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Brit workers waste nearly six hours a week 'botsitting' (www.theregister.com)

submitted 2 months ago by HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I have only one data point:

I am an embedded software developer. Recently, I had to attach and debug a stepper motor with a serial interface to an embedded control system. A bog standard task - basically, you need to initialize the motor, send it a home / referencing command, tell it to which position it has to go, and wait until it is there. Luckily for science, I had to do practically the same seven years ago with a lab system at a research institute. And in the current job, the senior engineer responsible for the motor interface is a heavy proponent of AI tools and uses these whenever he can.

Oh, and there are a few more pesky little differences:

In the first job, I had to write the driver myself, as I had no working code, but some examples in Python and Java.
I had only a partial protocol from the vendor and had to reverse-engineer important parts myself, as the vendor preferred to supply a closed-source windows driver.
in the second job, we already had working though a bit old C++98 code written by somebody who had left the company, for an earlier iteration of that embedded system, which was in production for about 8 years.
in the second case, the responsible engineer relied heavily on AI
he told me that in multi-threaded C++ code, you don't need locks for shared access, because the AI didn't tell him. I had to educate him a bit about undefined behaviour in C++.

In both cases, the result had to be reliable, ad it was part of expensive and heavy machinery with high cost of failures.

The outcome? The task took less than four weeks in the first job, and over six months in the second job. In the first case, the result was very reliable. In the second, it is still not fully reliable.

You can point out that the second was a legacy system, which is more difficult to evolve. But that's the point - AI does not "understand" legacy systems at all, and worse its use brings down and inhibits communication and knowledge transfer.

At best, you can conclude that AI is no substitute at all for a lack of knowledge and working institutional processes.

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago

Thank you, this is what I have been trying to tell people, I am an IT guy at a financial services company, the entire company is currently AI pilled, and I hate it.

Replacing knowledge and skills with a statistics based chatbot is insane.

The only times I use AI is like a dynamic manual, and that is only if I couldn't find the information through a normal googling.

I have tried to use AI to write code for me, and it terrified me, it was so easy, but I lost control and understanding of the code, and I hate that.

I want to be able to glance at the code of a script I have developed and be able to remember how it works, and I don't get that with AI.

A skilled employee with knowledge of the code/system is far, far more valuable than a statistics based chatbot.