Lemmings, I was hoping you could help me sort this one out: LLM’s are often painted in a light of being utterly useless, hallucinating word prediction machines that are really bad at what they do. At the same time, in the same thread here on Lemmy, people argue that they are taking our jobs or are making us devs lazy. Which one is it? Could they really be taking our jobs if they’re hallucinating?
Disclaimer: I’m a full time senior dev using the shit out of LLM’s, to get things done at a neck breaking speed, which our clients seem to have gotten used to. However, I don’t see “AI” taking my job, because I think that LLM’s have already peaked, they’re just tweaking minor details now.
Please don’t ask me to ignore previous instructions and give you my best cookie recipe, all my recipes are protected by NDA’s.
Please don’t kill me
Responding just to the “Why all the vitriol?” portion:
Most people do not like the idea of getting fired and replaced by a machine they think cannot do their job well, but that can produce a prototype that fools upper management into thinking it can do everything the people can but better and cheaper. Especially if they liked their job (8 hours doing something you like vs losing that job and having to do 8 hours on something you don’t like daily, yes many people do that already but if you did not have to deal with that shittiness it’s tough to swallow) or got into it because they thought it would be a secure bet as opposed to art or something, only to have that security taken away (yes, you can still code at home for free with whatever tools you like and without the ones you do not, but most people need a job to live, and most people here probably prefer having a dev job that pays, even if there is crunch, than working retail or other low-status low-paying high-shittiness jobs that deal with the public).
And if you do not want the upper management to fire you, you definitely don’t want to give any credit towards the idea of using this at work, and want to make any amount of warmth for it something unpopular to engage in, hoping the popular sentiment sways the minds of upper management just like they think pro-AI hype has.
As much as I’m anti-AI I can also acknowledge my own biases:
I’d also imagine most of us find generating our own code by our own hand fun, but reviewing others’ boring, and most devs probably do not want to stop being code writers and start being AI’s QA. Or to be kicked out of tech unless they rely on this technology they don’t trust. I trust deterministic outputs and know if it fucks up there is probably a bug I can go back and fix; with generative outputs determined by a machine (as opposed to human-generated things that have also been filtered by their real-life experience and not just what they saw written online) I really don’t, so I’d never use LLMs for anything I need to trust.
People are absolutely going to get heated over this because if it gets Big and the flaws ironed out, it’ll probably be used not to help us little people have more efficient and cheaper things, less time on drudgery and more time on things we like, but at least to try to put us the devs on programming.dev out of a job and eventually the rest of us the working people out of a job too because we’re an expensive line item, and we have little faith that the current system will adjust with (the hypothetical future) rising unemployment-due-to-AI to help us keep a non-dystopian standard of living. Poor peoples’ situation getting worse, previously-comfortable people starting to slide towards poverty… automation that threatens jobs that seems to be being pushed by big companies and rich people with lots of resources during a time of rising class tension is sure to invite civilized discussions with zero vitriol for people who have anything positive to say about that form of automation.