Writing and Programming are more important now than ever
Best time to hone these 2 skills to put you in the top 0.001%(Stats provided)
C was my first programming language to write terrible code. I use stack overflow, which was the code for chatGPT back then. Now, I can’t imagine coding without ChatGPT. It has become part of my work life. You specify what you want from the AI, and it spits out magic.
Back in my school days, coding and writing were tools for me to get a B and not disappoint my parents. Hardly a passion. This chasing for the approval of others lingered into my early work years as well.
There is no single big bang that profoundly changed my life. It was a quiet realization that doing it, failing it, but keeping on trying is the way to break out of the barrier that I placed for myself.
I started self-learning coding years ago and transitioned to a tech job. I‘ve also changed my self-reflection processes. From writing on paper that gets chucked at the corner of my drawer to being naked with my thoughts to the world.
Today, I use ChatGPT to perform research and generate boilerplates.
These time-consuming tasks are what ChatGPT excels at. Yet, with the AI wave riding high, companies are pushing the boundaries of what ChatGPT can do. The potential for cost savings is too attractive to ignore.
ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM), a subset of generative AI, which is another subset of AI. Nowadays, when people talk about AI, they usually mean LLM.
Chatgpt replacing writers at work
Recently, BBC shared a story about how a company sacked 60 writers, replacing them with ChatGPT prompts.
LLM has made a shift in people’s behavior. Especially in content creation, where churning out articles like butter to get more eyeballs. For many writers, the writing focus has shifted from creation to revision.
Months ago, news about an AI software engineer called Devin generated a lot of buzz. Software engineers are expensive. This business sees this as a potential big saving. But, software engineering is more than coding. This raises the eyebrows of many tech people. An industry veteran has also come out to debunk the capability of Devin.
Since then, Devin seems to have niched down to an area where LLM excels. You guessed it: boilerplate coding. In Devin Creator’s recent blog release, they highlighted that the use of Devin is best for repetitive engineering tasks.
For someone like me who took a career conversion into tech and hopped onto Medium together about a year ago. LLM has raised the bar for a good programmer or a good writer.
No point in gatekeeping and saying AI can never do XYZ. With processors doubling their power every 2 years, reaching AGI is no longer far-fetched.
LLM limitation
The trend is moving in that direction. Current AI still requires human touch as a safeguard to prevent hallucinations. However, this human touch can be outsourced to a country with less expensive labor since using ChatGPT is one keyboard away.
At work, we explored the use of LLM for marketing content generation.
When I was working on a marketing team as a data analyst, we explored the use of AI to create marketing content based on financial articles. Most of these financial articles seem to revolve around a certain formula of writing.
Stock X went up or down due to <link it with another recent event>, and what are the recommended choices?
It’s pretty convenient for LLM to generate something similar.
LLM has its place in the work environment by replacing humans with AI to tackle boring writing and boring coding. By boring, I meant repetitive in nature, which is low value. If AI has the potential to replace your career, you should start thinking about pivoting it.
Why we should still write and code
Humans are social creatures, and we have the desire to connect with others. We communicate to bring our ideas and desires across. With the internet and words, our thoughts can reach out to places that we have never heard of.
“The primary reason to write an essay is so that the writer can formulate and organize an informed, coherent, and sophisticated set of ideas about something important.” — Jordan Peterson
Writing helps you to think better.
I write slowly. It took me 8 hours to write and edit a 600-word article to get ~50 likes. That’s 1 word per minute. When I read some of the articles featured in the editor’s choice, I knew I had so much to work on.
I write to enhance my thought process — and this slow process of iterating my words changed the way I bring across an idea to the audience. To use AI completetly takes away the reflective thinking that one gets from writing.
While less than 1% of people can code and less than 0.1% who writes for a living, the number of the number of people who do them as a hobby is even lower.
If you can code and supplement that with good communication (which you can improve from writing). You will be fomidable.
Conclusion
LLM is here to elevate programmers code and writers ‘ pieces. It shouldn’t stop people from writing for self-improvement as the camera didn’t stop artists from doing realistic drawings.
