The future of software development (again)

Some reflections on my post from 2021, copied from my post on LinkedIn (yeah, I guess I'm a guy who posts on LinkedIn now).

OpenAI is 10 years old.

I remember when I was in high school and I built a very lame chatbot in Flash that does very basic NLP, and thought it was amazing at the time.

Fast forward to 2021/2, was playing around with GPT-3 and text-davinci-003, and I loved the "Q&A" mode they had on the home page. I would show my friends how I tell it to roleplay as characters from shows - "Act like you're Dwight Schrute and let's play out [some nonsense scenario here] in The Office. DON'T BREAK CHARACTER at any cost." (early stage prompt eng. I guess)

And then over a year before ChatGPT released, I wanted to share some thoughts on AI coding tools and published this post after starting to find TabNine (shoutout Dror Weiss & Eran Yahav) and GitHub Copilot really useful: https://guywaldman.com/posts/future-of-software-development

Reflecting on this post now, the last point made there about an idea of the human actually being the "copilot" seemed wild at the time, but now is becoming a real reality.

I don't really know what I think about the future of AI now.

I have used LLMs extensively, developed so-called AI apps & "agents" (some open-source), even researched its security implications and threat vectors at Microsoft. At PANW I also show and help people on how to use AI tools and how to use them more effectively, but also warn of its limitations and even risks.

This is honestly not to brag (others did all of the above much better) but to say that I'm not overhyped and mostly understand the tech and its limitations, so my opinions are grounded in reality, and the things that worry me the most now are overreliability on AI and its impact on creator ecosystems. It's a powerful tool, in the right hands and in the right places.

And some people won't agree, but I really don't like AI for content generation or things we "write to other people" - I can see how it's useful to brainstorm or outline thoughts, but for me personally it feels fake and superficial. Zero judgement to people who do (if it helps you - more power to you!) but not really my thing. Who knows, maybe I'll change my mind later.

All this to say... been a rollercoaster. Let's say where we are 10 years from now.