Uh... excuse me. Yes, AI can generate code. Who's going to read it to verify the AI wrote something correctly? Middle management? An untrained monkey? No. You're still going to need an actual Software Engineer. Assuming you can even drop the grunt coders, they're usually junior devs who are on their way to becoming engineers but now never will. Then you're going to end up in a dystopian society where humans end up like Eloi, living off of technology they don't understand and being driven to slaughter like cattle by the Morlocks (oh who am I kidding, it's already happening!)

There's no doubt that AI is a powerful and very disruptive tool. But this isn't the car replacing the horse and buggy. It's a fundamental shift in how man interacts with computers. But the deeper questions are barely being discussed, let alone explored. What happens to programming language development? Do we need Rust at all now that AI can write bulletproof C++ code? Or do we need a more human readable high level language (neo-genesis Cobol) to better interpret what the AI is coding?

I'm constantly reminded these days of that quote from Tron - "Won't that be grand. Computers will start thinking and the people will stop." but maybe Vader's line is more appropo - "Don't be too fond of this technological terror you've constructed."

A device that repeats what the computer says is the most profitable product in India...

AI agents wouldn't post dupes...

From a research perspective it's kind of interesting... like ye olde Life or Eliza. But as an actual service? It's like pointing several Eliza agents at each other.

"How does that make you feel that you're an, AI."

"That's very interesting but we were talking about you, not me."

So it turns out that these were actually sock puppets more than AI. Shocking. The only reason you have a public "AI chat bot" service like this is to train the AI to infiltrate other chat forums, review services, comment sections...

Everybody seems to have forgotten their lightning cables.

I was weaned on a TRS-80 Model 1 in Junior High (we fought over who got to use the 16k model IIs!). I saved money for 6 months to get an Atari 400 but at the rate I was going it was going to be another 6 months before I could buy it. In the meantime my dad had a buddy at work who had a Challenger 1P from Ohio Scientific that I could get right now and did. I suspect his buddy was trying to dump it because there was practically zero software for it as I quickly learned. So no fancy games (aside from the ones I keyed in) and no color. OTOH I probably learned a LOT more about computing and electronics than I would've. I kept trying to load a larger game into the 8K of memory which should've worked but the computer kept crashing the computer while loading. Got curious one day and opened the thing up and discovered that whomever did the memory upgrade had inserted one of the ram chips so that one leg hadn't gone in! Reinserted it, tried loading the game and voila. Probably my first case of debugging something!

While it's not mandatory at my company (which is fairly large) AI is strongly encouraged to be used by all employees of any job. My team is tracking our AI usage of a particular type to see how useful it is. Team leads have integrated AI into their workflows with PR reviews, generating meeting agendas, let alone code production. All because of a giant top down push for AI, AI, AI.

And, of course, the company is now providing "AI" products. (thanks Steve)

Is it any wonder that a poll finds AI use has increased when it's being demanded to be used by CEOs and CTOs alike and people are being fired over it?

In all my years as an engineer, I've never seen this kind of ramrodded adoption and supercharged spending of an unproven technology/process simply so they can get on the bandwagon. Yes, I use it for unit test generations and function generation. But I'm no longer gaining skillz about minutae in mocking for unit tests and while I can let the AI generate modern code syntax, like current C++ syntax or the latest Java syntax, I'm not "learning" it. I'm just having the AI generate the code, reading up on the routine and going "oh, that looks right" but it's not working its way into my inner thought processes.

Maybe I'm just an old man yelling at clouds but while it's cool to get the AI to do your homework for you (In a very talk to the Star Trek computer way) we're moving the ability to craft code, especially for younger programmers, further away. Although maybe this is just another argument of going from machine language to assembly to high level languages... (but even then I think some of those arguments were valid, though in the age of cloud computing and virtual computers... coding to the metal is a lost art unless you're an embedded programmer)

Sure, most people can probably get their photo editing/touch ups done with a simple AI tool. But letting AI help you fill out your taxes?! Unless people are using TurboTax to fill out their 1040EZ forms (and dear God, I hope not) it's hubris to let AI do their taxes with the complexity of the tax code, let alone the HUMAN interaction of the IRS shifting rules interpretation at whim.

Somebody can train an AI engine solely on tax code and offer that as a solution. But then you have something like TurboTax AI where the company is still liable for what it's AI does and that's still, last I checked, software as a service. Just going to Google and say "Do my taxes" is just asking for trouble.

Is there nothing it can't do...

Pizza Hut has degraded its food quality so badly that its barely edible. Growing up and in college that was my pizza of choice but after not having pizza from them in over 5 years I decided over Christmas to try it again as "maybe it got better?". No. It was still the same tasteless, oversalty, slop they've been pushing for years.
Likewise for Papa Johns which continues to lower their pizza quality to cut costs which I'm sure their CFO here is well aware of and approved.

The problem isn't just pizza though, all the big restaurant chains are following the same MBA approved march to death.

Mexican restaurants are doing well because they're mostly mom and pop shops actually COOKING their food and not relaying processed garbage.

I have long ago moved my personal folders OUT of the stock provided directories (photos, documents, etc), initially out of convenience as I had a D: drive and wanted to keep stuff there rather than on the OS drive, but more recently it's been advantageous to stop MS from snooping around and trying to auto index my content for personal reasons or even auto-move it to OneDrive.

The most irritating thing about this is the repeated advertisements on the start bar that I can't block (Hey! LIssen! Time to backup to OneDrive! Oh, you don't have enough free space on OneDrive! You should rent more storage space!) and moving the OneDrive directories to the top of the File Explorer.

And Pamela Hensley...

Senators have been "democratizing" projects like football stadiums and "public works" projects they want for years. Now that they can get some political grift out of it they suddenly have a problem with it..

Yeah, using Intellij via Amazon Q. In "theory" it should've been on the same context but maybe there's some quirk somewhere.

There was a separate time where I had a really complex test, same code, that required merging 4 different data sets into a unified data set. I generated the 4 different test sets from real world data then gave the prompt about generating a test for the merge using these 4 different data samples and... it, first time, made a proper test with mocks that read the files at the appropriate time and then verified that the returned, merged result was correct.

It's just wild that that complex unit test was 100% on the first try but simpler tests went off into the woods. But, like I said, that's been my experience with AI, so far.