this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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lol, I'd love to see the fucking ruin of the world we'd live in if current LLMs replaced senior developers. Maybe it'll happen some day, but in the meantime it's job security! I get to fix all of the bugfuck crazy issues generated by my juniors using Copilot and ChatGPT.
There is a reason Microsoft has branded it copilot...
Headline: airline fires every second pilot; says the copilot is good enough to fly the machine.
One of my uni lecturers does the whole "You are out of a job" thing. He's a smart guy but he's barley written a line of code in his life. This comes up frequently and everytime I ask him "Get CHATGPT to write fizz buzz in X86 ASM." Without fail it will crash when trying to build everytime. This technology is very advanced but I find people get it to the the simplest tasks and then expect it to solve the most complex ones.
I tried using AI tools to do some cleanup and refactoring of some legacy embedded C code and was curious if it could do any optimization or knew any clever algorithms.
It's pretty good at figuring out the function of the code and adding comments, it did some decent refactoring of some sections to make them more readable.
It has no clue about how to work in a resource constrained environment or about the main concepts that separate embedded from everything else. Namely that it has to be able to run "forever", operate in realtime on a constant flow of sensor data, and that nobody else is taking care of your memory management.
It even explained to me that we could do input filtering by using big arrays to do simple averaging on a device with only 1kB RAM, or use a long long for a never-reset accumulator without worrying about what will happen because "it will be years before it overflows".
AI buddy, some of these units have run for decades without a power cycle. If lazy coders start dumping AI output into embedded systems the whole world is going to get a lot more glitchy.
I was helping someone with their programming homework, every time copilot suggested anything he just blindly added it, and every time i had to ask him "and why do you need those lines? What do they do?", and he could never answer...
Sometimes those lines made sense, other times they were completely irrelevant to the problem, but he just add the suggestions on reflex without even reading them
It'll be like when we were all supposed to lose our jobs to outsourcing
And when "web frameworks means we don't need web developers anymore" and when "COBOL is basically plain English, so anyone can code, so we don't need specialists anymore".
And those juniors don't realize they've set themselves up to be forever-juniors since they aren't learning how to do the basics themselves.
I had to pull aside a developer to inform him that he "would be" violating our national security by pasting code online to an AI and that there were potentially repercussions far beyond his job.
He's a lot slower now, but the code is better.