I’m a dev. I’ve been for a while. My boss does a lot technology watch. He brings in a lot of cool ideas and information. He’s down to earth. Cool guy. I like him, but he’s now convinced that AI LLMs are about to swallow the world and the pressure to inject this stuff everywhere in our org is driving me nuts.
I enjoy every part of making software, from discussing with the clients and the future users to coding to deployment. I am NOT excited at the prospect of transitioning from designing an architecture and coding it to ChatGPT prompting. This sort of black box magic irks me to no end. Nobody understands it! I don’t want to read yet another article about how an AI enthusiast is baffled at how good an LLM is at coding. Why are they baffled? They have “AI” twelves times in their bio! If they don’t understand it who does?!
I’ve based twenty years of career on being attentive, inquisitive, creative and thorough. By now, in-depth understanding of my tools and more importantly of my work is basically an urge.
Maybe I’m just feeling threatened, or turning into “old man yells at cloud”. If you ask me I’m mostly worried about my field becoming uninteresting. Anyways, that was the rant. TGIF, tomorrow I touch grass.
Building abstractions and tools to reduce busy-work has been the goal of computer science since the moment we created assembly. The difficulty lies in finding methods that provide enough value for enough use-cases to outweigh the cost of learning, documenting, and maintaining them. Finding a solution that works for your narrow use-case is easy - every overly eager junior has done it. However, building solutions that truly advance CS takes time, effort, and many, many failures. I don’t mean to discourage you, but always be aware of the cost of your abstraction. Sometimes, the busy work is actually better.
I agree! It’s something I’ve been toying with in various guises for over 20 years now, it’s evolved a lot over that time - but now I run my own company I’ve decided to really put effort into implementing something usable that will save us time now and in the future.
It’s not about advancing CS, far from it - it’s about actually applying the core tenets of CS in practice. Things like re-usability, low coupling/high cohesion, maintainability, well-tested/robust, domain-oriented design, etc. are all really well understood and regarded as “Good”. Yet significant amounts of our development processes, technologies, and languages we use don’t meet those criteria.
We’ll see! I’m pleased with how it’s going, it’s already saving me time, so hopefully one day it’ll help others do the same.