Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I'll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don't believe me.
Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of "vibe-coding", but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can't spot any although we are looking intently.
And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What's even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would've taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.
I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn't a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It's a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don't know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.
And it all changed so fast. I don't think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.
it's interesting how years of security hardening and multi-tier firewall infrastructure to prevent code leaks is all going out the window, isn't it?
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by code leaks here. Like if the AI agent decided to take the proprietary code and post it on social media for some reason?
The same guard rails the humans had are in place for the AI agents too (not that they were super effective for humans to begin with).
anything the model ingests leaves the premises. that's a leak.
I work for a very large company that owns their AI, so that's not a concern in my case.
But even if I wasn't, I would assume the company would have negotiated a contract with whoever provides the AI that meets their requirements. That's above my pay grade.
I would never use a personal AI for company code. Even if public AI offerings aren't blocked on corporate devices, that sounds like a great way to get in trouble for mishandling company IP.
you can't really justify the hosting costs if you have less than 5000 employees
Yes, but someone has to host the data.
Your customers trust your company to host that data because they know you meet certain standards when it comes to security, privacy, and whatever other data handling requirements matter to them.
You can make the same agreements with your suppliers that your customers make with you to ensure their handling of data meets your (and your customer's) requirements. In this case, the "supplier" is the company that hosts the AI models.
don't think i've ever worked for a company that hosts customer data. we develop and build products, customer purchases product, transaction over.
You think they're using in-house models to do their coding? ๐