Replaced or Improved Job Security?
If you believe that Generative AI will replace programmers in the next 20 years, you might want to challenge that belief!
Generative AI does a great job assisting with code development. I’ve personally used it to help on a number of my own projects. But its not at a point right now where it can create complex web applications or software on its own.
Model Dependencies
The reality is that Generative AI is still extremely dependent on human input. Models need human generated content to learn. They also need contextual feedback to adapt knowledge to what is currently being asked.
When it comes to generating code, LLMs often utilize open source code to inform how the model should write a requested snippet of code. For established code bases with minimal changes, LLMs have no problem coming up with simple solutions.
Generative Decay
But LLMs constantly go through what’s known as Generative Decay. Meaning, as time goes on, Generative AI models becomes less effective without human intervention and reinforcement.
A great example of this is trying to have Chat-GPT help you write a code snippet using the Polars DataFrame library. If you are working on the latest version of Polars and you ask it to perform certain tasks, it will fail to generate working code. Why?
The reason for this phenomena is because Polars is under constant development with minor releases coming out weekly. The velocity at which changes are being introduced into the library’s code base makes it difficult for Chat-GPT to keep up.
In contrast, Pandas has a bit more history and hasn’t gone through as many changes recently. This makes the generated output more reliable.
I think this uncovers a major need for Chat-GPT and other generative models to be quicker at training. But that comes with challenges of its own which we won’t jump into here.
Conclusion
The main point of discussing all of this is to highlight how Generative AI models are highly dependent on “human generated” content, including code. Even with its flaws, I think that the Generative AI tools we have today are absolutely incredible. That said, I think the need for programmers remains strong and isn’t going away anytime soon!
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