My company is strongly pushing AI. There are lot of experiments, demos, and effort from decently smart people about integrating it into our workflows. There are some impressive victories that have been made with AI tooling producing some things fast. I am not in denial about this. And the SE department is tracking improved productivity (as measured by # of tickets being done, I guess?)
The problem is I hate AI. I hate every fucking thing about it. Its primary purpose, regardless of what utility is gained, is spam. I think it’s obvious how google search results are spam, how spam songs and videos are being produced, etc. But even bad results from AI that have to be discarded, IMO, are spam.
And that isn’t even getting into all massive amounts of theft to train the data, or the immense amounts of electricity it takes to do training and inference, as well as run, all this crap. Nor the psychosis being inflicted onto people who emplace their trust into these systems. Nor the fact that these tools are being used to empower authoritarian regimes to track vulnerable populations, both here (in the USA) and abroad. And all this AI shit serves to enrich the worst tech moguls and to displace people like artists and people like myself, a programmer.
I’m literally being told at my job that I should view myself basically as an AI babysitter, and that AI has been unambiguously proven in the industry, so the time for wondering about it, experimenting with it, or opposing it is over. The only fault and flaw is my (i.e. any given SE’s) unwillingness to adapt and onboard.
Looking for advice from people who have had to navigate similar crap. Because I feel like I’m at a point where I must adapt or eventually get fired.
Treat it like an especially junior dev that just graduated University.
It knows simple boilerplate stuff pretty well, but never trust it implicitly.
People keep saying this. I don’t want to work with an especially junior dev. I’ve been doing that my while career and the only thing good about it is that they get better.
It does not. My coworkers did some demos on this and it generated random, unnecessary, bloated, shitty, boilerplate. And worse, “because AI told me to” is now used to cement bad practices at my company. Just because it generates 1000s of LoC doesn’t mean you actually need that.
If you really need “standard boilerplate”, we’ve had tools to generate deterministic code for a long time now. They’re called snippets or templates. Just setup a company git repo template for your ideal project or whatever and have people clone that. Plus, this template repo would be reproducible, fixable, and debuggable, instead of rolling the dice with AI.