I need to use AI

I was building birdhouses with a good friend when the topic of AI came up. She asked, "Do you think they (my employer) would notice if you didn't use AI? Do you need to use AI for your job?”

This had puzzled me quite a bit, and my immediate reaction was that I need to use AI. But it kept me thinking. (Outside the fact that we're building internal AI tooling within the company) Could I? One thing is the amount of progress one engineer could achieve in a short amount of time. In the current state of software, I find it both useful and painful to use at the same time, but used correctly (does anyone remember Tea?) it can be an accelerant in software development. Whether or not the financial bubble pops or if Anthropic or OpenAI survive their battle against the Chinese open-weight models doesn't really matter. The tech will be here to stay regardless. I share many of the criticisms of AI, such as environmental and societal impacts. This is a conversation for a different day. But in my corner of the world, it has been and will continue to be a changing force in software development.

Before writing much of this post, I made a Google Form to collect some information on what people know/think about LLMs. Before I continue, I want to be transparent: I did only get a few back (less than 5), so the sample size won't be conclusive to anything outside of my own learning.

It was a mix between people that sometimes use the tech vs don't use it, but across the board, it seems everyone understands how the tech works (some version of a neural network that learns from large collections of human information and trains on that data at an extreme scale). A term that has been said often around conversation about AI but not well defined is AI psychosis. Some define it as an echo chamber where the AI will agree with its user leading to dependency on the tech. I've heard it used a lot in the tech space to refer to developers that can't stop working and believe that the tech is all powerful and they prompt the agent to create code at all hours, including long running prompts to generate code during the night. As time goes on, we’ll get a more concrete definition.

Another thing I found interesting is that all of the responders did not feel forced to adopt AI into work, which opposes my view as a developer. Although I'm not necessarily forced to use it for everything, the expectation is to develop with it to go at a faster pace.

In my personal ideal world, I would have gotten a job in big tech right out of college, learning to be a good software engineer under the guidance of a human. I yearn for that kind of era to return, but moping and thinking about it isn't gonna change the future. My current path forward is to take what is in front of me and become the best software engineer that I can be with the tools provided.