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You know what else about AI?
People who hype it have no idea about diminishing returns
We have decades of research showing that when people only work on the hard stuff at work and don't get sufficient breaks, they burn out faster
If you're selling AI as a tool that "automates the mindless parts of work" then the worker is only left with the hard parts, and they burn out faster
There will be some people who don't get this, so try an (imperfect) analogy:
Imagine you can automate the easy parts of parenting, the bedtime story, the moments when kids want to cuddle, the days when they eat well. And the parent is left ONLY focusing on the hard stuff, the tantrums, the life lessons, the medical worries. That is not parenting. That is burn out.
It’s an interesting conundrum. I’m pretty skeptical of AI in software development. But there are things I consider to be grunt work. I have to issue with that stuff be automated.
For example, RowMappers in JDBCTemplates. No interest in spending 40 or so minutes typing up one mapped to 18 columns in a table. Or creating a prototype GUI in React.
@davidhmccoy This is the thing. AI might be fine for looking at large data sets of medical images, for example, and finding commonalities among images that did or did not develop into cancer 5 years later. That is a great use case. There may be other great use cases in a very specific profession, such as software development. But that is not what AI "hype" is. The hype says "if you don't figure out how to use it in ALL of your jobs, you will be left behind."
Another implication from the analogy, that holds true:
Those “easy parts” of the job, performed frequently by someone who cares about the whole job, are also vital to maintaining one's connection to the job.
The skillful developer / parent must maintain a deep relationship to the changing code base / infant, that *requires* frequent practice of the basic stuff.
The less we do those “easy” basic continuous maintenance tasks, the more estranged we become from the code base / infant, and we'll be correspondingly clueless when something goes wrong. And it'll happen *really* fast if we spend any time not doing those low-level “easy” tasks.
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