I have been using AI for over 2 years at different capacities.
At work, to build solutions for the social sector organizations to make it easy for them to analyze data and personally to build open-source projects where I actively write code.
I want to summarize my experience from both these perspectives and I am leading with one big question: Will AI take our jobs?
Lets take the first case: We are using AI within our product to help analyze data faster and we are especially using it to analyze qualitative data, text data that is.
Historically non-profits fell into the following bucket
- They didn’t collect qualitative data because they couldn’t analyze it
- They collected it but didn’t do much with it (again difficult to go through large amount of text)
- Used some of the text data as quotes to show their program was working
- Collected it and analyzed it manually (very rare scenario)
Now, data analysis is hard.
So AI definitely makes this process easier. If you fell in the bucket no 4 (above), what took you days now happens in a matter of minutes. So it won’t be completely wrong to say it would almost replace a human in analyzing this data. But….
Here is the big question.
What the AI does in terms of data analysis, does it satisfy people?
The answer to this question is: Not completely. It does give you a good start but I have consistently seen that it falls short of satisfying a human being. There are many reasons for this
- When someone is looking for insights, they pretty much know before hand what they want to see
- Quality of analysis is not always great
- You still want to go and do some manual analysis to see what else you can find and to confirm if what the AI did was ok
So, in this scenario, AI won’t take your job. You still have a huge value to provide.
Just don’t be lazy and you will be fine.
Lets take the second scenario.
I am using AI to work on my own open-source projects. AppsAre, an uptime monitoring tool and SeasonSurvey, are my latest projects.
I use VScode to write code for my softwares and that comes with Copilot, which is now free.
I swear, AI makes the whole process of building much faster.
For instance, one of the features I was building for AppsAre required that I send notification of website being down to a Slack channel. And I have the concept of teams in the app which could have more than 1 person, so the need here was to notify everyone in the team.
Laravel has this nice integration with slack but when I wanted to send notifications I needed the team_id to be passed to the User model so that I could then pick up the slack channel to post the notification to based on the team_id. And I wasn’t sure if there was a feature to pass that parameter to the User model.
I asked Copilot this question?
Man, it not only gave me the example code of how this could work but also explained how the code really worked. I had to tweak it a bit to make it work exactly for my use case but made it so much easier.
The impact: What would typically take me a few hours going through official Laravel docs and a little bit of digging happened in 2 minutes.
This has real implications.
I am much faster to code an end to end feature. For someone that knows to code this is amazing efficiency increase.
Can my CEO come to me and say “Hey, I am going to replace you with a non-programmer and make him use Copilot or whatever else is out there and develop apps at a much lower cost, I don’t need you”?
The answer is a straight NO.
Coding is just a small but an important part of product building process. The thought process, the understanding of the use cases the understanding of customer pain points, understanding of core business the company is trying to do, all of these cannot just be replaced. Even from a purely coding standpoint it is not possible for a complete beginner to just start coding using Copilot.
If you disagree, all I ask is for you to try.
For those that are worried about being replaced, I suggest focussing on developing skills and just continue to build using AI. Don’t be that guy that says “I hand code all my apps and don’t use AI”.
There is nothing to feel proud about not using AI. It just makes you look dumb.
