For some background, I originally wanted to break into programming back when I was in college but drifted more into desktop tech support and now systems administration. SysAdmin work is draining me, though, and I want to pick back up programming and see if I can make a career out of it, but industry seems like it could be moving in a direction to rely on AI for coding. Everything I’ve heard has said AI is not there yet, but if it’s looking like it hits a point where it reaches an ability to fully automate coding, should I even bother? Am I going to be obsolete after a year? Five years?
The automobile didn’t put cabbies out of jobs, it put horses out of work.
If anything it actually made demand for cabbies skyrocket, because now they could do the same job but way faster, so now they were more affordable abd not just a service reserved for wealthy.
In other words, expect that AI will increase demand for programmers exceptionally, as the bar for entry lowers.
An LLM still needs a “pilot” to “drive” it, and you need to still know code well enough to interpret the output and catch mistakes or hallucinations.
But typically when a field becomes more affordable, it goes up in demand, not down, because the target audience that can afford the service grows exponentially.
“But if it’s so easy to become program now, what’s to stop people from just using ChatGPT and never hiring a programmer?”
Same reason people still, today, hire cabs even if they can drive themselves.
Convenience. Time is money and just because 1 person can do all the jobs of a company, doesn’t mean they physically have the time to do it.
Thank you for not being the rare rational outlook on AI and buying into the AI fear mongering, or the AI hype train.
AI is the new auto hammer, it can do things faster and sometimes better. Why you can build a house faster and with less effort! Or you can bash someone’s skull in faster and with less effort! It’s just a new tool we can use, for better or for worse, like every other new tool before it.
I’ve always been very up front with the fact that I could not have made a career out of programming without tools like Delphi and Visual Basic. I’m simply not productive enough to have to also transcribe my mental images into text to get useful and productive UIs.
All of my employers and the vast majority of my clients were small businesses with fewer than 150 employees and most had fewer than a dozen employees. Not a one of them could afford a programmer who had to type everything out.
If that’s what happens with AI tooling, then I’m all for it. There are still far too many small businesses, village administrators, and the like being left using general purpose office “productivity” software instead of something tailored to their actual needs.
Exactly. The “AI will do it all” crowd don’t have this perspective. There’s so much more work to be done, and I hope AI is hugely impactful to help. But I’ve been at this long enough to know that’s still a long road.
Bingo! This also happened when web frameworks promised to take away our jobs. Also when code generators promised to take away our jobs.
It turns out that expertise in computers remains pretty useful in a society that uses computers for almost everything. Even after the exact previous computer skill is no longer relevant.
Source: Y’all can pry Commodore BASIC from my cold dead hands. I may not be getting paid for it, but I’ll keep producing that beautiful line numbered code until my last breath.