close to reality. It's as close to reality as it has been for the past 10 years while it was being hyped up to be close to reality.
> And that's not even taking into account all the advances we'll have with AI within the next decade that we haven't even thought about.
As with FSD, we may approach an 80% with the rest 20% being insurmountable.
Don't get me wrong, these advances are amazing. And I'd love to see an AI capable of what we already pretend it's capable of, but it's not even close to these dreams.
Cruise and Waymo are in production in very tightly fine-tuned and carefully monitored situations in two cities. We've yet to see if that can be easily (or at all) adapted to driving anywhere else.