Editor’s Note: previous titles for this article have been added here for posterity.
  • Maxxie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    901·
    18 days ago

    (let me preach a little, I have to listen to my boss gushing about AI every meeting)

    Compare AI tools: now vs 3 years ago. All those 2022 “Prompt engineer” courses are totally useless in 2025.

    Extrapolate into the future and realize, that you’re not losing anything valuable by not learning AI tools today. The whole point of them is they don’t require any proficiency. It “just works”.

    Instead focus on what makes you a good developer: understanding how things work, which solution is good for what problem, centering your divs.

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      18 days ago

      Key skill is to be able to communicate your problem and requirements which turns out to be really hard.

      • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        17 days ago

        It’s also a damn useful skill whether you’re working with AI or humans. Probably worth investing some effort into that regardless of what the future holds.

        • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
          3·
          17 days ago

          Though it’s more work with current AI at least compared to another team member - the AI cannot have access to a lot of context due to data security rules.

  • fuzzzerd@programming.devEnglish
    52·
    18 days ago

    I don’t remember progressive web apps having anywhere near the level of fanfare as the other things on this list, and as someone that has built several pwas I feel their usefulness is undervalued.

    More apps in the app store should be pwas instead.

    Otherwise this list is great and I love it.

    • sidelove@lemmy.world
      18·
      18 days ago

      Which is honestly its best use case. That and occasionally asking it to generate a one-liner for a library call I don’t feel like looking up. Any significant generation tends to go off the rails fast.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        18 days ago

        If you use it basically like you’d use an intern or junior dev, it could be useful.

        You wouldn’t allow them to check anything in themselves. You wouldn’t trust anything they did without carefully reading it over. You’d have to expect that they’d occasionally completely misunderstand the request. You’d treat them as someone completely lacking in common sense.

        If, with all those caveats, you can get this assistance for free or nearly free, it might be worth it. But, right now, all the AI companies are basically setting money on fire to try to drive demand. If people had to pay enough that the AI companies were able to break even, it might be so expensive it was no longer worth it.

      • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        18 days ago

        Getting it to format documentation for you seems to work a treat. Nothing too complex, just “move this bit here, split that into points”.

      • Omgpwnies@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        18 days ago

        I’ve been using it to write unit tests, I still need to edit them to mock out some things and change a bit of logic here and there, but it saves me probably 50-75% of the time it used to take, just from not having to hand-write all that code.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    17·
    18 days ago

    No one can predict the future. One way or the other.

    The best way to not be let behind is to be flexible about whatever may come.

    • rodbiren@midwest.socialEnglish
      9·
      17 days ago

      Can’t predict the future, but I can see the past. Specifically the part of the past that used standards based implementations and boring technology. Love that I can pull up html with elements using ALL CAPs and table aligned content. It looks like a hot mess but it still works, even on mobile. Plain text keeps trucking along. Sqlite will outlive me. Exciting things are exciting but the world is made of boring.

    • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
      16·
      18 days ago

      Many of our customers store their backups in our “cloud storage solution”.

      I think they’d be rather less impressed to see the cloud is in fact a jumble of PCs scattered all around our office.

    • Colonel Panic@lemm.eeEnglish
      17·
      18 days ago

      Naming it “The Cloud” and not “Someone else’s old computer running in their basement” was a smart move though.

      It just sounds better.

    • Rusty@lemmy.caEnglish
      27·
      18 days ago

      I don’t think it was supposed to replace everyone in IT, but every company had system administrators or IT administrators that would work with physical servers and now there are gone. You can say that the new SRE are their replacement, but it’s a different set of skills, more similar to SDE than to system administrators.

      • MinFapper@startrek.websiteEnglish
        9·
        18 days ago

        And some companies (like mine) just have their SDEs do the SRE job as well. Apparently it incentivizes us to write more stable code or something

      • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        17 days ago

        I just think this is patently false. Or at least there are/were orgs where cloud costs so much more than running their own servers that are tended by maybe 1 FTE across a bunch of admins mostly doing other tasks.

        Let me just point out one recent comparison - we were considering cloud backup for a couple petabytes of data, with a few hundred GB changing or adding / restoring every week or less. I think the best deal, where we held the software costs equal was $5/TB/Month.

        This is catastrophically more expensive over a 10 year lifespan of a server or two and a small/mid sized LTO9 tape library and tapes. For one thing, we’d have paid more than the server etc in about a year. After that, tape prices have always tended down over time, and the storage costs for us for tape is basically $0 once in archive storage. We put it in a cabinet in another building - and you can fit A LOT of data in these tapes in a small room. That’ll cost basically $0 additional for 20 years, forget about 10. So let’s add in electricity etc - I still have doubts those will be over ~$100k over the lifetime of the project. Labor is about a wash cause you still need people to manage the backups to the cloud, and I think actually moving tapes might be ~.05 FTE in our situation. Literally anyone can be taught how to do it once the backup admin puts the tapes in the hopper or tells them which serial # to put in the hopper.

        I also think that many companies are finding something similar for straight servers - at least it was in the news quite a bit for a while. Now, if you can be entirely cloud native - maybe it washes out, but for large groups of people that’s still not possible due to controlling hardware (think factory,scientific, etc)or existing desktop software for which the cloud isn’t really a replacement and throughput isn’t great (think Adobe products, video, scientific, financial etc data).

      • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
        8·
        18 days ago

        There is still difference.

        Cloud was FOR the IT people. Machine learning is for predicting patterns following data.

        Maybe stock predictors will adapt or replace but average programmer didn’t have to switch to replit because it’s “cloud IDE”

      • Ferk@programming.dev
        71·
        18 days ago

        I mean, isn’t that what “get on or get left behind” means?

        It does not necessarily mean you’ll lose your job. Nor does “get on” mean you have to become a specialist on it.

        The post picks specifically on things that didn’t catch on (or that only catched on for a period of time but were eventually superseeded), but does not apply it to other successful technologies.

    • Kissaki@programming.devEnglish
      21·
      18 days ago

      I’d love to read a list of those instances/claims/tech

      I imagine one of them was low-code/no-code?

      /edit: I see such a list is what the posted link is about.

      I’m surprised there’s not low-code/no-code in that list.

      • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
        14·
        18 days ago

        “We’re gonna make a fully functioning e-commerce website with only this WYSIWYG site builder. See? No need to hire any devs!”

        Several months later…

        “Well that was a complete waste of time.”

      • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
        3·
        18 days ago

        You’re right. It belongs on the list.

        I was told several times that my programming career was ending, when the first low-code/no-code platforms released.

        • Kissaki@programming.devEnglish
          5·
          18 days ago

          At my work we explored a low-code platform. It was not low on code at all. Beyond the simplest demos you had to code everything in javascript, but in a convoluted, intransparend, undocumented environment with a horrendous editing UI. Of course their marketing was something different than that.

          That was not the early days of low-code mind you. It was rather recently; maybe three or four years ago.

    • 3abas@lemm.ee
      1723·
      18 days ago

      Non of those examples are relevant.

      Those examples are specific tools or specific implementation pattern, AI in development is a tool.

      It doesn’t dictate how to write software or what the written code will look like, it’s a tool that speeds up your code wiring. It catches typos and silly bugs that take hours to debug, it’s able to generate useful unit tests, it can clean up and apply my code style way better than codemaid or resharper ever code, it’s taken care of so much tedious shit and made software development fun again.

      Vibe coding is not the future of development. If you aren’t learning to use AI as a tool in development, you are going to be left behind.

      It’s more apt to compare it to IDEs. Sure, you can still write you entire app in vim and compile it in the terminal, but you would have been very foolish to deny the future of development was in IDEs.

      • qqq@lemmy.world
        9·
        18 days ago

        Pretty much everyone I work with uses vim, emacs, sublime, or vscode. I like IDEs and use them for… well Java, but I wouldn’t argue that they’ve made the other tools obsolete or you’re a fool for sticking with the old ones. If it ain’t broke and all that. It actually seems like more people are moving back to pluggable text editors over IDEs

        I’ve used AI tools a bit. They’ve really helped drop in code that would previously just be a bunch of TODOs; they get you up and writing the core parts much faster to see if the idea even works. They’ve also really helped answer specific questions or lead me towards the answer. They’ve also straight up lied to me quite a bit. It’s a weird tool.

        I think the OP image is pretty wrong with the comparison it makes. LLMs/AI are a class of technology that are most definitely not going anywhere unless something dramatic happens. Some people, myself included, feel uneasy about the way they’re created and the fact that people in powerful positions completely misunderstand them, and I think that leads to the hope that they’re just a fad.

      • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
        9·
        18 days ago

        None of those examples are relevant.

        They seem pretty relevant. Those things didn’t go away, but they also didn’t remove the need for programmers (the way their sales people said they would).

      • TheOneCurly@lemm.eeEnglish
        41·
        18 days ago

        You’re describing exactly how all these web tools worked. “HTML, CSS, and JS are too hard to do manually. Here’s a shiny new tool that abstracts all that away and lets you get right to making your site!” Except they all added additional headaches, security concerns, and failed to fill in edge cases, so you still need to know how to do all that HTML, CSS, and JS anyway. That’s exactly how LLM generated code works now. It’ll be useful and common for a while and then the technical debt will pile up and pile up and eventually everyone will look around and think “what the hell were we thinking” and tear it all down.

      • heavyboots@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        18 days ago

        It is always hilarious and strange to see the buy-in on these things. We have a single coder in his late 60s that has bought in hard to spicy autocorrect. Meanwhile, the youngest on our team (like 22) won’t touch it with a 10 ft pole.

        The other issue is just the morality of it. Do I know people that got rich on Bitcoin? Yes. Do I feel like they’re participating in a pyramid scheme still? Also yes. And with spicy autocorrect, where they got their training data for any and all of these models is so freaking morally bankrupt, and they’re desperate to paper over that and make it “ok” for businesses to use it.

  • MortUS@lemmy.worldEnglish
    53·
    17 days ago

    Once both major world militaries and hobbists are using it, it’s jover. You can’t close Pandora’s Box. Whatever you want to call the current versions of “AI”, it’s only going to get better. Short of major world catastrophes, I expect it to drive not only technological advances but also energy/efficiency advances as well. The big internet conglomerates are already integrating it into search, and I fully expect within the next 5 years to have search transformed into an assistant-like chatbot (or something thereof).

    I think it’s shortsighted not to see the potential of accumulating society’s knowledge and being able to present that to people in an understandable way.

    I don’t expect it to happen overnight. I’m not expecting iRobot or Android levels of consciousness any time soon, but the world is progressing toward the automation of many things - driven by Capital(ism) - which is powerful in itself.

  • someacnt@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    112·
    18 days ago

    It pains me so much when I see my colleagues pay OpenAI to do programming assignments… they see it is faster to ask gpt, than learn it properly. Sadly, I can say nothing to them, or I would risk worsening relations with them.