Gone are the days when gaining a skill through spending some time learning in order to know stuff separated developers from great developers. In this day and era, your skill to prompt the AI is what makes you a super coder.
In this article I will be rumbling about what I think about the use of AI, is it good for your career (beginners vs experts), and of course the most controversial question (will AI takeover our jobs)
Is AI really good for your career?
Well, it depends. For me AI is a tool that you should use to assist you to do your job not heavily rely on it to do your entire job. Using AI tools like ChatGPT is great if you are in later stages of your career than when you are still a beginner. If you are using AI to do your entire job you should not be having a job (you are just lucky your boss does not know you can be replaced by AI)
Tools like ChatGPT should come in handy when you are stuck with a bug and need a way out. If you are still learning to code you need to avoid abusing the use of such tools for every problem that you will face. This will help you master whatever are learning and help with building your creativity.
I know you are already saying to yourself, "this guy is crazy, ChatGPT was created to do that. If I cannot use it to do that then what is the point of having it?". Well, that actually makes sense and it is supposed to do that. Is having AI doing everything for you good for you though? I do not think so.
I was recently doing my MSc degree the past 2 years and I realized that if ChatGPT had been released before I commenced my MSc degree I would have become an empty head. Considering my levels of laziness, I would have dodged doing all the assignments on my own and that would have costed me all the knowledge that I have now. When you are learning something new you need to limit the use of AI tools, suffer a little bit trying to figure out things on your own.
“There is no growth without pain. No life without suffering.”
― Cynthia Eden, Burn For Me
Will AI takeover our jobs?
That actually depends with the job. Some people have already lost their jobs because of AI but as developers I do not think AI will never be able to replace us. As developers I think we are users of AI therefore we will never be replaced. The worst thing AI will do to us is cut our jobs that is instead of having a team of 10 developers we might end up having a team of 1 10x super coder and god level ChatGPT user.
Though AI might not takeover our jobs, i think we a heading to an AI dystopia. The use of tools like ChatGPT will improve our productivity but ruin our creativity.
A world where an AI tool can generate an entire application for you would be great right? well i dont think so, i believe that suffering makes you a great thinker and being a great thinker makes you creative.
Top comments (6)
You've just put into words the same thoughts I've been pondering. Glad to see that I'm not alone out here.
My company just put out an official AI policy that is going to limit some uses of these tools. I'm fine with that. I'm sure we will be getting some new hires in the near future that will be in for a surprise that they will actually need to know the skills we hire for, and they can't simply rely on pasting code into ChatGPT and asking for changes.
AI is yet another tool, like the MILLIONS of tools human beings use in their lives every day, so why make big deal out of it?
If a developer uses AI to write code, is that much different than an accountant using a calculator? It is not.
As developers, we don't know how to solve every problem that we face, so in these cases we used to ask colleagues, or search elsewhere (stack overflow, forums..) and the solution used to be the combination of all these methods. If AI (chatGPT, Copilot..) is shortening the time of you finding the solution, it doesn't mean it replaces you, it is merely helping/assisting you.
In my experience, I figured out that AI helps me do things faster than before, and possibly does 10-20% of my job (mostly automated tests or documentation generation), that is not even near replacing me, because I am still the creative mind behind the solution (or at least 80-90% of the solution) and I am still the decision maker.
If you think AI can replace you, then you are a very BAD developer. Similar to the accountant example, if someone else is doing the ACCOUNTANT part and you are doing the calculation part only by using a calculator, than surely you can say that the calculator can replace you.
Love this take! Thanks for sharing!
You are welcome, thank you for taking your time to read
Nice memes
🤣
I initially thought chat gpt would make learning code easy for me then I stopped using it and had way more fun learning it normally I think I'm going to keep it this way.