The great AI frenzy
One must embrace the time they live in and to my displeasure, this decade seems to be focused on AI.
Having listened to all the predictions on AI these last years, a reasonable conclusion is that AI has definitely replaced us all developers somewhere around mid 2024. Weirdly enough, a lot of devs are still getting paid a large sum of money to program on a daily basis with a language made in the 90s. Someone in HR probably didn’t get the memo from all the tech prophets.
Since we are all more and more incentivised to adhere to the AI frenzy and use AI for programming on a daily basis, I felt that a disclaimer was needed as to what this website contains, what in its content was made by an AI, and what was not.
Where AI was not involved
Everything that you can read on this website has been manually written, by me, except for spell checking, which is done by google docs.
Every piece of code except web-related code (see next section) has been manually written, by me.
In particular, no C, C++, make, bash code contains any char generated by an AI.
Where AI was involved
As stated in my rant below, I do not use AI for anything that I see value in.
There are some domains that I am not interested in and that I will never be paid for, and that I do not want to invest time in. For those, I use AI.
So far this has been limited to :
- article thumbnails : I have no drawing skills and do not want to invest the time in it.
- anything web-related : I have no interest in web design and I have developed the web interface for my
toy-trading-botusing ChatGPT. I would have done the same for this website but ChatGPT is bad with blowfish, + blowfish is easily customizable. so I customized it manually.
Now that this has been said and that the reader knows that I actually used AI for some things, here is my unfiltered opinion about AI.
Let’s make enemies : value
Whenever possible, my approach was always to code things myself, if I see a value in it.
At many occasions in the past, it could have been easy to just incorporate code from others, and that would have resulted in a more agreeable and faster experience. But there was value in learning how things were made and hence I chose to write things myself.
It is not often said that there is a strong difference between being given a solution, and coming up with the solution yourself. In the former case, one (at most) understands the solution if anything. In the latter case, one understands THE PROBLEM which means that one is able to see the tradeoffs of the different possible solutions.
In one case, one just waits for the solution to be made for them.
In the other, one has to modify their own mental model to understand the problem and all its implications. In the process of coming up with a solution, they are actually updating themselves.
Granted, not everything has the same value, and many domains like web development have just become too big, are relatively fault tolerant, and do not care about performance. In those domains, AI probably has a legitimate place.
But all technical domains are not equal. There is a fundamental difference in technical skills between a web developer (<), a low level software engineer (<), and a HW designer. And sadly, the salaries may not always reflect this fact.
Many domains like HW design, embedded programming, kernel development, compiler development (and many others) are scoped, critical, fault-intolerant and very performance sensitive. In these domains, people have to know their stuff and imprecision is just not acceptable, nor is delegating brain power to some third party AI.
My belief is that AI is making developers soft and lazy, and that the long term impact will be a lack of knowledge and mastery.
So if some domains are already lacking this, good for them, let them use AI. All technical domains are not equal.
But it is not because everyone decides to suddenly stop learning that everyone should do the same, as there still is a strong need for people that correctly understand how complex systems work.
If one wants not to be replaced, one just has to learn enough.