LLMs are very easy to pick up, the point of them for their makers is to commoditize skill and knowledge, you can't be left behind in learning to use them, AI providers don't have economic incentives to make them into anything other than appliances.
The people more at risk of being left behind are the ones that don't learn when not to trust their output.
Right, bridging the gap of knowledge by getting closer to that of the clerical workers of the company, because pure software knowledge is no longer as valuable. That will probably make your salary closer to theirs, and that'll be a pretty big adjustment.
My uncle leads IT support teams, the org is measuring AI use in writing reports and tickets. The org has very poorly structured and obsolete processes (he's trying to straighten them up as he goes), AI will probably amplify the lack of structure, by making it easier for the work to _look_ as if someone carefully reviewed the issues and followed procedure.
A friend is a team lead in an org that's mandating vibecoding via "Devin", a lesser known player an "architect" chose after shallow review. The company also has endemic process issues and simply can't do deployments reliably, it's behind the times in methodology in every other respect. Higher ups are placing their trust in a B-list agentic tool instead of fixing the problems.
Anyway, I wouldn't be caught dead working at either of those two shops even before the AI rollout, but this is what's going on in the IT underworld.
I hate the AI assistants for ticket-writing. The beneficial use there would be to prompt for possibly-useful information that's not present, or call out ambiguity and let the writer decide how to resolve any of that. Coaching, basically. Suggesting actual text to include, for people who aren't already excellent at ticket-writing, just leads to noisier tickets that take more work to understand ("did they really mean this, or did the LLM just prompt them to include it and they thought sure, I guess that's good?")
[EDIT] Oh and much of your post rings true for my org. They operate at a fraction the speed they could because of organizational dysfunction and failure to use what's already available to them as far as processes and tech, but are rushing toward LLMs, LOL. Yeah, guys, the slowness has nothing to do with how fast code is written, and I'm suuuuure you'll do a great job of integrating those tools effectively when you're failing at the basics....
Lots of organizations don't want to accept that their velocity issues are quality issues. It's often a view held by an old guard that was there when the business experienced growth by adding features, while not having to bear any maintenance burden. The people who remain are either also oblivious to this, or simply have stopped caring.
LLM-generated code hits all the right notes, it's done fast, in great volumes, and it even features what the naysayers were asking for. Each PR has 20 pages of documentation and adds some bulk to the stuff in the tests folder, that can sit there looking pretty. How wonderful! Hell, you can even do now that "code review" that some nerd was always complaining about, just ask the bot to review it and hit that merge button.
Then you ask the bot to generate the commands again for the deploy (what CI pipeline?) and bam! New features customers will love. And maybe data corruption.
A firm that is led by people who can envision, very clearly, revenue-generating and cost-reduction projects - wins. Writing code by hand is absolutely irrelevant. Who fucking cares. The former is what matters.
Code generation acceleration only matters when those pre-requisites are met. How did Apple go from the verge of bankruptcy to where it is today?
All Im seeing is most people are not smart at all - no wonder they are so impressed by LLMs! They can't think straight. I only see this become even worse over-time. Perhaps this is the stated goal.
Ticket writing is one thing. Does anyone see automated IT ticket resolution?
Seems tool vendors are introducing AI for issue resolution. But my sense is that in practice they struggle too with the real-life shitshow. Anyone try any of these systems yet?
Well before offices were computerized at all some of the manual processes turned out to be more effective than after full computerization was completely accomplished. Which was sometimes decades later so nobody could tell which workflows it actually applied to, or wouldn't believe it anyway by the 21st century.
It was truly quite rare to have such well-honed manual processes though, the "average" place had a lot of elements that were far from perfect but still benefited after the computerization dust had settled. Then at the opposite end of the spectrum were companies where everything was an absolute shitshow, maybe since the beginning.
That's kind of where Conway's Law comes from, if you benchmark against a manual shitshow that has built up over the years, and replace it with a computerized version, you get a shitshow on steroids. The only other choice would have been to spend the appropriate number of years manually undoing the shitshow before making any really bold moves.
Now AI can really take things to a whole 'nother level, not just on steroids but possibly violating Conway's Law . . . squared.
It brings up the Task Manager, that lets you forcibly stop processes, and this is a way for the (NY State) Government to take control of your printer, the analogy isn't bad.
On Windows XP this depended on whether you had joined a domain. On joined systems you got the security screen (same as previous Windows NT/2000), on other systems the task manager (same as Windows 9x).
Plenty of people will tell you that they enjoy solving business problems.
Well, I'll have to take their word for it that they're passionate about maximizing shareholder value by improving key performance indicators, I know I personally didn't sign up for being in meetings all day to leverage cross functional synergies with the goal of increasing user retention in sales funnels, or something along those lines.
I'm not passionate about either that or mandatory HR training videos.
Many countries were also "biased" against Apartheid South Africa, the bias was disapproval of apartheid, much like the one enacted on the West Bank and Gaza.
The bias predates the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.
The litmus test is if they were just opposed to the policies of the South African government, or did those countries also hate South Africa and South Africans?
Did they have a history of persecution of South Africans in their own country?
Were they funding armed groups to attack South Africa?
Did they believe that South Africa has no right to exist anyway?
> Countries tend to dislike and boycott apartheid states
> Ah but what about many many decades ago in history the minority ruling the apartheid state were treated badly! In other places! Did you think of that?
"Did the accused party commit the offense they are accused of?"
...everything else is whataboutism, red herring, ad hominem, and DARVO.
If the worlds worst person says 2+2=4, you still can't evaluate that claim by testing how many people like or hate the person. Only by whether the content of their words is true or false.
It used to lack non-destructive editing ("adjustment layers" in Photoshop parlance) until recently, it's a core foundation of editing workflows for designers and photographers, it lets you layer transformations of over immutable rasters. This was in Photoshop since 2005.
It was going to be the future of Software Engineering in the 2000s, Software Architects laying out boxes for Software Bricklayers to implement as dictated, code generation tools were going to make programming trivial.
For trivial CRUD apps, and maintaining modified versions of the generated code was a nightmare.
The people more at risk of being left behind are the ones that don't learn when not to trust their output.
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