Use AI - or else!
Github’s CEO blog post is making headlines: “GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out” says Business Insider. That’s how insiders get their information, you see – they read blogs /s.
It’s sensationalized, of course. The context is not included, the entire post is not linked, take it at face value or get out. The quoted Thomas Dohmke is in fact quoting someone else, and the message is not so black and white when you read the rest of the paragraph. From the blog post itself:
The developers who found success with AI tools have a strong underlying motivation to prepare for what they anticipate will be an overhaul of their profession. To that end, they relentlessly experiment with various AI tools, even when the tools aren’t consistently helpful. “Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career” one developer said.
So we’re just quoting some poor sod, showing that even if the tools aren’t good, one might find themselves trying to use them anyway, out of fear of losing their jobs.
The rest of the post is a typical AI propaganda, IMO not worth reading. So perhaps the fearmongering headline that we see floating around doesn’t take much away from the rest of the content.
But I can’t help but notice how unusual the language of AI propaganda is. It’s not promising a brighter future. It’s threatening. You have to adapt, it says. You’ll be left behind. Being an “AI Skeptic” is just a “Stage One” of being a successful developer of the future (guess where that’s from)!
The last technology I saw that had to resort to shit like this was Bitcoin and its likes. When the tech is not good enough – and your marketing not strong enough – to be able to win the hearts of the very people whose lifes you’re promising to improve oh-so-much, this smells like a failure to me. Smells of desperation.
I wasn’t around for most of the software engineering revolutions of the days of yore. Was TDD also considered so unattractive that it had to be forced into products to make people use it? Was OOP so unappealing to most that we had to paint a dystopian future where people who don’t use it are left out? Was there ever this comical time pressure brought along with these, an “adopt it now or say goodbye to your career?”
Why should I adopt it now, when our protagonist CEO admits that it isn’t “consistently helpful?” (A down-to-earth translation of this phrase would be “a shitty tool”). Why shouldn’t I wait and see, wait for the thing to become good, wait until the tooling improves, wait until best practices get established?
What’s the hurry? Is someone worried about being in the red too many quarters in a row or something?