At work, this week, what should have been a 30 minute task is taking all week because of process slog. Adding AI won’t make it any faster. It would make it slower, because of the time writing the prompts and checking its output.
Management isn’t really interested in fixing their process or training their workers. But they’re really excited about ai
They are excited that they can learn a tool that uses English to write their business logic. It’s not about AI making it easier for technical folks, it’s about to eventually getting rid of technical folks entirely. Or as much as they can feasibly get away with.
I’m starting to learn it deeper. I hate it. I don’t have a career if programming goes away though so I guess I’m making a deal with the devil while I try to find an exit strategy.
I don’t think LLM’s are going away. OpenAI will die, Claude will jack up their prices to match their cost, but the technology isn’t going away. At least until the next iteration shows up.
What’s also not going away is the truth of their actual abilities. The only people who really have to worry are the ones in the entertainment industry.
I would wager quite a lot that less than one out of every ten executives could properly explain what an SQL injection is, or even know the term at all. They would not write a prompt like this.
I worked for one executive who read an article about APIs and came to me and told me to start using APIs. In 2010. I told him it sounded good and I would look into it.
My exec asked “how is the ODBC coming?” We were a Linux shop. Also we weren’t, like, doing anything near the type of work that… it still baffles me. After a beat I said “good.”
Writing all these prompts almost seems like a more time-consuming thing than actually programming the software.
The great prof. dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote exactly that already in his 1978 essay On the foolishness of “natural language programming”:
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html
100%
At work, this week, what should have been a 30 minute task is taking all week because of process slog. Adding AI won’t make it any faster. It would make it slower, because of the time writing the prompts and checking its output.
Management isn’t really interested in fixing their process or training their workers. But they’re really excited about ai
They are excited that they can learn a tool that uses English to write their business logic. It’s not about AI making it easier for technical folks, it’s about to eventually getting rid of technical folks entirely. Or as much as they can feasibly get away with.
Right. Ownership doesn’t want to pay for labor. They want to keep all the money for themselves.
Which makes it funny (in a sad way) when all these tech folks, who are labor, are super on board with this whole thing. You’re digging your own grave.
I’m starting to learn it deeper. I hate it. I don’t have a career if programming goes away though so I guess I’m making a deal with the devil while I try to find an exit strategy.
You don’t have to worry long term. The only issue is how hard your boss falls for the snake oil sales pitch.
I don’t think LLM’s are going away. OpenAI will die, Claude will jack up their prices to match their cost, but the technology isn’t going away. At least until the next iteration shows up.
What’s also not going away is the truth of their actual abilities. The only people who really have to worry are the ones in the entertainment industry.
Absolutely true, but executives kind of understand prompts whereas they don’t understand programming at all.
I would wager quite a lot that less than one out of every ten executives could properly explain what an SQL injection is, or even know the term at all. They would not write a prompt like this.
I worked for one executive who read an article about APIs and came to me and told me to start using APIs. In 2010. I told him it sounded good and I would look into it.
My exec asked “how is the ODBC coming?” We were a Linux shop. Also we weren’t, like, doing anything near the type of work that… it still baffles me. After a beat I said “good.”