Ok let’s give a little bit of context. I will turn 40 yo in a couple of months and I’m a c++ software developer for more than 18 years. I enjoy to code, I enjoy to write “good” code, readable and so.
However since a few months, I become really afraid of the future of the job I like with the progress of artificial intelligence. Very often I don’t sleep at night because of this.
I fear that my job, while not completely disappearing, become a very boring job consisting in debugging code generated automatically, or that the job disappear.
For now, I’m not using AI, I have a few colleagues that do it but I do not want to because one, it remove a part of the coding I like and two I have the feeling that using it is cutting the branch I’m sit on, if you see what I mean. I fear that in a near future, ppl not using it will be fired because seen by the management as less productive…
Am I the only one feeling this way? I have the feeling all tech people are enthusiastic about AI.
As a fellow C++ developer, I get the sense that ours is a community with a lot of specialization that may be a bit more difficult to automate out of existence than web designers or what have you? There’s just not as large a sample base to train AIs on. My C++ projects have ranged from scientific modelling to my current task of writing drivers for custom instrumentation we’re building at work. If an AI could interface with the OS I wrote from scratch for said instrumentation, I would be rather surprised? Of course, the flip side to job security through obscurity is that you may make yourself unemployable by becoming overly specialized? So there’s that.
Honestly, if I was still working in C++ I would be more worried about the language being replaced than about AI.