So, before you get the wrong impression, I’m 40. Last year I enrolled in a master program in IT to further my career. It is a special online master offered by a university near me and geared towards people who are in fulltime employement. Almost everybody is in their 30s or 40s. You actually need to show your employement contract as proof when you apply at the university.
Last semester I took a project management course. We had to find a partner and simulate a project: Basically write a project plan for an IT project, think about what problems could arise and plan how to solve them, describe what roles we’d need for the team etc. Basically do all the paperwork of a project without actually doing the project itself. My partner wrote EVERYTHING with ChatGPT. I kept having the same discussion with him over and over: Write the damn thing yourself. Don’t trust ChatGPT. In the end, we’ll need citations anyway, so it’s faster to write it yourself and insert the citation than to retroactively figure them out for a chapter ChatGPT wrote. He didn’t listen to me, had barely any citation in his part. I wrote my part myself. I got a good grade, he said he got one, too.
This semester turned out to be even more frustrating. I’m taking a database course. SQL and such. There is again a group project. We get access to a database of a fictional company and have to do certain operations on it. We decided in the group that each member will prepare the code by themselves before we get together, compare our homework and decide, what code to use on the actual database. So far whenever I checked the other group members’ code it was way better than mine. A lot of things were incorporated that the script hadn’t taught us at that point. I felt pretty stupid becauss they were obviously way ahead of me - until we had a videocall. One of the other girls shared her screen and was working in our database. Something didn’t work. What did she do? Open a chatgpt tab and let the “AI” fix the code. She had also written a short python script to help fix some errors in the data and yes, of course that turned out to be written by chatgpt.
It’s so frustrating. For me it’s cheating, but a lot of professors see using ChatGPT as using the latest tools at our disposal. I would love to honestly learn how to do these things myself, but the majority of my classmates seem to see that differently.
So fucking what if you’re somehow compelled to use it later? Nobody is talking about later. This is the part where they’re learning the essentials which is, as you seem to agree, a bad time to use AI. What’s with all the unrelated apologetics nobody asked for?
I personally like the fact a lot of people are using AI to learn fundamentals, but only because this improves employment of real coders.
It’s also going to harm many predatory startups too, run by idiots with deep pockets. It’s better to handicap them this way than they actually have scalable stuff which works in the real world.
Most of the programming job cuts this year are untreated to AI, it’s another bubble that is bursting. But the above is creating another bubble that will burst in a year or so, and those who can code will see improved salaries, in my opinion
This is Darwinism in action