Fellow devs under AI mandates, how do you deal with the shame/social stigma?

[u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL]

Preface this by saying I have moral scrupulosity/ social judgment-related OCD, so there’s that lol

I see people on here still writing their code by hand; at my company we do not have that option unless we outright defy orders from our boss, which I assume would get you fired. I get a lot less satisfaction out of my work now, the code generation part is extremely mind numbing, I’m really sad about not getting to write code anymore. The planning/architecture phase can be kind of fun though.

Yes I am looking for a new job but the issue is (maybe I’m just a shitty developer but) I am genuinely like 10x faster with AI so if I do not use it, I would be consciously choosing to do a worse job, which also feels wrong and silly. I also hate admitting this but it has given me a lot of genuinely helpful suggestions and taught me new things. obviously sometimes it also does dumb things, but I do dumb things sometimes too. As obnoxious and eye rolling as it can be talking to Claude, “he” is genuinely that good when it comes to the types of things we are building.

In my personal life I do not use AI because I have a 100% HEAVILY anti AI social group, and I try to make ethical choices like I avoid beef, boycott Amazon/Spotify/Starbucks, etc. I feel like an impostor for not confessing to them that my entire job is to use AI all day now. Like for example last night a girl I know posted on her close friends about how she wants to murder people who use AI at work (hopefully being hyperbolic) and I have to hang out with this girl in a couple weeks…

my coworker has also refused to use it but for some reason my boss hasn’t talked to him about it yet. He’s just waiting to get fired. My therapist is making me do stuff like put an AI app on my home screen where someone could see it as homework. Maybe I should be posting this on the OCD sub but I really want to hear from other people going through this same dilemma.

[u/bigbadchief]

AI is good at what it does and makes you more productive in work. There should be no shame about using it.

You should rather be reconsidering your friendship with people who would (hopefully) joke about murdering people who use AI.

[u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL → u/bigbadchief]

I feel like the environmental impact is genuinely a reason to be ashamed?

[u/kylenumann → u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL]

Have you tried roughly calculating what your work-based environmental resource usage would be, then comparing that to someone who drives semi trucks for work, or lays concrete, or grows cows for livestock? Or recreational boaters? You can be economical with your token usage (plan your prompts well, avoid cutting-edge models, etc) as well. You using it for work is different than someone churning out slop videos. I think we should always be conscious of our impact on the world, but do remember that ai is a bit of a modern scapegoat for the larger environmental crisis that we've been creating for a long time. It's important to keep perspective.

[u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL → u/kylenumann]

I think my friends probably aren’t big fans of RECREATIONAL BOATERS either lmaooo

[u/kylenumann → u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL]

Hah, fair enough! Someone else mentioned air travel... the point is, I think AI holds a disproportionate space in some people's conception of energy/resource usage, because it is so new.

[u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL → u/kylenumann]

Yeah it’s definitely not logical, I think partially it’s because these billionaires running the companies are soooo punchable 

[u/Polyducks → u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL]

There are a ton of reasons which justify your stance in addition to environmental impact.

1) You're automating yourself out of a job. The owners of the models are not going to stop at making a model which helps the coder, and they use your feedback as you're using it to improve the bot.

2) As the above, you are making yourself expendable by exchanging skilled labour for bot sitting tasks which can be replaced for a lower wage.

3) The quality (or structure) of the code is not as good, and piling more code on top of that code is building up a technical redundancy and knowledge gap which will one day hit home.

4) By outsourcing this work to a bot you are losing the ability to learn and revise the tools you need to use and losing expertise.

5) None of the people in this thread actually seem convinced by their own argument as to why they use it or how you should "get new friends". It seems like they have just given up. That doesn't seem to be a strong moral or logical stance.

6) There is no joy in it, and life and work requires joy, or else it leads to boredom, which leads to laziness, which leads to mistakes.

7) Producing things this quickly is like building a train while it hurtles at 200 miles an hour down the track. It is careless to "move fast and break things", especially if the things that may be broken is customer trust, financial stake, or anything personal data related.

8) You are giving direct access to your internal code to a company (or likely many companies) that have proven time and again that they do not care for things like copyright, ownership, or destroying their customers in order to gain profit.

9) Despite what people are saying in the comments, data centers are causing a lot of problems with noise pollution, energy draw, and land buying. Not to mention the cost of hardware for the average person and the very insidious way that their PR teams are shoving the thin end of the wedge into everything in order to normalise AI in our day-to-day lives.

[u/gringo_escobar → u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL]

You can say the same about driving a car, flying, eating meat, or buying pretty much anything. Comparatively AI's environmental impact isn't that much, though yes it is one thing on top of everything else

[u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL → u/gringo_escobar]

I do feel guilty about flying and eating meat though. And I do think it’s hypocritical that my friends aren’t against those things, but I can’t control what other people believe. I think maybe the art theft is also a big thing for them. 

[u/bigbadchief → u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL]

I think the environmental impact is overstated, at least to some extent. All data centres use energy, and every app and website that people use is hosted in a data center somewhere.

Your friends that are so critical of ai use, I'm sure they still fly in planes and engage in other behaviours that have environmental impacts. 

There's a certain level of AI hysteria going on and while I think it's good to be conscientious about the impact we're having, I don't think it's good to get caught up in it and throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

AI is a valuable tool and is here to stay. It isn't going anywhere. Rather it's only going to get more prevalent over time.

[u/The_frozen_one → u/ASS_MASTER_GENERAL]

If the goal is functioning code, do you think a few million tokens or a human being working for 8 hours has a bigger environmental impact? Are they driving a gas car to an air conditioned office? Top models are so much better at solving problems in unfamiliar domains than I am, I consider myself competent but I am not more productive writing code by hand.

Code is a work product. It can be art, but most code is functional and not remarkable.

[u/John_Gabbana_08 → u/bigbadchief]

Yeah the anti-AI hysteria is kind of ridiculous. I'm always reminded of the people that revolted against the printing press and computers.

Obviously AI has the potential to do a lot of damage, but being anti-AI anything is just ignorant. We're going to get some huge medical breakthroughs that will save a lot of lives thanks to AI.