I can see someone in the future watching a program run and asking “wow, is that ai? A PERSON typed those cryptic letters? No way!”

  • silly goose meekah@lemmy.world
    2·
    4 days ago

    I fully agree with you, and just like to add my take on how developing will change in the near future:

    I think AI can help developers speed up their work. Its easier to find information from a documentation when you can just straight up ask the documentation about something, rather than having to research and find the correct paragraph/term yourself. I don’t think AI will replace documentation, just help you sift through it. Also tools like copilot are pretty useful, I think. It just helps speeding up the process of getting your ideas into code.

    • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
      3·
      4 days ago

      I prefer to coach my enthusiasm for the productivity improvements.

      If all you’re using it for is to find the relevant parts of the relevant documentation, then a vector search would do as well.
      What an LLM can do is synthesize readable docs out of poor or missing docs. When it isn’t hallucinating, that is.

      But I don’t actually see anyone using LLMs just to cut through the docs, they’re using it to code. And the results I’ve seen are pretty mixed. It does seem to help ramp up in a new area, but it also seems to become an impediment to moving past the ramp-up phase.
      Beginners can now produce beginner code at 2x the speed, and senior folks can now produce beginner code at 3x the speed. But nobody is producing senior level code.

      Plus, you know… All the ethical and socioeconomic concerns.