American teenager Joshua Karoli is pursuing a career in IT despite the rise of artificial intelligence. He hopes the excessive hype will burst the AI bubble and lead to more jobs for professionals who can code.
American teenager Joshua Karoli is pursuing a career in IT despite the rise of artificial intelligence. He hopes the excessive hype will burst the AI bubble and lead to more jobs for professionals who can code.
Karolyi told Business Insider that he started programming with Scratch in second grade. He realized he could create entire games using it. Then he picked up a book about Python from the library and started trying to write code from there. He gradually increased the level of difficulty of the material he studied and learned a lot during the COVID pandemic.
«As for artificial intelligence, I had known about neural networks for a while because I had seen people do cool things. Before OpenAI became very popular, they had a song generator that created songs in the style of classical composers and so on. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world,» Karolyi said.
He notes that currently AI produces results that appear as accurate as possible, even if they are wrong.
«I spend a lot of time debugging AI code, that’s my experience with it. I use it from time to time to debug my own code or get an idea of how to solve something, but overall I don’t think the code is of the highest quality,» the teenager said.
He also participated in a game jam where he used AI to fix code that was malfunctioning.
«You can get pretty far with vibecoding, but it usually gets harder. As the project gets bigger and bigger, it gets harder and harder to figure out what the AI can work on. It can fix one thing and then break something else. That can create problems because when your project gets bigger, the AI can only focus on one thing. It’s even hard for humans, at least for me. I’m just a teenager,» says Joshua.
He says he’s not worried about powerful AI taking over and taking jobs, but he believes the technology could reduce the number of vacancies.
«AI made me think, but there are already so many people in programming that I don’t know if there are any job guarantees. I hope all my peers will pay more attention to AI than they should. Then, when the bubble bursts a little, or maybe when there are jobs that AI can’t do as well, I will be the one who is right for the job because I know how to handle it,» the schoolboy admitted.
In his opinion, AI can be used as a tool, but he tries not to rely on it too much, as many people do.
«AI is still not very good at reasoning. It is still a long way from replacing most of the work that I would like to do or that most programmers do,» says Joshua Karoli, adding that he dreams of owning his own company and being his own boss.
Earlier, Recruiting Partner Olga Sergienko shared her first experience of rejecting a candidate due to lack of skills with AI tools, even though the interview was for a management position, not a technical one. Not all representatives of the IT community agreed with this decision, because, in their opinion, AI skills are not decisive for a management position, not for a narrowly specialized technical one.
