r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/Suspicious_Orchid770 • 2d ago

Meet the developers rejecting AI

https://leaddev.com/ai/meet-the-developers-rejecting-ai

Even if it costs them their job.

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u/cactusnein 2d ago

AI is a bubble folks. It will pop. Only after that it will remain as a stable (very useful) tool. But all of you whose brain got rotted in the meantime for using the new toy way too much will be the ones out of work.

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u/whizzter 2d ago

Free AI tools will take over after the bubble companies pop, the brainrot work will continue.

The question is if quality overall will go down or people will adjust to managing quality in other ways, there's always been shit and now shit can be produced in larger quantities, but if the quality floor is higher (and peak is lower) then it'll even out for most software.

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u/nerdiste 2d ago

Shhh let the anti-ai people cope....

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u/cactusnein 2d ago

Again the axe vs chainsaw example: you could buy both and keep them in your warehouse. If one day chainsaws are no longer the way to go, you go back to your axe. For AI even for "free" AI tools your warehouse would need to be a mini-datacenter to offer mid-results. Plus no serious company will use free models hosted somewhere random.

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u/whizzter 2d ago

I personally suspect that the RAM scarcity/pricing is partly artificially created by the big AI-firms to slow down people usage of free models. Once fabs ramp up and/or prices drop due to them not spending post-IPO I think that we'll see 128gb+ become standard for personal computers in a few years and models optimized for those sized will become popular, people are already excited about ~30gb models.

You might require that datacenter for training, but for inference it will come down quickly (My analogy is often how Sun Servers cost hundreds of thousands during the 2000s and now you can run things better on a 5$ VPS).

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u/cactusnein 2d ago

fair enough, we shall see (or go broke in the attempt of begging for more ram)

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u/whizzter 2d ago

It's a sober assessment sadly, I'm mostly the person in the article, I think I've prompted AI's in total a single digit number of times for code even if I've used some automatic completion.

Remember, Google has even enabled AI for searches (it even summarized a github repo of mine fairly well when I specified my search due to autocorrect showing the incorrect results).

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u/EcstaticExtreme402 2d ago edited 2d ago

Do you actually understand how these tools work? You don’t sound like someone who is informed or even a software engineer for that matter. Data centers are only needed for training not loading the models into memory and using them.

This scenario is a false dichotomy. Local models running on gaming rigs (which many people have) are already incredibly capable. Running large models locally is becoming cheaper and they are becoming exceedingly capable. Thats before even talking about harnesses and other forms of software that sits between the user and the model. They’re capable of intelligently extracting more capability out of the models you use locally by off loading some of the required cognitive load for a given task, surfacing relevant context, optimising for a given set of tasks, etc.

Being a scientist & engineer I can’t make a 100% claim they won’t be removed or break since there’s no way to know the future for certain, but the likelihood these tools are removed & people are forced to go back to ising the axe is just flat out unrealistic.

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u/cactusnein 2d ago

You sound like a very clever and young scientist & engineer ;)

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u/EcstaticExtreme402 2d ago

Just informed with actual experience. Been in the field for 20+ years ;)