When it comes to the sci-fi trope of humanity ending at the hand of the machines, I’m in the camp of “The Creator” rather than “The Terminator” – it’ll be a software bug that does us in rather than machines achieving sentience and judging us unfit. Which brings me to… the glut of “AI” coding assistants that are so hyped these days.
With some time off for the holidays, I had an opportunity to update some of my open-source projects and try out the JetBrains AI plugin as I did it. The results are interesting…
On one hand, virtually none of the major features work perfectly – every time the plugin generated refactorings or unit tests, they were somewhat off, the documentation generation was at the most junior developer level, but I think that it would be wrong to call it useless. In fact, it is well worth the $100 yearly cost they charge for this thing because that “wrong” code it generates doesn’t work as-is, but it also isn’t that far off from what was needed. So, at the end of the day, using the plugin to start menial tasks is a huge time saver. It just doesn’t reduce the time to zero.
I did find the fact that the underlying prompts all start with “you are a rock-star … developer” to be quite amusing. Obviously, we all have different definitions of “rock-star developer”, but the output looked more like the “booze and groupies” kind. At some point, we have to remember that this doesn’t (yet) understand anything about what it is doing. It is incredibly good at mimicry and does work a lot faster than any human could. It is only a “10x developer” in that it is 10x faster, not 10x better. I think that there is still a large gap between where this is going and the humans that are good at this craft. I’m sure that the gap will narrow, but the intent to fully automate at any cost seems unjustified.
Which brings me back to the original comment about AI: we’re at a stage where these assistants are productivity multipliers for skilled workers. Just like computers have been in various fields for decades now. But that isn’t apparently good enough for the kool-aid drinking hype mongers: nothing less than complete replacement of the human element is acceptable in their book. The economics of the workplace aren’t static, though – it’ll certainly devalue large parts of the this profession, but the runtime cost of AI models still isn’t zero. There is an equilibrium to be found. I just have no idea how unpleasant it’ll be, especially for new practitioners, and I have no idea how innovation will continue to happen when everything is a “remix machine”, but it’ll be interesting to watch… I guess.