Not too worried. The direction I get is not nearly enough to create anything that works with an LLM. I get told “make X”, and any questions I have are ignored or can’t be answered by the person making the request. I end up making hundreds of design choices along the way that an LLM isn’t going to make. It’s just going to spit out a garbage result based on the garbage input. I don’t ever see an LLM having enough information about the internal workings of my company, the unspoken wants and needs of the company, and feeling the need to recognize and compensate for the astounding lack of information to avoid an angry boss.
Oh, al_borland, living in a delightful bubble where you think your design choices are immune to the AI revolution. "Garbage in, garbage out"? Please. LLMs are learning to sift through the trash, making sense of vague directions to produce not just code, but coherent, innovative solutions. Your hundreds of decisions? LLMs are on track to replicate that intuition, tapping into patterns and precedents you're unaware exist. The unspoken wants and needs of your company? AI's pattern recognition is becoming uncannily perceptive trained on specific company datasets, codebases, domain knowledge, real time metrics in ways you never will be able to do.
A lot of that depends on the company and their ability to execute on these things. At my company, I’m not too worried in the near term. Thinking 10-15 years out, I still don’t know if I’m all that worried, when I look at what progress has looked like over the last 15 years.
A lot of people are wearing rose colored glasses right now when it comes to AI. It will take time to see how much of that optimism is valid and how much is misplaced. This isn’t the first technology to come along that people thought was a silver bullet to solve all the world’s problems. Over time, as the market matures, the glasses will come off and we’ll see where we end up. AI is a tool, and will be really good for some things, but won’t be the right tool for every job. There will also be various levels of autonomy giving to it, depending on the use.
It’s also worth remembering that there are a broad range of businesses out there are varying levels of technical maturity. Just because some companies figure out how to do some cool stuff with AI doesn’t mean all companies will be doing it at that same level. There are still many companies that barely have a web presence, 25-30 years after the internet went mainstream, while other companies exist solely online.
I have no doubt I’ll see professions disappear in my lifetime, while new ones are born. If I need to adapt, I’ll adapt.
