I’m in software engineering. AI is pretty far along in my field, and also very suited for it. I’ve spent two decades writing everything from very low-level to high-level code. I enjoy it, but it’s just labor at this point. What LLMs allows me to do is move to the role of systems architect. I have an endless supply of tireless jr engineers to execute my designs.

I get quick results. But I’m not as in touch with the codebase as if I had written it myself. You can do things wrong, and you can do things right. I like to compare it with a chainsaw. You get the job done a lot faster than with a regular saw, but you can fuck up a lot harder, too.

The field is moving fast. In the last two years it’s gone from helpful auto-complete to finishing projects on its own.

I expect to be downvoted.

I hate AI, but still use it from time to time when 3+ searches would yield no result, or I am already quite adapt to a topic and just want some stupid research work done by a web scraper tool, or when searching on brave search and I just search for a command in bash or something like that on a topic where I don’t currently want to learn (maybe because of a deadline). I am inpatient at the moment, pressed for time and still want to try new things. It’s a faster search engine for me right now because search engines and wesites became infested with SEO, bots and AI slop, at least I get to control the answers a bit better

Try throwing AI at boring repetitive work.
I argued with an LLM for about 15 minutes and got a list of IPs and the name of the systems that used them. I could have done it manually in about an hour.

Also I’d argue that it’s the opposite. It’s for people that are experienced. If you can’t check the output for correctness it’s most likely wrong. I’ve never had the right answer the first time I asked.

I translate this to: “if I’m making a horrible mistake, I want you right there with me when it blows up in my face.”

If they actually felt it gave them an advantage they wouldn’t be trying to convince everyone else to do it too.

There’s a lot clearly unemployed/in industry that doesn’t spin around AI in here.

In dev, AI saves fuck tons of time. But there’s no nuance on the Internet so everyone assumes I’m advocating for vibe coding. I’m not.

What the “fall behind” is referring to is the simplest fact, if you’re in a team and you’re not using AI? You are very likely outputting at a much slower speed.

Now more caveats, you’re not a lead dev or principle architect, your code isn’t second coming of Jesus, you need to get a task done. Like it or not, the pace rest of the team sets? Is the new floor.

I manage a team and while I give them a lot of time to get work done well, the world around us is shrinking in resources. Business cares not that a job takes 4 weeks, they need it done in 2, ideally in 1 week.

Hopefully this sheds some light on this. I’m getting downvoted regardless. I’d probably have more popular opinion praising trump than daring say anything positive about AI here.

From what I’ve experienced it’s mostly managers saying this. They’re afraid of competitors taking over the market because they can be more efficient with AI. They say this without any idea of how exactly that would work.

There are people in all kinds of industries claiming AI is helping them do their job 30% faster or whatever, so presumably you’ll be “left behind” if you don’t catch up to their pace. In reality, those “30% faster” people are often producing at least 50% worse quality work. So it may come down to whether you can persuade your potentially AI-obsessed boss that maintaining quality matters enough to not adopt a faster but far more problematic process. You might not actually be left behind in terms of producing valuable work, but your boss might decide your team is being “left behind” if you don’t use AI to generate workslop or meet increasingly unrealistic deadlines.

I am reading this book https://thecon.ai/ that, among other things, explains the hype behind the set of tools we call AI. Check it, it might help you answering your question or at least having a different pov compared to the “if you don’t use it you’ll fall behind”.

There is no there there. AI has yet to prove itself useful for more than support at the general public level. Right now AI’s most compelling use for the public is as a mediocre assistant not good enough to be irreplaceable but not bad enough to fire. There are scientific applications where the technology is allowing researchers to do things that would have taken years in a few weeks, but general purpose use is still years away from being what people actually need or even want.

People who claim that if you don’t use it you’ll miss out are like beleaguered parents telling thier childless friends how great having kids is. It’s the most basic human instinct, confirmation bias. I made this choice and therefor it must be the right choice so everyone else should make that choice too.

And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.

That still is extremely unspecific and doesn’t say much about what the idea is to use it for

it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets.

Writing maybe? I can’t tell what this is about

Seems like some people are looking at the AI chatbot and thinking “this thing is smarter than me.”

AI’s extremely flawed still, but it’s improving. There might actually be a day when it can do many of the things they promise. Supposedly it’s helping disease research. That seems undeniably good. Right now it’s useful in a few ways, in the future it will be helpful in more ways.

My biggest concern is that AI chatbots will soon start giving alternate versions of history. Becoming a huge propaganda tool. Even more than currently. I am afraid for the day when 99% trust it blindly. And that day is already almost here.

You can resist as much as you want but technology and big business are going to keep moving whether we like it or not. Unless we all decide to boycott, which we are too comfortable to do, there is no stopping capitalism. So yes, in much of the business world, if you don’t get comfortable with AI, you will fall behind.

That doesn’t mean you have to do anything with AI, tho. If you never learned to use a computer, or Excel, you fell behind in many business settings. Doesn’t mean you have to learn computers.

LLM’s are not the end all be all. There will be another big AI boom at some point in the future and if it’s derivative of LLM’s you may not have the experience to use the new tech as well as others who are well versed with AI. Isn’t good or bad. It’s just how you wanna live your life. Make a living in spaces that don’t require AI.