I’d be 100% fine, and I’m a fucking systems analyst, a job where you’d think AI might actually be helpful.
But honestly, nope it’s not. Even for basic data parsing and analysis, it takes more time for me to double check AIs work, understand what it’s doing, then correct its mistakes than it would for me to just do it right the first time.
Let me put it another way; a job that takes me two hours on my own would probably take at least 3 hours if I had AI do it, when I factor in the proofing and corrections, plus there’s the additional cost of the AI itself, so I have a hard time seeing how it will EVER be more cost efficient to use AI. Especially with ai prices keep going up, and its use raises overall energy prices for everyone.
It rarely saves time, and pretty much never saves money, so I’m kind of wondering what the point is, other than selling a pipe dream to dipshit boomer ceo’s that don’t understand basic math, but view employees as a wasted expense they want to get rid of
it’s been said that reverse-engineering takes three times as long as writing it on your own. Yet everyone prefers reverse-engineering stupid ai answers instead of thinking for themselves. Make it make sense
I find the people who are worst at thinking use AI the most.
And yet, the fields that require thinking the most are the ones that are getting the most use out of AI. Your average factory worker is not the one that uses AI, it’s the scientist, engineers and doctors.
Implying there’s some kind of contradiction here? Why would you need to out-source your “thinking” if your job doesn’t require “thinking”?
How is it not a contradiction? You say “people who are the worst at thinking” when it’s the people who are the best at thinking that use it the most, because they get to spend more time thinking by outsourcing the low-thinking tasks to AI.
Vaguely insulting to factory workers, first.
Second, much of the AI use is counter productive. Some of it is metrics chasing.
I did not mean to insult anyone.
If your AI use is counter productive, then it’s probably either because the scenario doesn’t benefit from AI or because you’re using it wrong.
There are PLENTY of cases where AI has made a world of difference productivity wise. Since it gained the ability to reason last year, there are just so many things it can do. Right now it’s better than every human at cyber security, period. Ask anyone who got to work with mythos.
Now I’ll agree that in the end cybersecurity is not a “productive” field since nobody cares when the cat doubled in size if the mouse did the same. However just last week we’ve seen something similar happen in Math, where it solved many math problems that no human or traditional computer has ever been able to solve. To say AI is “dumb” and “useless” after reading that paper feels a bit silly.
If your AI use is counter productive, then it’s probably either because the scenario doesn’t benefit from AI or because you’re using it wrong.
It’s harder to review code than to write it. Humans are kind of of lazy, and when we see code that looks generally correct we skim. We lose focus.
So if someone uses AI to generate a lot of code, it’s hard to review. If we just trust it, we lose knowledge of how our system works. If we spend the time reviewing it, that’s harder than just doing it ourselves. This is true at any scale, but the more you use it the worse it gets.
Maybe you consider using AI for code generation “using it wrong”. If so, please tell it to management at my job who are frothing at the mouth over the idea.
If you disagree that humans don’t notice problems, did you see the mistake I added in this post? Maybe you did! But most people wouldn’t.
Even if that wasn’t a problem, de-skilling is definitely a problem long term. If the AI did produce flawless code, after a few months of using it you’d start losing the ability to code yourself. Counter productive. Unless you’re management, and don’t care about your laborers.
I agree with what you’re saying in general, but most code out there doesn’t need to be high quality. There is no reason for anyone to design a web page manually in 2026 for example, AI will do it faster and cheaper than any human can dream of. And the code itself is incapable of causing issues, it’s just markdown/css. However even for high-quality code, if you look at benchmarks the top models produce higher quality code than the majority of devs.
As for losing understanding of our code, I agree but I suppose it’s the price to pay for productivity. Besides, it’s not like I understand Joe’s 30 years old ugly code any better than if AI had written it. At least AI has the decency to include comments.
How much web development experience do you personally have? Like, from before AI tooling?
Once your website is more complicated than a static marketing site, I don’t think AI is going to do it better. Some of the problems, like slopsquatting might be around for a long time. Possibly forever.
And the code itself is incapable of causing issues, it’s just markdown/css.
…what?
However even for high-quality code, if you look at benchmarks the top models produce higher quality code than the majority of devs.
Doing the wrong thing faster is not an improvement.
At least AI has the decency to include comments.
From what I’ve seen of AI comments, it’s not really helpful. It’s illusionionary confidence.
As for losing understanding of our code, I agree but I suppose it’s the price to pay for productivity.
That’s very expensive technical debt, or a massive de-skilling of labor.
Do you own a business? If you don’t, why would you dig your own grave here?
Honestly, I’ve only done web dev around 10 years ago and found it so mind-dumbing I left after a year. I have however had AI code a dashboard last year, roughly ~20k lines of mostly front-end and have yet to have heard of any issues from the ~30 people using daily. Why then would I have done this manually in a week when the AI did it better in an hour and $5?