> Any LLM would outperform the DBA we had
I worked with 1000s of dba's in my 35 year career (I get into companies to 'fix things', so I see a lot of this). I don't think your case is unique at all. And seems to get worse.
I worked with 1000s of dba's in my 35 year career (I get into companies to 'fix things', so I see a lot of this). I don't think your case is unique at all. And seems to get worse.
If you have an average company that needs to settle for something that works instead of something that is great, you could already replace a ton of jobs with AI. When the C-suite realises this, below average devs are doomed. In the coming years we will probably see the first companies taking off primarily employing AI as coders - long before AIs can beat elite programmers.
Lets follow this all the way to the bottom: all coding employees are replaced by one very senior one who is AI assisted.
One thought -How are juniors turned into seniors? Lets say that we solve that with some yet to be invented educational solution, and then companies that arent code heavy would hire them for much less money or something like that.
The senior developer always keeps his job, because we cant have non technicals deploying LLM code yet. Then maybe that becomes solved, so your non technical CTO can deploy code.
This then creates an environments where fuck ups are on the CTO for being non technical. The blame aspect is the reason for this, its political.
Or it creates an environment where infrustructure and software becomes a solved problem altogether.
Then we start considering if AI can replace all engineering altogether in many fields. All of commerical writing and commercial creative arts are mostly taken over. Occasionally a brilliant human example moved things in a different direction, but this is quickly fed to the incumbent AIs and then it becomes commercialised.
What happens now? Everyone moves into hardware work?
> One thought -How are juniors turned into seniors? Lets say that we solve that with some yet to be invented educational solution, and then companies that arent code heavy would hire them for much less money or something like that.
In theory there are already many occupations like medicine where you have to study for years before you can do actual work, but coding wise it will still be easier, since people who do it as hobby will do it as hobby and become good enough on their own.
If you define elite programmers in the context of actual coding as those who excel at implementing ideas and solutions, I could imagine that this skill might become less relevant with the advent of AI. Smashing out over 1000 lines of Haskell would then be the equivalent of being able to calculate complex numbers in your head.
However, if you define elite programmers as those who possess good domain knowledge, communication-, management-, and soft skills, then yes, they might become so productive that they could replace developers whose main skill is writing code as we move up a level of abstraction. While it might help today to have a certain level of understanding about Assembly and C, we do not need to be elite at it to be a good software engineer.
I am asking as I met a few devs who are electrical engs. with a very good understanding of how a computer actually works but now earn more with React and Python.
Are we still talking about AIs as anything other than tools that will enhance everyone’s abilities instead of replace people at the bottom?
Beat elite programmers? Have you seen what hundreds of billions of dollars can get you and the models can’t even solve a logic puzzle?
Say those AIs exist. Who is going to prompt those AIs? Steve, the CEO, who can’t open his PDFs or Bill, the CTO, who has only 24 hours in the day.
We're still talking about AI as though the goal was never actually to have artificial intelligence. LLMs are impressive for what they are, but they definitely aren't intelligent. OpenTextPrediction just doesn't have a nice ring to it and definitely wouldn't be valued at billions of dollars.
The ability to solve problems is a particularly interesting one. To me there's a difference between brute forcing or pattern recognition and truly solving a problem (I don't have a great definition for that!). If that's the case, how do we really recognize which one an LLM or potential AI is doing?
It'd be a huge help if AI researchers put more focus on the interoperability problem before developing systems that could reasonably emerge intelligence.
This is my main fear about AI: AI being used to do stupid things more efficiently.
You clearly have far fewer meetings than I do! :-)
Currently AI already beats most of them on single one shot tasks but LLMs are not consistent across tasks for the same project; nor are a lot of humans but at the moment better than LLMs. And seeing the progress over the past 2 years; yes they get better at the one shot tasks, amazingly so, but consistency, even in the same conversation is a big issue. They just are not. So humans will win until that is fixed, if it can be. And hallucinating; people bluff about their knowledge too, but they can be corrected and might soak up that knowledge; for LLMs it's not proven it's even possible to fix this.
But yes I agree with your points generally, the rest of the tech staff is often even worse. This article was about dba's and I have and do meet many who shouldn't be ones and who are dangerous. Way too many.