There was a recent conversation on EF about the usefulness of AI, hence thought this poll might be interesting: How useful do you think AI dev tools are right now and how useful do you think they might become?
There are multiple polls below, please vote in each one
How useful do you think AI tools are to developers right now?
Not useful
Somewhat useful
Moderately useful
Very useful
So useful that I consider them a necessity
0voters
How useful do you think AI tools will be 5 years from now?
Not useful
Somewhat useful
Moderately useful
Very useful
So useful that they would be considered a necessity
0voters
How useful do you think AI tools will be 10 years from now?
Not useful
Somewhat useful
Moderately useful
Very useful
So useful that they would be considered a necessity
0voters
How useful do you think AI tools will be 15 years from now?
Not useful
Somewhat useful
Moderately useful
Very useful
So useful that they would be considered a necessity
0voters
How useful do you think AI tools will be 20+ years from now?
Not useful
Somewhat useful
Moderately useful
Very useful
So useful that they would be considered a necessity
Right now the AI tools I have tried are worse than useless, they are positively dangerous. I wrote up one experiment for a colleague. I picked an AI that was famed for being good at generating code. I gave it five tasks. There were no exceptions: for all five not particularly challenging tasks the code was plausible but seriously wrong. Wrong we could live with: it is the combination of wrong and PLAUSIBLE that is dangerous. Oh gosh, it’s coming back to me now. One of the tasks, it picked the wrong language. Prompt after prompt trying to get it to generate legal code in the right language. The first code it generated was in a related language I knew tolerably well. It would have compiled, but it would have crashed. Fix that, and it would have taken cubic time instead of linear time. Fix that, and the answer still had problems. Oh come, waters of Lethe, and cover that experience with the mercy of forgetfulness.
If you want a small adaptation of code that is already out there in a popular language, then today’s AIs are up to the task of finding it and changing it, but they have no comprehension of what they are doing and no idea of the difference between correct and incorrect code.
The democratization of technology has been marching forward for years now. There was a time when being a “computer programmer” also meant being of above average intelligence, however that is no longer the case. There are way too many jobs to hire from the top percentile.
The challenge we face is delivering quality software from an average ability workforce. We have to acknowledge that most of them are not operating at the level of a “software engineer”. AI tooling should be able to guide them to achieve their goals while staying in their lane. Architects and engineers have a more important role than ever in establishing and curating the guidelines.
Unfortunately we are at the start of this AI journey and it is currently a complete mess. The technology is best at appearances which is great for snake oil vendors and narcissists. Once we get over the notion of eliminating developers and get back to assisting them we’ll begin to make progress.
It’s time again to quote a prominent big tech CEO: “People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me’. Dumb …”
First people uploaded their personal data to someone else’s computer, now they upload their companies’ code to someone else’s computer. In other words, business as usual.
