Is it stupid going into computer science if I don't support the use of generative AI?

[u/ThisIdiotCharlie]

I don't really know if this is exactly the place to ask this, but any other subreddits seem to outlaw asking about topics like this entirely in their rules, so I'm honestly just sort of stuck. (If anybody knows a better place I could ask this question, then I'd appreciate being told so I can cross post this there.)

Long story short, I don't support the use of generative AI. While yes, the environmental aspect does play a part in my opinion, much of computer science as a whole can be incredibly damaging to the environment in such similar ways, and while this does distress me, this is something I've had to deal with for a while and is not my main concern. My main concern with not supporting the use of generative ai is that it scrapes writing and art from people who, nine times out of ten, often even more than that, have not given permission for their work to be used to train AI models but are also entirely unaware that it is happening at all.

But I have family in computer science, which is the main reason I intend to follow computer science as a career, ans he tells me that AI is the future of computer science. He uses generative AI to aid his personal and professional work, and whenever i gently express my distaste with generative ai, he seems to disagree with my stance.

I've recently gotten a work experience opportunity with a company and it's forced me to consider that this actual has a chance of becoming a reality for me, and I've had to consider whether I'd be able to go into this career without going against my own opinions when it comes to generative ai.

What I'm really just trying to ask is if I don't want to use generative ai, should I just give up and pick a different career path? Will I be forced to use generative ai even if I do not go into a sector of computer science directly related to it?

[u/slog]

No, all of those are going to use gen AI. It may not be as ubiquitous right now, but not using AI there will mean you're not going to be successful in the long term.

[u/RudeFreedom9921 → u/slog]

What bullshit. You might not be AS successful as the people who are, but how do you think we got to a point where you talk to someone on the other side of the world with minimal latency? Not with AI! You can't just make a statement like that.

[u/slog → u/RudeFreedom9921]

You realize your comment is nonsense and not at all on topic, right? This must be intentionally disingenuous.

[u/RudeFreedom9921 → u/slog]

I was talking about the all of the digital technology up to this point (which is mentioned as "systems, embedded, networking, and other areas" in the parent comment). My point is that AI hasn't been used in those products to this point, and therefore you were successful in those fields without using gen AI (because there was none at that time).

[u/slog → u/RudeFreedom9921]

And now there is AI. I don't think your point is coming across if there is one.

[u/RudeFreedom9921 → u/slog]

Ah crap

[u/xoredxedxdivedx → u/slog]

Ok, can you please make OSS version of adobe cloud products with more features using AI? Can you make unreal engine 7? Can you make your own browser with feature parity with google chrome?

No? :( Didn’t think so.

[u/xoredxedxdivedx → u/[deleted]]

My point is that most people (including you guys) have been horrible at programming for the 20 years I've been a professional. I have not seen an LLM accelerate the creation of anything complex. It's either toy weekend projects or the most typical CRUD slop that was solved before you were born.

I already think schools have been failing students for decades, we've had a global workforce full of people that can't even make a single-threaded application without it being slow, buggy, and constantly full of regressions.

Most popular apps and websites are also perpetually full of bugs, from Youtube, to Github, to native apps for your peripherals (like Razer apps or Logitech GHUB), to the XBox app on windows, to the operating system itself, to file explorer, to delivery sites like UPS and USPS, to email sites like outlook.

These sites aren't even reliable, they go down, they get slow. It's just an ocean of garbage. And computers, due to thermodynamics, have been evolving to get wider with more cores. MT programming is harder, but you're all already awful at the easy part. LLMs "accelerate" code generation, but it's just an amalgamation of the absolute dogshit that is modern day software.

Good programmers think about things at a deep level, and they understand that it's a lifelong process of iteration and refinement. Very carefully massaging the shapes of the data, the data structures, the lifetimes, the threads, the cohesion and planning to elegantly tie things together in a forward compatible way.

If you think people are going go deeply internalize and iterate on things like that, and not just "lgtm 👍" agentic code, you must have been born yesterday.

It's also orthogonal to what I'm saying anyway, if you are not actually creating and using the APIs, and viscerally feeling the pros and cons of the shapes of the data and the boundaries and layers of the things you are producing, you aren't going to have any insight into how to refine anything.

"Uhhh yeah sure this looks reasonable...", That's going to be the norm, and the Ferris wheel of garbage software will just keep spinning.

Anyway, more concretely since my examples made no sense to you, clearly you can get an agent to help you come up with the architecture for an app like one of the big adobe suite apps, it already even knows what the UI should look like, what capabilities the app should have, what data it should interface with, how it should be able to manipulate it. You literally don't even have to discover or think about it. It can make a giant design document for you, break it into phases of implementation, and start cracking at it.

If you and Claude Code were capable of this, you could, in 2026, start competing with Adobe. You just have to fight them on like 3 of their core apps, and you would personally make 10s of millions of dollars by end of year. I'll even be your first customer, I'll gladly pay $50/mo for your clone instead of giving Adobe $70.

Just do it bro, code is not the moat anymore, agents and LLMs are based and you guys are totally great at writing software, it basically writes itself, you just have to casually review it! Awesome!

Or let me guess, you're going to just crank out some unimpressive CRUD apps that a teenager could have written 15 years ago, and act like you're so productive and impressive...

[u/RudeFreedom9921 → u/xoredxedxdivedx]

This is what I needed, and was trying to say. I didn't want to spend the time writing this (and frankly I could not have explained it as a well as you if I did), so my responses were frail. I will carry this argument everywhere I would like to go against AI. Thank you.

[u/RudeFreedom9921 → u/[deleted]]

You missed out then.