AI thoughts for the future

🗣️ Off-Topic Lounge
1

I’ve started using AI a lot, and I have to say — it helps a ton. As a senior developer, I don’t really see it replacing us. It’s very good, and it will keep getting better, but in the end, it’s our ideas and vision that are being sold — not just the code.

Personally, the way I see it, junior developers might not have a place anymore. Coding is hard, especially for beginners, and the expectations nowadays are huge.

I believe that in the near future, there will be an even bigger demand for developers. That’s how I see it.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this.

2

Well, I also use AI a lot, and it helps me achieve a larger amount of work, in a shorter period of time. It is a great tool, but indeed, it is not able to handle larger projects, as if you give it a larger task, it starts to give tons of errors and inconsistencies in the result.

Also, I consider that the current AI model architecture is not fit to evolve as the current hype expects it to do. I mean that the current AI models have their limitations, and the current idea (coming from OpenAI’s part) of “adding more processing power and hardware” and to “build larger AI warehouses” to improve the AI models, will not give the expected results, but will provide less and less benefits with more and more money invested in AI infrastructure.

So, in my opinion, if the AI model’s infrastructure will not change or if the quantum computing will not become a mainstream reality, AI will be just another tool with is very useful, but in reality, was overhyped in its initial phases.

I want to share a specific case that highlights why it’s critical to verify AI-generated responses.

Yesterday, I asked o1, currently considered the top reasoning AI, how to safely run untrusted JavaScript code submitted by users.

It recommended a library called vm2 and even provided a complete, functional code example. The code was so well-written that it worked flawlessly without any changes.

But when I checked the vm2 GitHub repository, I found it had been abandoned due to security vulnerabilities. Its recommended replacement is isolated-vm.

The AI’s code was 100% executable. If I hadn’t looked it up myself, no amount of unit testing would have revealed that vm2 was an insecure and outdated solution.

So, yeah…

3

Thank you for your thoughts — I feel the same.

Sometimes, when generating code, it feels like real AI… but other times, it’s a complete mess.

My thoughts are mostly about beginner developers. I believe there will be fewer developers in the future. There’s no real way to learn development just by using AI — you have to go through the hell of debugging and truly understand what’s going on under the hood.

Also, the industry seems to be at its worst right now, so most young developers will probably choose a different path…

4

You’re spot on, it’s a weird time in tech. The AI tooling feels like magic sometimes, but if you’re just starting out, it can totally short-circuit your learning.

And yes, the struggle of digging through error_log, tracing hook priorities, figuring out weird plugin conflicts → that’s where the real growth happens.

And yeah, the industry seems to be rough right now, many IT friends of mine complain about it… layoffs, shrinking teams, overloaded seniors, stagnant or even decreasing salaries (because government policy changes).

As a personal story, I can tell you that my daughter has swimming classes and the instructor managed to strike a deal with Evozon, a local IT company from my city, which has a swimming pool built for company employees, but which no longer serves its original purpose, but it is lent out to swimming teachers for swimming classes.

This is the first red flag, as most of the day, the company employees no longer can access the swimming pool (they have free access only in the early mornings).

Also, the company headquarters has large empty halls, which were designed to house large offices filled with cubicles, but now lay empty.

Also, on the top of the building, there is a large ad: “office space for rent”…

There isn’t a good vibe in the industry, at all…

5

AI is great, don’t get me wrong — but it’s going to cause a lot of chaos. In programming, it’ll create a huge demand for developers, while other professions might just disappear. And most likely, it’ll end up being used in war and all sorts of crazy things…

After all history tends to repeat itself…

6

Exactly, good point.

Even more, what I personally observed is that the recent AI models of ChatGPT are not as good in programming as the models ChatGPT used from the last part of 2024. Current AI models give broken code much faster than previous models did.

Not sure if this is just my personal experience or not.

7

I love AI and it helps me so much already.

It’s insane and it’s only going to get better. I think anything else is only cope guys, sorry. It’s only going to get crazier:

  • The token limit will become huge up to the point where you can just feed it terrabytes of text and info directly.
  • AI agents will be able to visually test all app functions, auto-detect and auto-fix bugs.
  • There’s pretty much nothing a human can do that an AI cannot do theoretically.
  • You’ll be able to give the AI a complex task, like developing an app, and just let it run continuously for days, designing, testing, coding, re-testing, etc until the app is ready.

Maybe it will take 5-10-20 more years until we get to that point, but the direction is clear.

In the initial stages AI’s going after the simple things. No one searches for code snippets or browses stackoverflow anymore. In the next stages it’s going to get after more and more complex things.

I think our only chance to remain relevant as developers is to build large complex apps or things that have a brand / network effects.

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8

Who knows, I don’t even know what to think anymore…

Today, I had a client ask me to modify the code so that one of my plugins could open an anchor link on his page. This shows where a normal human being with some coding knowledge is today.

It’s one thing for AI to generate code snippets, and another thing entirely to write a complete, structured application. So far, AI can only update parts of an app — an entire app, properly structured with different classes and human logic, is still literally not understandable for AI.
In the end, we are the pilots of our apps, and this will not change in the foreseeable future.

What I really like about AI is the boost in productivity. My development time has improved by about 90% since I started working with it, and it allows me to create some crazy things — like this slider, for example.
I built it in about a week; in the past, it would have taken a few good months:
:backhand_index_pointing_right: Shader Infinite Slider

Not jsut code wise, text and overalll sutff as well…

What I like about AI is productivity time, it has improved 90% since I started to work with it and allow me to create some crazy things like this slider for eample, Idone this in a week, i the past it would have taken a few good months Shader Infinite Slider

9

I agree with you and I found the same productivity boost. And definitely a lot of people have no idea what AI is capable of - I often get questions from customers that could have been easily answered by AI.

On the other hand, I’ve also seen the reverse quite a lot, customers send me code generated by AI and asking me to fix it, and when I look at it it’s just a complete hallucination.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet is pretty good at building or updating entire apps, often in a single try: https://x.com/mckaywrigley/status/1894123739178270774

It does get bogged down in token limits and I’ve found that for more than > 2000 lines of code it gets too slow and ineffective. My opinion though is that this is more of a temporary limit and it could be solved with:

  • more computing power
  • but even if processing power stays as it is, I feel like it could be solved algorithmically by making it work the same way a human does: not by keeping the entire code in memory but running some kind of “search” mechanism where it finds the relevant parts of the code and only focuses on that.
10

Yeah, everybody will soon be a developer. :slight_smile:

As for clients one of mine who is a developr could not manage to change a simple thing in the JS file, I am not worried about this part at all…

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11

Totally agree with you guys. Honestly, the AI boost is real, I’ve had the same ~50% productivity jump since I started using it (especially on CSS part, as I am really bad at creating modern looking pages). But still, I’ve seen devs (even experienced ones) struggle with changing a single line in JS… so yeah, I’m not worried about AI replacing us - it will become a very powerful tool, it will replace only the developers who are not motivated to evolve to match the new times which will come.

The gap between generating code and actually understanding the logic, structure, and flow of an entire app is massive. And as long as people keep sending broken AI-generated snippets asking for help, I think we’re safe. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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