christianbryant
Joined 14 years ago
Joined 14 years ago
I've been in the software industry for 30 years and I understand that sentiment perfectly on a personal level. However, also having used ChatGPT for the first time this year to help solve a technical problem, I was surprised to learn that feeling didn't go away. In fact, it was because I leaned on my experience and technical understanding to get to the point where I realized I needed help that I decided to try a new tool. I didn't feel any shame or disappointment in myself, rather I felt excited to learn something new that came out of the solution. It sent me on a new path of learning.
Now, that was research and not implementation. While plenty of code options were presented by ChatGPT, I analyzed the solution and educated myself from it. My final fix looked very different from the proposal because I do things a certain way, based on experience and learning from my many mistakes. In this scenario I was the secondary verification. My peers the tertiary. AI made the proposal, humans did the verification and could not have done so without cumulative knowledge and experience.
I have to assume that all fields utilizing AI will remain as they have always been, human education and experience will come first no matter what the tools available, because we are the ones impacted by the data produced by AI. As many math-oriented commenters here have already noted, human verification is a necessity and to do that, you must understand the discipline within which the data is being produced.
Personally, the idea of reaching solutions in math and computing (for example) exponentially beyond human capacity is exciting; I want certain answers before I die! But it still must be human-verified and the solutions should be for humans, not for machines, and not for "time to market". Repositories full of unvetted AI-generated code is bad enough, but once you start engineering structures, spacecraft and medicine strictly with AI, well...
I've had my Panasonic Toughbook (CF31-5) for almost 10 years and while it's a dinosaur to some, it's a major upgrade from what I had before in terms of portable computing. Its max memory is 16 GiB DDR3 SDRAM on an Intel Core i5-5300U. When I first bought it I tried Debian and Ubuntu, but even back then those ran slow. I installed Xubuntu and have run that ever since with no performance issues whatsoever.
Because I primarily use Emacs and TeX tools, writing Elisp and LaTeX, the system is more than enough for me. I've not played graphics-heavy games, run GPU-intensive UI or done any heavy data plotting. However, one benchmark I do have: I am able use the test automation framework required for my day job with ease. I run that software on Xubuntu because on my work-provided systems (Windows 11 and macOS Tahoe) the application crawls and is practically unusable.
http://users.cms.caltech.edu/~vidick/publications/index.html
Now, I won't discriminate against the segment of the industry moving in this direction, but ask yourselves this question: Where is my personal power over my environment, over my code, and do I have the freedom to modify my work and the hardware I do it upon as I see fit? The model proposed and the assertion of the inevitable disappearance of the IDE and personal workspace is done with no consideration of those questions, or the psychology and methodologies of the experienced software engineer.
Of course, the points relating to security and environment stability are problems we all face, but they are also problems that have simple solutions within the existing software development ecosystem. And, I must say, if human verification and "fit for use" validation is not part of this process, then the flaws go beyond psychology and the freedom to tinker.