Developers, AI Will Not Take Your Jobs… Yet
February 15, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
It seems programmers are safe from an imminent AI jobs takeover. The competent ones, anyway. LeadDev reports, “Researchers Say Generative AI Isn’t Replacing Devs Any Time Soon.” Generative AI tools have begun to lend developers a helping hand, but nearly half of developers are concerned they might loose their jobs to their algorithmic assistants.
Another MSFT Copilot completely original Bing thing. Good enough but that fellow sure looks familiar.
However, a recent study by researchers from Princeton University and the University of Chicago suggests they have nothing to worry about: AI systems are far from good enough at programming tasks to replace humans. Writer Chris Stokel-Walker tells us the researchers:
“… developed an evaluation framework that drew nearly 2,300 common software engineering problems from real GitHub issues – typically a bug report or feature request – and corresponding pull requests across 12 popular Python repositories to test the performance of various large language models (LLMs). Researchers provided the LLMs with both the issue and the repo code, and tasked the model with producing a workable fix, which was tested after to ensure it was correct. But only 4% of the time did the LLM generate a solution that worked.”
Researcher Carlos Jimenez notes these problems are very different from those LLMs are usually trained on. Specifically, the article states:
“The SWE-bench evaluation framework tested the model’s ability to understand and coordinate changes across multiple functions, classes, and files simultaneously. It required the models to interact with various execution environments, process context, and perform complex reasoning. These tasks go far beyond the simple prompts engineers have found success using to date, such as translating a line of code from one language to another. In short: it more accurately represented the kind of complex work that engineers have to do in their day-to-day jobs.”
Will AI someday be able to perform that sort of work? Perhaps, but the researchers consider it more likely we will never find AI coding independently. Instead, we will continue to need human developers to oversee algorithms’ work. They will, however, continue to make programmers’ jobs easier. If Jimenez and company are correct, developers everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief.
Cynthia Murrell, February 15, 2024
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