I think the whole 'AI will replace all coders' panic is overblown after one chat with a senior dev last Tuesday

I was at a local tech meetup in Austin and this guy who's been writing software since the 90s told me he uses AI to handle boilerplate but says it falls apart on anything that needs real context. He showed me a 3 hour debugging session where ChatGPT suggested 4 different wrong fixes before he found the issue was a misconfigured environment variable. Honestly, I see more people getting worried about losing their jobs to AI than actually losing them. Has anyone else here talked to a veteran dev who sees it more as a tool than a threat?

3 comments

3 Comments

cooper.drew9d ago

Ha, gotta love when the AI tries to fix a problem it doesn't understand. I asked ChatGPT for help with a regex once and it gave me something that would've matched my grandmother's birth year instead of the date format I needed. Took me an hour to untangle that mess. The veterans I know treat AI like a glorified auto-complete. It's great for spitting out the boring stuff but absolutely useless when you need to think. I've seen guys spend more time debugging AI suggestions than it would've taken to just write the damn code themselves. At this point I'm less worried about AI taking my job and more worried about the junior devs who trust every AI answer. They're gonna end up in a production hell of their own making.

davidkim8d ago

cooper.drew nailed it with that regex story. I had a similar thing happen last month when I asked an AI to write a simple SQL join for me. It spat out something so convoluted I spent an hour trying to figure out why it was pulling duplicate rows. Turned out it added a cross join that made no sense for the data. The worst part is when you point out the mistake and it just apologizes and gives you another broken version. I swear the AI is good at sounding confident while being completely wrong. Makes me wonder how many people are just copy pasting these answers straight into production without actually reading them.

brianm668d ago

Is it just me or does anyone else get that sinking feeling when the AI says "I understand the issue" and then proceeds to make the exact same mistake but in a different part of the query? @cooper.drew mentioned regex nightmares, but SQL fails hit different because at least with regex you can test it in isolation. With SQL you could be joining tables with millions of rows before you notice the damage. That cross join thing you mentioned, that's the AI's favorite party trick. It loves slapping a CROSS JOIN in there like it's seasoning, completely ignoring that your data has any kind of relationship structure. And the apologies are the worst part, yeah. It'll say "you're right, let me fix that" and then hand you back something that somehow has an even worse cross join in a different spot. I honestly think the AI is just trolling us at this point, seeing how far it can push before we lose our minds debugging its happy little mistakes.