AI Angst
There are so many posts, so much marketing, so much hype, so much push back. How do you know what is true, what is real, what is fake, wishful thinking.
Should I be worried about my job, my future? Are developers like me doomed?
I actually don't know the answer to the above and I am not going to pretend to be able to see how this will all end. But I can say that I am pretty much ignoring a lot of the AI posts from both extremes and trying to just pick up the more reasoned ones that sit in the middle somewhere.
This is what I currently use AI for:-
- Pretty much all my boilerplate code
- Code reviews
- Finding things in a code base that silversearcher is not appropriate for
- Summarising documentation
- Planning out what tasks would need to be done to add a feature
- Checking on the work of another AI
My current use of AI will probably expand but so far I enjoy using it. It takes the mundane out of my role and allows me to focus on solving the problems and edge cases.
BUT I do have two major concerns.
- The environmental impact of all the data centres springing up everywhere
- The possibility that I will forget how to code.
The environmental impact i can only influence in 1 way. And that is to control my use of AI so that those data centres are not required. BUT I am not convinced me using it or not is going to make any difference at all to big tech building another data centre. I can't see Jeff Bezos just checking data on his decision to build a data centre and declining because Dave Gill is not using AI.
Now this is my personal concern. That the skills and knowledge I have picked up over the years will slip out of my memory and code will become obscure to me. Which made me think of it like a voluntary (paid for) brain rot. But am I being overly dramatic? Am I a human computer worrying about the advent of the calculator. Is this all inevitable and programming skills are on the decline.
This concern is the only one I can do anything about. I can stop using AI and force myself to just coding away. But does that mean I will fall behind those people who are using AI? But then I am falling into that normal IT trap. You need to be up to date with the latest tech, the latest AI model, the latest frontend framework.
And then there is speed. The fact that this AI surge is a push to get workers (not just devs) working faster and faster and being more productive. Which you might think would be a good thing, and it would give people more spare time. But no, it is the additional productivity, the additional money driving this.