I have a boss who tells us weekly that everything we do should start with AI. Researching? Ask ChatGPT first. Writing an email or a document? Get ChatGPT to do it. They send me documents they “put together” that are clearly ChatGPT generated, with no shame. They tell us that if we aren’t doing these things, our careers will be dead. And their boss is bought in to AI just as much, and so on. I feel like I am living in a nightmare.

We had a discussion about AI at work. Our consensus was that it doesn’t matter how you want to do your work. What matters is the result, not the process. Are you writing clean code and on finishing tasks on time? That’s the metric. How you get there is up to you.

While this sounds like a good idea, leaving individual decisions to people, longterm it is quite dumb. if you let an LLM solve your software dev problems, you learn nothing. You don’t get better at handling this problem, you don’t get faster, you don’t get experience in spotting the same problem and having a solution ready. you don’t train junior devs this way, and in 20 years there will be (or would be without the bubble popping) a massive need for skilled software developers. (and other specialists in other fields. Better pray that medical doctors handle their profession differently…) you really enjoy tweaking a prompt, dealing with “lying” LLMs and the occasional deleted harddrive? Is this really what you want to do as a job? (bonus point) Would your company be ok with someone paying a remote worker to do his tasks for a fraction of the salary, and then do nothing? I doubt that. so, apparently it does matter how the work gets done.

Old enough to remember how people made these same arguments about writing in anything but assembly, using garbage collection, and so on. Technology moves on, and every time there’s a new way to do things people who invested time into doing things the old way end up being upset. You’re just doing moral panic here, and it’s frankly tiring to listen to.