Sure, an AI watches 30k hours of video games and is heralded, but when I watch 30k hours of video games, I need to “move out and make something” of myself.
In Graphic Design, technology removed a lot of specialists. Used to be you needed a type guy, a colour guy, an art director, and an illustrator for each and every project.
Now that’s all the same guy.
Same thing is going to happen to coders I think. Look around at your team, think of everything they are currently doing, then understand that soon these will all be your sole responsibility.
I actually don’t see that as a bad thing other than in the loss of jobs.
All the best games were things made by fewer people not more. The best game ever, Dwarf Fortress, is entirely done by 1 guy.
It would be nice if it caused a return of teams of 3 guys in a garage creating and shipping software
AI is not replacing programmers crowd are delusional.
Haven’t written a single line of code in 6 months. Yet I feel confident in saying that I’ve contributed more progress to a solution than the concurrent work amounting to 2y FTE working on the wrong problem.
LLMs will only make the latter problem worse, because that’s how the tool will be used. Knowing what problems to solve, and which not to solve, is a lot more “programming” than actually writing code. The other part is the extra work that comes in vetting stuff written by LLMs. There is a huge difference in how much effort it is to code-review work of someone you trust to not make certain mistakes vs someone who is likely to pull stuff straight from stack overflow.
Software development is to me:
- 50% modelling the domain and flows.
- 20% plumbing and making stuff harder to fuck up by accident
- 20% documentation
- 10% programming
I welcome anything that can help on reducing somewhat trivial tasks. Programming has never been the challenging part of software development, and isn’t where the big and costly mistakes are made. Those that think that LLMs helping with the programming part, make them a significantly better developer, are still bound by the 10%, and I question their ability to understand the bigger picture.
LLMs can be a useful tool. But, I’m worried about how much time will be spent fixing subtle mistakes it will make.
“replace” is, as always, oversimplified… the job of programming will likely change for sure. programming languages will be built around AI generation, and programming will become prompt creation that looks at the big picture rather than the minutiae of code: just like it did when we stopped coding in ASM and started coding in higher order languages, or scripting languages, etc
It all just moves up a level really, I’m the lead at my company and writing code is maybe like 25% of what we do. A lot of it is about connecting different services, physical product inventories, other company integrations , taking customized requests from the CEO, identifying where things are and why they are laid out this way.
I work at an E-commerce company, however we have four buildings and do a lot of manufacturing and distribution. Multiple connected websites, internal and external, wikis, inventory programs and then multiply that by other companies integrations.
I’m just saying, when it comes down to it, it’s gonna take awhile for an AI to do that. Sure it’s gonna be great at writing some sick for loops and generations 95% of a full script, but that has to be connected to real world things, other assets outside of the scope of web development.
As a programmer, I do a lot more than just write code.
Saying that AI is going to take my job is kinda love saying a brick laying robot will take all the construction jobs.
Hey, AI is pretty good at attending meetings. It still needs to learn how to drink coffee, though!
/joke
But seriously though, machines did end up replacing a lot of jobs. They added some jobs too, but I don’t know how the ratio is.
It’s not that I don’t think AI will replace jobs. It’s just that programming is so much more than just writing code.
An LLM, which is the best thing we have right now, doesn’t understand concepts. And most of my job is taking problems and figuring out the best solution given a whole massive heap of context. That’s not something an LLM will ever be able to do.
Until we have something like general AI, my job is safe.
Soon we’ll have The Mind Game from Ender’s Game:
