As programmers make more and more use of generative AI in the workplace, their responsibilities are quickly transitioning from creating new products from scratch to babysitting a large language model that cobbles together code.
It’s gotten to the point where some engineers are no longer able to make sense of the code being spat out by an AI, as chip optimization software company Infinity founder Jeremy Nixon told Business Insider.
That doesn’t bode well, considering researchers are finding that the widespread use of AI can lead to cognitive decline and skill atrophy, including among computer scientists. Developers are afraid that software engineers are drifting further and further away from the act of actually writing code and learning new skills required to architect larger projects as their employers continue to push for more AI automation.
Even employees at frontier AI labs are aghast at peers who are struggling to make sense of the outputs of AI models. Earlier this year, independent research firm SemiAnalysis technical staff member Jordan Nanos revealed in an interview that OpenAI engineers had no idea what they were looking at while scrolling through the code of their own graphics processing unit kernel, the program at the core of the company’s efforts to better make use of available hardware to train and run AI models.
