• Technus@lemmy.zip
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      1 month ago

      Even if it didn’t, any middle manager who decides to replace their dev team with AI is going to realize pretty quickly that actually writing code is only a small part of the job.

      Won’t stop 'em from trying, of course. But when the laid-off devs get frantic calls from management asking them to come back and fix everything, they’ll be in a good position to negotiate a raise.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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        1 month ago

        If anything. AI could be used to replace managers 😆 I mean lots of management seems to be just pushing paper to me. Ideal to be handled by AI. But I think we still need people to do the real work for quite some time to come. Especially software architecture and coding (complex) stuff ain’t easy. Neither is project management. So I guess even some managers can stay.

        • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          Good management is almost all people skills. It needs to be influenced by domain knowledge for sure, but it’s almost all about people.

          You can probably match trash managers, but you won’t replace remotely competent ones

          • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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            1 month ago

            I’m not even sure about the “people skills” of ChapGPT. Maybe it’s good at that. It always says …you have to consider this side but also the other side… …This is like that, however it might… It can weasel itself out of situations (as it did in this video). It makes a big effort to keep a very friendly tone in all circumstances. I think OpenAI has put a lot of effort in ChatGPT having something that resembles a portion of people skills.

            I’ve used those capabilities to rephrase emails that needed to tell some uncomfortable truths but at the same time not scare someone away. And it did a halfway decent job. Better than I could do. And we already see those people skills in use by the companies who replace their first level support with AI. I read somewhere it has a better customer satisfaction rate than a human powered callcenter. It’s good at pacifying people, being nice to them and answering the most common 90% of questions over and over again.

            So I’m not sure what to make of this. I think my point still remains valid. AI (at least ChatGPT) is orders of magnitude better at people skills than at programming. I’m not sure what kind of counterexamples we have… Sure, it can’t come to your desk, look you in the eyes and see if you’re happy or need something. Because it doesn’t have any eyes. But at the same time that’s a thing I rarely see with average human managers in big offices, either…

            • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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              1 month ago

              Using flowery language isn’t “people skills”.

              People skills means handling conflict and competing objectives between people fairly and efficiently. It’s a trait based almost entirely on empathy, with a level of ingenuity mixed in, and GPT isn’t anywhere within many orders of magnitude of either. It will be well after it “can code” that it does anything remotely in the neighborhood of the soft skills of being a competent manager.

  • Jestzer@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    The rule of any article asking asking a question in its title is that the answer is always no.

  • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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    1 month ago

    AI is actually great at typing the code quickly. Once you know exactly what you want. But it’s already the case that if your engineers spend most of their time typing code, you’re doing something wrong. AI or no AI.

    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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      1 month ago

      I don’t think so. I’ve had success letting it write boilerplate code. And simple stuff that I could have copied from stack overflow. Or a beginners programming book. With every task from my real life it failed miserably. I’m not sure if I did anything wrong. And it’s been half a year since I last tried. Maybe things have changed substantially in the last few months. But I don’t think so.

      Last thing I tried was some hobby microcontroller code to do some robotics calculations. And ChatGPT didn’t really get what it was supposed to do. And additionally instead of doing the maths, it would just invent some library functions, call them with some input values and imagine the maths to be miraculously be done in the background, by that nonexistent library.

      • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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        1 month ago

        Yes actually, I can imagine it getting microcontroller code wrong. My niche is general backend services. I’ve been using Github copilot a lot and it served me well for generating unit tests. Write test description and it pops out the code with ~ 80% accuracy

  • Telorand@reddthat.com
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    1 month ago

    Not until it’s better at QA than I am. Good luck teaching a machine how stupid end-users can be.

  • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    I think the obvious answer is “Yes, some, but not all”.

    It’s not going to totally replace human software developers anytime soon, but it certainly has the potential to increase productivity of senior developers and reduce demand for junior developers.

  • key@lemmy.keychat.org
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    1 month ago

    “software developer says ai will not replace software developers” feels very John Henry

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      tbh that is vastly more reliable than “seller of hardware used to train AI models says AI will replace developers”