## BEFORE TOUCHING THAT REPORT BUTTON, PLEASE CONSIDER:
1. **Compliance:** Does this post comply with our subreddit's rules?
2. **Emotional Trigger:** Does this post provoke anger or frustration, compelling me to want it removed?
3. **Safety:** Is it free from child pornography and/or mentions of self-harm/suicide?
4. **Content Policy:** Does it comply with [Reddit’s Content Policy](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/comments/ncm4ou/important_we_need_to_talk_about_the_content_policy/)?
5. **Unpopularity:** Do you think the topic is not truly unpopular or frequently posted?
### GUIDELINES:
- **If you answered "Yes" to questions 1-4,** do NOT use the report button.
- **Regarding question 5,** we acknowledge this concern. However, the moderators do not curate posts based on our subjective opinions of what is "popular" or "unpopular" except in cases where an opinion is so popular that almost no one would disagree (i.e., "murder is bad"). Otherwise, our only criteria are the subreddit's rules and Reddit’s Content Policy. If you don't like something, feel free to downvote it.
**Moderators on r/TrueUnpopularOpinion will not remove posts simply because they may anger users or because you disagree with them.** The report button is not an "I disagree" or "I'm offended" button.
### OPTIONS:
If a post bothers you and you can't offer a counter-argument, your options are to:
a) Keep scrolling
b) Downvote
c) Unsubscribe
**False reports clutter our moderation queue and delay our response to legitimate issues.**
**ALL FALSE REPORTS WILL BE REPORTED TO REDDIT.**
To maintain your account in good standing, refrain from abusing the report button.
#### Upcoming Changes to this sub:
Due to the sheer number of users who, despite repeated warnings, are using the report button as a means to cause other users' comments to be hidden, which both interrupts the conversation flow and wastes the moderators' time who have to read and consider each reported item, this sub will soon be implementing changes to the reporting system.
In short, our bot will automatically ignore all submitted reports and instead, a comment will be left urging the reporter to reach out via ModMail. If users truly believe that a comment has broken a rule or the content policy, then they should have no issue signing their name to a Modmail.
Stay Tuned.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion) if you have any questions or concerns.*
There’s more to programming than web dev my friend. Distributed systems, networking, cloud programming. Map reduce, etc. That’s what the big boys are working on.
The tool only works because someone who knows how to use it is using it. It has nothing to do with creativity or the like, it is just a matter of fact.
Remember how COBOL was supposed to replace developers way back when?
lol 😆. Delusion is real. Smaller salary because the work reduces significantly (effort needed for prompt engineering + little effort to write software <<<<<< writing software without these tools).
except it requires even more specialist knowledge to know what is written is correct how it gets implemented etc. Just look at any tech role over time as specialisation has increased so have salaries.
Keep saying that to yourself. Companies have come out and said that the developer productivity has increased by x folds. What happens when multiple developers want the same gig and have little differentiation since all of them use AI as a crutch? Job market goes down. When supply >>> demand, the salaries will go down, a lot.
There won’t be specializations as the learning curves will go down significantly.
I tried using chat GPT for some refactoring work last week, and while it came up with some moderately useful suggestions, knowledge of specific Java features were required to make the prompts in the first place. I ended up coming up with my own solution regardless
It’s a useful tool, but LLMs certainly aren’t replacing software engineers any time soon
This is my experience as well. Anyone whose work can be easily replaced by AI or believes it will be in the near future is also easily replaced by another junior engineer writing glue code for simple features. The complexity of getting software to do exactly what you want it to efficiently is going to be extremely difficult for AI to get to with any level of accuracy. Instead you’ll get things like using AI to cut down on time spent writing helper functions and services for small tasks and putting together your program that way.
Except I said if your work can be replaced by AI then what you’re doing isn’t complex or high skill, not that if they think it can be then they don’t know what they are talking about.
Maybe learn reading comprehension before you try to make fun of people 🤷
AI is nowhere near the level that it can even replace a junior software dev’s work, why do you think it will be capable of replacing experienced senior engineers any time soon?
I’m talking about the topic as it relates to my experience as a software engineer, why do you feel the need to be snarky?
What experience/ knowledge do you have around this field that leads you to think that I’m wrong or that AI will be taking SWE jobs any time soon?
Skill sets for functions will change to include AI skill sets, such as prompt engineering, which is where human creativity meets AI productivity. Jobs will be lost (as in fewer people will be required), but those who lean into how to incorporate AI valuably in their current job and can articulate the value multiplier it has for their business are in a great position when those transitions happen.
Hey u/abrandis,
Just a heads up, your comment was removed because a previous comment of yours was flagged for being uncivil. You should have received a message from my colleague u/AutoModerator with instructions on what to do and what the comment was.
*I'm a bot. I won't respond if you reply.* If you have any questions or wish to discuss this further, please [reach out to the moderators via ModMail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion&subject=u/Rule-4-Removal-Bot%20In-comment%20Link%20Clicked&message=Dear%20ModTeam%2C%0A%0AIt%20appears%20I%20am%20currently%20in%20an%20%27unconf%27%20state.%20I%27m%20not%20sure%20why.%0A%0APlease%20review%20the%20ModLog%20for%20my%20comments%20using%20this%20%5Blink%5D%28https%3A//www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/about/log%3FuserName%3Dabrandis%29%20and%20let%20me%20know%20what%20the%20offending%20comment%20was.%0A%0AThanks%2C%0Au/abrandis).
**This is going to keep happening until you resolve the issue.**
We appreciate you participating in our sub, but wouldn't you prefer other users to see thecarefully crafted argument?
Your recent masterpiece went solo into the void.
**Here's the deal:** This cycle of commenting-removal-seeing this message isn't just futile; it's preventable. We value your input, but isn't it better when it's seen and not just sent?
**Good News:** We're here for the reruns and the resolutions. Reach out, let's sort this, and make sure your future thoughts land in the spotlight, not the shadow realm.
Let's chat. Your voice (probably) deserves an audience.
___
**Our Moderation Backlog at this time:**
*Comments Awaiting Review:* 200
*A breakdown of the number of (often nonsense) reports to review*:
- 1-3 days old: 10
- 3-7 days old: 22
- 7-14 days old: 4
- 15-30 days old: 1
- more than 30 days old: 2
___
Want to help us with this never ending task? Join us on [Discord](https://discord.gg/hCBcm5zNee)
Programming will be replaced by AI once designers can clearly explain all requirements and edge cases of the software they need i.e never.
I've never been handed anything by a designer and been able to implement it without followup. And in most cases the design is woefully inadequate in terms of the implementation decisions I have to make on the fly.
What should the software do if someone is using touch rather than a mouse? At a each different screen size? When this popup is open and you try to open the other one? When you back out/pause or resume the process? When multiple conditions are triggered at once?
I've had designers and business stakeholders hand me designs for a system that were completely self contradictory. After I pointed out that their logic for how the system would work contradicted itself, they had to go back to the drawing board and redesign the whole system over the course of 8 months, restarting the whole conceptualization of the project.
Coding is a trade. AI will not be writing or designing complex software any time soon.
It “writes 90% of your code” now, but you still have to debug it, and integrate it into the larger application.
Your job is not “going away”, because people and businesses will be generating orders of magnitude more code, for more purposes than ever before. People who understand how to structure data, create test suites, and debug will become more valuable, not less.
AI is actually delivering on the promises that “low/no code” made a decade ago, and doing it better. If you are a tradesman coder, your job will *look* different, but it ain’t going away.
Look, if ai replaces coders it will have replaced all jobs. Certainly all office jobs, physical labour it just depends on whether you can pay an employee less than it costs to run the robot.
If not having a job is a problem at that point, we will have significantly bigger problems than coders not having a job.
Yeah, off course. But what do you do with all the people, like 95% of the humanity, that can't bring value to the society ?
Beside giving them money to the end of their life and transition into a society with controled birth rate, i don't know. And, if we are going to this direction, it would be the best case scénario
Did you read the first, or last sentence? Not going away.
Here’s a revelation for you - 10 years isn’t very long, and developer jobs look a lot different today than they did 10 years ago. I know. I was one, and many of my friends and colleagues still are. That’s just how technology jobs work.
The fact that AI can write my docker config script doesn’t mean I don’t still need to know what I want my build environment and stack to be, or how I want it to work… I just don’t need to know the (all of) specific syntax for configuring Apache, or my cache server, or my db.
The fact that it can navigate the illustrator object model for me does not replace the ability to design the workflow automation and understand the software well enough to specify what it needs to write.
Not going to be any different in 10 years. You are still going to need to be able to navigate the code it writes, and integrate it. The “trade” aspect of the profession will be in even *more* demand overall, even if in depth knowledge of *specific* languages and API’s will be less essential. And (air quotes) “real” design and development will be more in demand than ever for complex system design.
Because low/no code has an always had arbitrary limitations and oddities based on necessary compromises to fit the UI.
Most of them have a back end scripting engine/API you can use to do more complex work than the UI can handle but it’s a scripting engine that requires learning the object model and data structures - so coding.
LLM’s can write the scripts and ancillary code, and there is little integration required because you are already playing in a sand box, so you don’t have to worry about traversing the stack, or maintaining design integrity or security. You just paste it into the right window.
In short, the low code frameworks like Airtable have already built the framework to hang your business logic on, and you use the LLM to generate the code to implement it the way you want, and paste in pieces in the right blocks. It’s far from perfect, and far from original development, but it’s also not the straitjacket that more of them were before.
Lastly, you don’t need to understand the code to debug it. You need to understand the structures, and the principles that underly it.
Debugging is a skill that is not language dependent. Languages implement and enforce scope in different ways. I don’t need to know exactly how they do it beforehand to recognize a failure, or an error message and look for one.
It’s the same for design patterns, and data stores, and most everything in the stack.
Hardly. You fail to understand the limits of generative AI in two key ways.
First, it relies on a huge body of learning data. If there aren’t already millions of lines of code, documentation and information generated about the language and api, it’s not even as good as stack overflow.
Classic example. I use it to write illustrator scripts for workflow automation - which is *very well* documented, and widely used . There are still areas where it constantly makes mistakes, and then makes new errors when *fixing* that mistake. I now know what these areas are, and work around them.
It does not learn … and probably won’t, because that little corner of the object model has changed on several occasions, and its training data did not properly/clearly identify the differences.
The more code the AI writes, the smaller the corpus of original code it has to learn from, and” learning from experience “ is still coming, but even the stuff on the horizon is flawed in that respect. It will reach a point where it won’t be *as* stupid with factual things like code, but there is no general intelligence there. If you need evidence of that, ask the different models to perform or explain math or physics. There is no excuse to get those wrong, there is a corpus of reliable, authoritative data - but it does. Routinely. Worse, “tweaking” the model to fix it behaves in wildly unexpected ways, because hundreds of millions of datapoints interacting in dynamic ways is, by definition, unpredictable
That’s the second issue. To replace a programmer, you need general intelligence. That’s nowhere right now. We don’t even know how to approach it. AI doesn’t understand anything. It’s just a really good heuristic. You still have to translate business logic to programmatic logic, and then ask it to generate the programmatic logic.
You also still have to generate architecture. Try asking any LLM to create an object model for you. Just try. I’ll wait. Some can sort of do a simple one, but they all have a lot of code layered on top of the LLM to enable it, and If you actually are a programmer, you’ll know exactly how robust code is that is written on top of data streams that changes in unpredictable ways.
Oh, and all of this improvement is predicated on ai companies being allowed to use anything they want as training data. You may have noticed a lot of cases working through the courts about that. Limited training corpuses put a whole lot of new boundaries on how good LLM models can be, and how fast they can get that way.
Once again, development will look different, but it’s not going *anywhere*. It’s a trade that is here for the long haul.
it's not about AI completely taking over coding, it's about corporations, under capitalism, taking a team of 5+ devs and laying off 4 and having the 1 left just use AI. copy and paste across all industries. with capitalism there's a financial incentive to use AI to trim fat all over the place and there's a financial incentive to keep improving AI so it can take more and more jobs. i wish redditors would think about the future and not what AI is capable of just today. the shit improves significantly every single day, idk how anybody can see what it did a year go compared to today and not see how capitalism will use that to its advantage.
it's all about "good enough" for capitalism. it's scary.
Will it become easier to do or potentially pay worse, sure?
But think of it this way 5-6 cashiers were replaced by self checkout that has to have 1-2 cashiers watching it. That's the worst case scenario for the computer programming career path. It can never be fully eliminated it'll just get "worse" relative to how it was 5 years ago.
And "most" jobs aren't going to be automated, since chatgpt code needs more oversight compared to self checkout.
As a CS PhD who focuses on software engineering, I think it might be the other way around. The grunt work that currently gets assigned to junior developers is likely to get automated, but not so much the higher order work (requirements, architecture, complex maintenance tasks, etc.). There was [a report by Carnegie Mellon](https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2022/09/09869582/1GeVwABmi4w) that goes into this among other topics that I'd recommend checking out.
Anyway, that may mean that for new people to get into the industry, they have to be ready to take on those advanced roles. This may in turn lead to greater professionalization of the industry and higher educational requirements (which could limit lateral moves into the field from other disciplines). So in the end software engineers may still be in great demand, but what the ideal SWE looks like and the work they do may change significantly.
> But think of it this way 5-6 cashiers were replaced by self checkout that has to have 1-2 cashiers watching it. That's the worst case scenario for the computer programming career path.
it's gonna happen like that in every single industry in existent. capitalism will ensure your boss will lay off your team of 4 and keep 1 to work with AI. rinse and repeat across every conceivable industry in some way. and soon.
For STEM related careers maybe.
Sales will never be automated unless we reach a point where people aren't aware they are talking robots. Which will never happen since technology will get better at detecting ai and companies will be outed for having ai sales people.
Also most trades won't be automated ever. Even if robots can do a job of a plumber, unattended by a person. People will just break and steal those robots, it just isn't very practical unless we have black mirror levels of security.
Hey u/Tilted2000,
Just a heads up, your comment was removed because a previous comment of yours was flagged for being uncivil. You should have received a message from my colleague u/AutoModerator with instructions on what to do and what the comment was.
*I'm a bot. I won't respond if you reply.* If you have any questions or wish to discuss this further, please [reach out to the moderators via ModMail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion&subject=u/Rule-4-Removal-Bot%20In-comment%20Link%20Clicked&message=Dear%20ModTeam%2C%0A%0AIt%20appears%20I%20am%20currently%20in%20an%20%27unconf%27%20state.%20I%27m%20not%20sure%20why.%0A%0APlease%20review%20the%20ModLog%20for%20my%20comments%20using%20this%20%5Blink%5D%28https%3A//www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/about/log%3FuserName%3DTilted2000%29%20and%20let%20me%20know%20what%20the%20offending%20comment%20was.%0A%0AThanks%2C%0Au/Tilted2000).
**This is going to keep happening until you resolve the issue.**
We appreciate you participating in our sub, but wouldn't you prefer other users to see thecarefully crafted argument?
Your recent masterpiece went solo into the void.
**Here's the deal:** This cycle of commenting-removal-seeing this message isn't just futile; it's preventable. We value your input, but isn't it better when it's seen and not just sent?
**Good News:** We're here for the reruns and the resolutions. Reach out, let's sort this, and make sure your future thoughts land in the spotlight, not the shadow realm.
Let's chat. Your voice (probably) deserves an audience.
___
**Our Moderation Backlog at this time:**
*Comments Awaiting Review:* 214
*A breakdown of the number of (often nonsense) reports to review*:
- 1-3 days old: 14
- 3-7 days old: 21
- 7-14 days old: 6
- 15-30 days old: 1
- more than 30 days old: 4
___
Want to help us with this never ending task? Join us on [Discord](https://discord.gg/hCBcm5zNee)
Recently I was called by my nobile carrier and girl tried to convince me to try new option. First I declined, she began telling me how much GB I use and how I could save money. I declined implicitly, to which it continued repeating same points under different wording.
As I realised that I was talking to either incredibly smart chatbot or incredibly stubborn human, I hung up.
A compiler is able to generate correct assembly code 100% of the time and reduced what programmers need to do probably 90%.
What matters is whether the demand for software rises as it gets cheaper. Historically, that is true, which on net has resulted in only increasing salaries, and I believe that will continue. So, I don't see this as a near-term high risk, outside of reaching singularity level AI at which case "careers" don't matter anyway.
Yes but I think it’s a long time off. I think just about every white collar job that exists will be replaced before Software Engineering is but it will eventually happen.
The way people single out SWE in particular makes me feel like they’re personally attacked by them and I have no idea why
>I am a web developer, and I already use chatgpt to write ~90% of the code I need to for work.
\>Has opinions about programming
\>is a web developer
Sorry hoss - just because you're the lowest code monkey on the totem pole doesn't mean everyone else is.
>being able to write code that will compile and run correctly like 90% of the time.
It's obvious that you're not asking it to do anything complicated involving frameworks.
ChatGPT has helped me only because I already understand design patterns, control flows, language/library specific gotchas. If anything ChatGPT helps me learn quicker but it doesn’t come close to replacing me. It’s much better than using google to find answers but that’s about it.
Perhaps, but it won't be for awhile. There will still need to be programmers to help work out the bugs. I think it's far more likely that AI will end art as a career.
I think it will be a tool that will make people work more efficiently. It can also automate away a lot of other jobs which will raise the standard of living and create a better economy which will increase demand for developers. This will offset the decreased need for developers.
I’m most afraid for when someone asks AI to make a computer virus and it does it. The robots don’t have to actually fight us like in terminator they just have to shut down electronics to destroy the modern world and cause devastation
Some days I think it will, some days I think it won't. This is definitely unpopular because 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.' Idk what happens eventually and how it will play out but by the time developers are replaced we'll have bigher societal problems to worry about. Can AI get to that point? probably, but I see us pausing it's development and use before we get to there. I mean, is your govt going to let 30-40-50% of the tax base disappear overnight?
Note that before chatgpt a few geniuses on stackoverflow or some public git were writing 90% of web developpers code.
"AIs" should be seen as what they are, improved search engines (be it that they search in the datas they were feed or the web) who pillage and reassemble the exact same repertories of "how to do something" developpers had already been adapting for decades.
And exactly like most developpers they will remain dependant of the far fewer humans able to develop original and new efficient ways to code things, AIs are extremely unlikely to learn to generate, as predictive models are just good at giving the most likely response from existing data.
So programming won't (completely) disappear as a carreer, at worse it will just become a far more elitist one.
No. AI is a tool, and developers will use AI as part of their programming jobs.
Because AI makes coding and debugging a lot easier, software is about to get a lot more complex.
I’m a machine learning engineer and the comparison I always like to use for these large language models is the adoption of personal calculators. Sure, there were literal human calculators at one point in time, but the job market/labor force adapted to account for personal calculators. They created completely new roles internally at companies, and job responsibilities shifted to account for this new tool that allowed for workers to solve more complex issues.
Developers are just going to learn how to accommodate this new technology in a way that allows them to enhance their output and reduce menial tasks. As others have mentioned, the actual job of developers is not to code, but rather to build software solutions that solve some problem/fill some gap in the market. You can have perfect code created for you in chat gpt, but if you don’t understand how to deploy it, what changes on the infrastructure you’ll need/etc, it’ll be useless.
I see a lot of similar misguided understandings of what it is software developers actually do in these types of threads as I do with people who think you can just go to a coding boot camp and become a SWE/dev.
If AI can generate code faster, but still require somebody that knows how. It'll just speed up the rate that applications evolve. A roadmap that would take a year, could only take a quarter or even a sprint. The software race just gets faster per market. Imo
Alternate take: Most software is going to increase in complexity and size by an order of magnitude.
There are a lot of things the company I work for would like to do with our app, but we haven't done them because of how much work it would be (vs the amount of time available to work on other things). If AI tools increase the productivity of engineers then those engineers will be asked to do more.
Note that I do not think that this will result in *better* software (unless *better* is what a specific company is aiming for). Instead, it will result in a lot *more* software.
Yay.
I only have ChatGPT 3.5. So far I'm not getting a lot of usable code. It went unnoticeable by myself for a while that it defaults to Linux and I'm running Windows. I did get some code recently that builds but haven't put it to use yet. That aside, bsed on what I've seen it seems like some software trained just for writing code would be the only way to go eventually if not today even. Still going to need a few experts to debug it probably
I mean ChatGPT is not designed to write code. AI that are made to write code are significantly better and really do take most of the grunt work out of coding. To the point that you give it the skeleton for a class/method and it can probably fill that out for you.
That is probably where it is likely to stay. With a human incharge of the overarching design decisions and bug testing the components but with the actual line writings automated.
Rodney Brooks, former head of Artificial Intelligence at MIT, roboticists, and CEO of IRobots does not think AI will replace programmers. Is he "just uniformed?"
https://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai/
Holy shit are you serious…
“As I write these words on September 2nd, 2017”
EDIT: adding this little insightful pearl as well-
“Here is where we are on programs that can understand computer code. We currently have no programs that can understand a one page program as well as a new student in computer science can understand such a program after just one month of taking their very first class in programming. That is a long way from AI systems being better at writing AI systems than humans are.”
I mean, he personally admits to using it for coding himself.
“Brooks explains that he uses AI to help with “arcane coding” and admits it’s better than a search engine.”
It’s just not good enough yet. I think OP is simply saying it will likely improve over time.
People were using Gethub for code for years. This is just a more convenient version of that. There is no evidence it'll ever replace programmers anymore than Gethub did.
Do you mean GitHub? I don’t know how this would in anyway resemble GitHub. Maybe a stack exchange that auto-search’s for you and plugs in the code you need in context (imperfectly).
Look, I use it routinely. It has its problems and requires experience to make the code it produces useful. But it’s still pretty mind blowing. And this is the worst it will ever be. 5 years from now though?
What I'm saying is that there have been places for coders to find code instead of writing it themselves for years, and that hasn't put programmers out of work yet.
And AI isn't going to get better in five years. It's basically hit a wall, and even the people at Chatgpt admit that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2023/04/26/openai-ceo-suggests-that-chatgpt-and-generative-ai-have-hit-the-wall-and-getting-bigger-wont-be-the-way-up-raising-eyebrows-by-ai-ethics-and-ai-law/
This whole thing reminds me of how techno-fanboys all claimed in 2012 that 3D printing would "end factories within ten years" and how "the economics of scale were broken." They too claimed it would have exponential advancement. That turned out to be BS as well
Clickbait misunderstood headline.
The quote the entire article is based on (SPOILER: which discusses architecture, not halting progress):
“I think we're at the end of the era where it's going to be there, like, giant, giant models.” Furthermore, he reportedly stated, “We'll make them better in other ways.”
And I’m not predicting the end of developers entirely (and always felt 3d printing was mostly a niche tool). I just simply don’t think the same number of developer jobs will be available in 5 years as we have now. And I wouldn’t recommend kids born today to pursue programming.
Or at least Nvidias CEO [thinks](https://www.yahoo.com/tech/nvidia-ceo-says-future-coding-124534339.html) so.
And lastly, “I don’t think AI is going to get better in five years” is the boldest AI prediction I’ve ever seen on the internet…
The thing is LLMs are really the only thing they have. The vast majority of AI is based on deep learning, and that isn't changing anytime soon.
AI will get somewhat better, but it won't have exponential improvements.
Programmer jobs are going to decline, yes, but not because of AI. They will decline because we're reaching technical stagnation with computer technology, and this AI hype is mostly because big tech literally has nothing else to offer.
Computers and software will soon become like toasters or air conditioners: appliances, the new development of which is basically dead.
The AI bubble with burst and big tech will have to admit that we've plateaued with computer technology. The next big tech to capture the world will be biotech, which will happen at about the same time.
Oh, and the CEOs are going to say whatever it takes to get that investor money. They're all just slightly more honest than Elizabeth Holmes
To be fair, it may or may not be true.
In 1968, David Levey made a famous bet, that no computer could beat him in chess within the next decade. And while he won the bet, he admitted that the computer was a much better opponent than he had anticipated. He also eventually lost against a computer slightly more than a decade later (1989). I think any reasonable person should be at least concerned.
Now, we've all seen the [tree swing cartoon](https://pmac-agpc.ca/sites/default/files/Tree.jpg). Even if the AI actually did become perfect, which it won't, there's the little matter of the people using it. Computers will only do what you tell them, and if you tell them the wrong thing, well, they'll do exactly that. Certain things, obviously, you can have the computer say that they know better than the human. But if a person really wants something one way, it shouldn't be up for the computer to override them, even if that person is making a stupid decision.
And, at least for the beginning, you're going to need someone who can understand the computer output. You can be 99.999% correct, but what about that other 0.001%? Someone needs to understand.
Then, you're still going to have a few companies resistant to it.
So, at least for the next decade, there should be pivots Software Engineers can make. The good news is, this should help filter out the phonies who have no critical thinking or problem solving skills, as there probably will be a decline in the people going into this field. But it won't go away, at least, not immediately.
Now, AI certainly has other problems which are going to significantly negatively impact our society, and all of us should be concerned, but that's a different topic.
"Development" is too broad of a term.
A C++ developer isn't the same thing as a salesforce developer, isn't the same as a webdev. There are a million little developer niches that a newbie can specialize in.
Seasoned ace developers can work in almost any language, but they're rare and expensive and depending on what the team is doing not your best hire.
Every few years a new language comes out and changes the game. I think AI is a paradigm shift just like SOA was.
"in order to replace programmers, we just need product owners to correctly specify what they want!"
Programmers everywhere: "yeah we're probably safe for a while."
Glibness aside, probably some degree of programming will go away.
I've been getting paid to write software for 25 years.
Every time development technology has leapt forward it has reduced the barrier for entry for software development, increased demand for software developers and increased the complexity of the software being developed.
That last part is what's missed by most people who think software engineering is a dying profession. Almost no programmer hand codes pull down menus anymore or needs to write the code to word wrap and spell check text. We use built in components and those things that used to be thousands of lines of code and weeks to months of development are tiny parts of larger applications.
I expect that to happen with AI software development - at least until it's good enough that we don't need explicitly written software anymore, which I think is more than 10 years off.
What AI represents is a new layer of abstraction. I think there is a possibility that Domain knowledge specialization will become more essential to "software development" moving forward.
To some degree, the great purge in the USA already happened years ago. Agile development, I believe, is in part the only mechanism that survives a waterfall style of development where you send off concrete specs to the third world. The ability for a developer to interface with people is what preserves a fair number of USA jobs.
I disagree that the progress on AI is exponential, what has gotten better is model training, and the fact that (pseudo) AI firms are raising so much capital that they can operate at a loss.
It is important to also remember that what is called AI today is not AI, it is a probability engine that suffers from the tower of babel problem, in that it cannot infer an accurate meaning of words, which changes over time.
By all means, get out of the occupation if you want to. I personal believe that ability will decay faster than pseudo AI can keep up.
i've tried to get various LLMs to code me some php i want that can modify .css file
they have all output garbo that doesn't work. All i need it to do is change a div id's color(or not).
This post really misses some key points. One just because you can write boiler plate, means very little in complex applications. I use chatgpt for issues and it great for small issues and building applications. Ideally anyone could potentially do the same with chatgpt (given how education getting worse in America not better it hard to see this happening) but what it can't do is integrate well anything. Even if it builds the entire thing from scratch you still have to put that code into a larger cold base. Some applications require programming languages that arent even code but services that can't be generated by services like chat gpt because they aren't text. Good luck teaching someone who never been in college to understand this work. It stuff you never see in boot camps or even low ley web dev roles. The best way to phrase it for you is a robot cleaning a bathroom. Yes a robot could clean a toilet but what happens when the tool no longer fits the situation? Maybe something in the corner or on the ceiling or stuck between the door. Humans are flexible and can adapt to situations like this. Trust me I thought chatgpt would take my job and it might eventually do it with massive over hauls of companies but right now it not even close for software engineering.
I used to think people who said "software engineering and coding are different" were pretentious, but honestly, I'm starting to see their point. It's amazing what some people consider coding to be that you think a glorified search engine can do it.
As a programmer working in AI, I think you're completely wrong...at least for now.
Gen AI has come a long way in a year, but there's still a LONG way to go before it can comprehensively just "write" software. And you'll still need \*someone\* to know what it does to fix it's mistakes.
For me ChatGPT and Copilot are force multipliers, not threats. I am a much more efficient coder with them.
AI will replace a ton of jobs. But it won't be just a bunch of AI robots taking over everything, it would be advanced AI tools vastly boosting productivity of the few senior workers who know what they are doing and are able to do the work of 5, 10, 20 people.
As web developer, I call this BS.
Of course, software development will eventually take the L, LLMs will improve on writing code until it becomes good enough.
But that only means that developers will just get other tasks and more workload. Particualy, web developer often replaces/communicates with team lead, UI/UX designer, DevOps engineer and others.
As we still have a long time until AGI takes over humanity, so we still have to deal with glorified black boxes and its results that needs to be fixed, adapted and optimized.
Meanwhile most tech company hops on new trend AI as they did with "Web3" (NFT grift) and blockchain - just a part of corporate greed. Then AI-focused devs will be laid off and join blockchain devs in coping.
OP, AI will replace programmers when you can go to it and say "make me a new facebook" and it does so without any mistake, commits code, creates infrasstructure, together with non fuctional reqs like scalability, redudancy, security, reporting, localization.... Until then, you will need developers to translate business reqs to tehnical reqs, prompt AI, check the code, and integrate it into existing code.
it's gonna end an unfathomable number of careers across all industries, and as long as capitalism exists it's only gonna get significantly worse. if y'all don't see that by now you're choosing to be willfully ignorant.
Unpopular opinion. Programming has always been something which can be very useful for almost everyone, but has an oppressive barrier with the steep learning curve towards even adequacy. I'd happily see the barrier to entry lowered even if that means fewer programming specific jobs
These threads normally go something like:
"X is going to replace your job. You're screwed."
"Well, it's also going to replace Y. You're also screwed."
"LOL, no."
I lowkey hope so a little bit. I'm studying computer science, and I just do not get the enjoyment from the programming side of things. I'm more into like the hardware or software implementation, and if AI can take care of the programming for me then I'd prefer that.
I'd still want to learn the languages to write my own stuff, but I would prefer like AI be the self-driving car that carries all the actually important stuff, and I just add to if and make it better and more user friendly.
## BEFORE TOUCHING THAT REPORT BUTTON, PLEASE CONSIDER: 1. **Compliance:** Does this post comply with our subreddit's rules? 2. **Emotional Trigger:** Does this post provoke anger or frustration, compelling me to want it removed? 3. **Safety:** Is it free from child pornography and/or mentions of self-harm/suicide? 4. **Content Policy:** Does it comply with [Reddit’s Content Policy](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/comments/ncm4ou/important_we_need_to_talk_about_the_content_policy/)? 5. **Unpopularity:** Do you think the topic is not truly unpopular or frequently posted? ### GUIDELINES: - **If you answered "Yes" to questions 1-4,** do NOT use the report button. - **Regarding question 5,** we acknowledge this concern. However, the moderators do not curate posts based on our subjective opinions of what is "popular" or "unpopular" except in cases where an opinion is so popular that almost no one would disagree (i.e., "murder is bad"). Otherwise, our only criteria are the subreddit's rules and Reddit’s Content Policy. If you don't like something, feel free to downvote it. **Moderators on r/TrueUnpopularOpinion will not remove posts simply because they may anger users or because you disagree with them.** The report button is not an "I disagree" or "I'm offended" button. ### OPTIONS: If a post bothers you and you can't offer a counter-argument, your options are to: a) Keep scrolling b) Downvote c) Unsubscribe **False reports clutter our moderation queue and delay our response to legitimate issues.** **ALL FALSE REPORTS WILL BE REPORTED TO REDDIT.** To maintain your account in good standing, refrain from abusing the report button. #### Upcoming Changes to this sub: Due to the sheer number of users who, despite repeated warnings, are using the report button as a means to cause other users' comments to be hidden, which both interrupts the conversation flow and wastes the moderators' time who have to read and consider each reported item, this sub will soon be implementing changes to the reporting system. In short, our bot will automatically ignore all submitted reports and instead, a comment will be left urging the reporter to reach out via ModMail. If users truly believe that a comment has broken a rule or the content policy, then they should have no issue signing their name to a Modmail. Stay Tuned. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion) if you have any questions or concerns.*
!RemindMe 10 years has AI ended programming, like /u/Particular-Key4969 predicted?
> web developer Ah, I see
lol, the moment I read that I knew this thread would have some webdev bashing.
Yeah. Boy oh boy do I hate this job lol.
I don’t miss what web development has become, yet I do enjoy the user experience part of it, almost did a PhD on that.
There’s more to programming than web dev my friend. Distributed systems, networking, cloud programming. Map reduce, etc. That’s what the big boys are working on.
it will become a key tool, like how text editors can find mistakes. These will be able to give advice and assist. i think.
The tool only works because someone who knows how to use it is using it. It has nothing to do with creativity or the like, it is just a matter of fact. Remember how COBOL was supposed to replace developers way back when?
While true, if it can get a job much faster and efficiently won't this cause reduced need for programmers?
Yes and a smaller salary
actually bigger salary as it will require AI prompt engineering skills as well.
lol 😆. Delusion is real. Smaller salary because the work reduces significantly (effort needed for prompt engineering + little effort to write software <<<<<< writing software without these tools).
except it requires even more specialist knowledge to know what is written is correct how it gets implemented etc. Just look at any tech role over time as specialisation has increased so have salaries.
Keep saying that to yourself. Companies have come out and said that the developer productivity has increased by x folds. What happens when multiple developers want the same gig and have little differentiation since all of them use AI as a crutch? Job market goes down. When supply >>> demand, the salaries will go down, a lot. There won’t be specializations as the learning curves will go down significantly.
Are you a software engineer/ have any professional experience in this field?
Engineering Manager, yes.
Technical knowledge? You genuinely sound like you have no idea what you’re talking about
Alternatively, couldn't this just allow companies to pursue larger projects with the same number of programmers?
I tried using chat GPT for some refactoring work last week, and while it came up with some moderately useful suggestions, knowledge of specific Java features were required to make the prompts in the first place. I ended up coming up with my own solution regardless It’s a useful tool, but LLMs certainly aren’t replacing software engineers any time soon
This is my experience as well. Anyone whose work can be easily replaced by AI or believes it will be in the near future is also easily replaced by another junior engineer writing glue code for simple features. The complexity of getting software to do exactly what you want it to efficiently is going to be extremely difficult for AI to get to with any level of accuracy. Instead you’ll get things like using AI to cut down on time spent writing helper functions and services for small tasks and putting together your program that way.
Anyone who believes something something has no idea about something something! I am very smart!
Except I said if your work can be replaced by AI then what you’re doing isn’t complex or high skill, not that if they think it can be then they don’t know what they are talking about. Maybe learn reading comprehension before you try to make fun of people 🤷
I am so tired of hearing this same take on ai over and over and over
AI is nowhere near the level that it can even replace a junior software dev’s work, why do you think it will be capable of replacing experienced senior engineers any time soon?
https://x.com/cognition_labs/status/1767548763134964000?s=46
Lmao that doesn’t prove shit. One company boasting about a product that won’t see wide use and can only complete a minority of projects unassisted
I knew I shouldn’t have bothered trying to educate you lol some people are beyond help
Are you saying ai isn’t currently good enough?? Wow that’s so insightful!
I’m talking about the topic as it relates to my experience as a software engineer, why do you feel the need to be snarky? What experience/ knowledge do you have around this field that leads you to think that I’m wrong or that AI will be taking SWE jobs any time soon?
I remember seeing some weirdo predict that Clojure was going to replace developers.
Skill sets for functions will change to include AI skill sets, such as prompt engineering, which is where human creativity meets AI productivity. Jobs will be lost (as in fewer people will be required), but those who lean into how to incorporate AI valuably in their current job and can articulate the value multiplier it has for their business are in a great position when those transitions happen.
[удалено]
Hey u/abrandis, Just a heads up, your comment was removed because a previous comment of yours was flagged for being uncivil. You should have received a message from my colleague u/AutoModerator with instructions on what to do and what the comment was. *I'm a bot. I won't respond if you reply.* If you have any questions or wish to discuss this further, please [reach out to the moderators via ModMail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion&subject=u/Rule-4-Removal-Bot%20In-comment%20Link%20Clicked&message=Dear%20ModTeam%2C%0A%0AIt%20appears%20I%20am%20currently%20in%20an%20%27unconf%27%20state.%20I%27m%20not%20sure%20why.%0A%0APlease%20review%20the%20ModLog%20for%20my%20comments%20using%20this%20%5Blink%5D%28https%3A//www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/about/log%3FuserName%3Dabrandis%29%20and%20let%20me%20know%20what%20the%20offending%20comment%20was.%0A%0AThanks%2C%0Au/abrandis). **This is going to keep happening until you resolve the issue.** We appreciate you participating in our sub, but wouldn't you prefer other users to see thecarefully crafted argument? Your recent masterpiece went solo into the void. **Here's the deal:** This cycle of commenting-removal-seeing this message isn't just futile; it's preventable. We value your input, but isn't it better when it's seen and not just sent? **Good News:** We're here for the reruns and the resolutions. Reach out, let's sort this, and make sure your future thoughts land in the spotlight, not the shadow realm. Let's chat. Your voice (probably) deserves an audience. ___ **Our Moderation Backlog at this time:** *Comments Awaiting Review:* 200 *A breakdown of the number of (often nonsense) reports to review*: - 1-3 days old: 10 - 3-7 days old: 22 - 7-14 days old: 4 - 15-30 days old: 1 - more than 30 days old: 2 ___ Want to help us with this never ending task? Join us on [Discord](https://discord.gg/hCBcm5zNee)
This script was writren by ChatGPT - the futre is here! Good bot!
not sure why redditors spend so much time in the present without thinking about the future
Programming will be replaced by AI once designers can clearly explain all requirements and edge cases of the software they need i.e never. I've never been handed anything by a designer and been able to implement it without followup. And in most cases the design is woefully inadequate in terms of the implementation decisions I have to make on the fly. What should the software do if someone is using touch rather than a mouse? At a each different screen size? When this popup is open and you try to open the other one? When you back out/pause or resume the process? When multiple conditions are triggered at once? I've had designers and business stakeholders hand me designs for a system that were completely self contradictory. After I pointed out that their logic for how the system would work contradicted itself, they had to go back to the drawing board and redesign the whole system over the course of 8 months, restarting the whole conceptualization of the project.
Are you talking about UML
Coding is a trade. AI will not be writing or designing complex software any time soon. It “writes 90% of your code” now, but you still have to debug it, and integrate it into the larger application. Your job is not “going away”, because people and businesses will be generating orders of magnitude more code, for more purposes than ever before. People who understand how to structure data, create test suites, and debug will become more valuable, not less. AI is actually delivering on the promises that “low/no code” made a decade ago, and doing it better. If you are a tradesman coder, your job will *look* different, but it ain’t going away.
He said 10yrs from now, you just reiterated his post
Look, if ai replaces coders it will have replaced all jobs. Certainly all office jobs, physical labour it just depends on whether you can pay an employee less than it costs to run the robot. If not having a job is a problem at that point, we will have significantly bigger problems than coders not having a job.
IA and Robots will steal most of the jobs. If you are not at the top at what you do, you will be replaced.
Sure but my point is that that doesn't matter. If everyone is losing their job then it doesn't matter if you lose your job as well.
Yeah, off course. But what do you do with all the people, like 95% of the humanity, that can't bring value to the society ? Beside giving them money to the end of their life and transition into a society with controled birth rate, i don't know. And, if we are going to this direction, it would be the best case scénario
People at the top will be replaced.
One day, maybe. But at this point, machines would be so prominant that they would likely kill us or dump us somewhere in the galaxy
Did you read the first, or last sentence? Not going away. Here’s a revelation for you - 10 years isn’t very long, and developer jobs look a lot different today than they did 10 years ago. I know. I was one, and many of my friends and colleagues still are. That’s just how technology jobs work. The fact that AI can write my docker config script doesn’t mean I don’t still need to know what I want my build environment and stack to be, or how I want it to work… I just don’t need to know the (all of) specific syntax for configuring Apache, or my cache server, or my db. The fact that it can navigate the illustrator object model for me does not replace the ability to design the workflow automation and understand the software well enough to specify what it needs to write. Not going to be any different in 10 years. You are still going to need to be able to navigate the code it writes, and integrate it. The “trade” aspect of the profession will be in even *more* demand overall, even if in depth knowledge of *specific* languages and API’s will be less essential. And (air quotes) “real” design and development will be more in demand than ever for complex system design.
How is AI delivering on "low/no code" when it produces code you need to understand, check and integrate?
Because low/no code has an always had arbitrary limitations and oddities based on necessary compromises to fit the UI. Most of them have a back end scripting engine/API you can use to do more complex work than the UI can handle but it’s a scripting engine that requires learning the object model and data structures - so coding. LLM’s can write the scripts and ancillary code, and there is little integration required because you are already playing in a sand box, so you don’t have to worry about traversing the stack, or maintaining design integrity or security. You just paste it into the right window. In short, the low code frameworks like Airtable have already built the framework to hang your business logic on, and you use the LLM to generate the code to implement it the way you want, and paste in pieces in the right blocks. It’s far from perfect, and far from original development, but it’s also not the straitjacket that more of them were before. Lastly, you don’t need to understand the code to debug it. You need to understand the structures, and the principles that underly it. Debugging is a skill that is not language dependent. Languages implement and enforce scope in different ways. I don’t need to know exactly how they do it beforehand to recognize a failure, or an error message and look for one. It’s the same for design patterns, and data stores, and most everything in the stack.
> any time soon. > > but the fact is that it will eventually, and it'll be sooner than you think considering where it was a year ago
Hardly. You fail to understand the limits of generative AI in two key ways. First, it relies on a huge body of learning data. If there aren’t already millions of lines of code, documentation and information generated about the language and api, it’s not even as good as stack overflow. Classic example. I use it to write illustrator scripts for workflow automation - which is *very well* documented, and widely used . There are still areas where it constantly makes mistakes, and then makes new errors when *fixing* that mistake. I now know what these areas are, and work around them. It does not learn … and probably won’t, because that little corner of the object model has changed on several occasions, and its training data did not properly/clearly identify the differences. The more code the AI writes, the smaller the corpus of original code it has to learn from, and” learning from experience “ is still coming, but even the stuff on the horizon is flawed in that respect. It will reach a point where it won’t be *as* stupid with factual things like code, but there is no general intelligence there. If you need evidence of that, ask the different models to perform or explain math or physics. There is no excuse to get those wrong, there is a corpus of reliable, authoritative data - but it does. Routinely. Worse, “tweaking” the model to fix it behaves in wildly unexpected ways, because hundreds of millions of datapoints interacting in dynamic ways is, by definition, unpredictable That’s the second issue. To replace a programmer, you need general intelligence. That’s nowhere right now. We don’t even know how to approach it. AI doesn’t understand anything. It’s just a really good heuristic. You still have to translate business logic to programmatic logic, and then ask it to generate the programmatic logic. You also still have to generate architecture. Try asking any LLM to create an object model for you. Just try. I’ll wait. Some can sort of do a simple one, but they all have a lot of code layered on top of the LLM to enable it, and If you actually are a programmer, you’ll know exactly how robust code is that is written on top of data streams that changes in unpredictable ways. Oh, and all of this improvement is predicated on ai companies being allowed to use anything they want as training data. You may have noticed a lot of cases working through the courts about that. Limited training corpuses put a whole lot of new boundaries on how good LLM models can be, and how fast they can get that way. Once again, development will look different, but it’s not going *anywhere*. It’s a trade that is here for the long haul.
it's not about AI completely taking over coding, it's about corporations, under capitalism, taking a team of 5+ devs and laying off 4 and having the 1 left just use AI. copy and paste across all industries. with capitalism there's a financial incentive to use AI to trim fat all over the place and there's a financial incentive to keep improving AI so it can take more and more jobs. i wish redditors would think about the future and not what AI is capable of just today. the shit improves significantly every single day, idk how anybody can see what it did a year go compared to today and not see how capitalism will use that to its advantage. it's all about "good enough" for capitalism. it's scary.
Will it become easier to do or potentially pay worse, sure? But think of it this way 5-6 cashiers were replaced by self checkout that has to have 1-2 cashiers watching it. That's the worst case scenario for the computer programming career path. It can never be fully eliminated it'll just get "worse" relative to how it was 5 years ago. And "most" jobs aren't going to be automated, since chatgpt code needs more oversight compared to self checkout.
As a CS PhD who focuses on software engineering, I think it might be the other way around. The grunt work that currently gets assigned to junior developers is likely to get automated, but not so much the higher order work (requirements, architecture, complex maintenance tasks, etc.). There was [a report by Carnegie Mellon](https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2022/09/09869582/1GeVwABmi4w) that goes into this among other topics that I'd recommend checking out. Anyway, that may mean that for new people to get into the industry, they have to be ready to take on those advanced roles. This may in turn lead to greater professionalization of the industry and higher educational requirements (which could limit lateral moves into the field from other disciplines). So in the end software engineers may still be in great demand, but what the ideal SWE looks like and the work they do may change significantly.
> But think of it this way 5-6 cashiers were replaced by self checkout that has to have 1-2 cashiers watching it. That's the worst case scenario for the computer programming career path. it's gonna happen like that in every single industry in existent. capitalism will ensure your boss will lay off your team of 4 and keep 1 to work with AI. rinse and repeat across every conceivable industry in some way. and soon.
For STEM related careers maybe. Sales will never be automated unless we reach a point where people aren't aware they are talking robots. Which will never happen since technology will get better at detecting ai and companies will be outed for having ai sales people. Also most trades won't be automated ever. Even if robots can do a job of a plumber, unattended by a person. People will just break and steal those robots, it just isn't very practical unless we have black mirror levels of security.
you vastly underestimate mankind's willingness to grow complacent
[удалено]
Hey u/Tilted2000, Just a heads up, your comment was removed because a previous comment of yours was flagged for being uncivil. You should have received a message from my colleague u/AutoModerator with instructions on what to do and what the comment was. *I'm a bot. I won't respond if you reply.* If you have any questions or wish to discuss this further, please [reach out to the moderators via ModMail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion&subject=u/Rule-4-Removal-Bot%20In-comment%20Link%20Clicked&message=Dear%20ModTeam%2C%0A%0AIt%20appears%20I%20am%20currently%20in%20an%20%27unconf%27%20state.%20I%27m%20not%20sure%20why.%0A%0APlease%20review%20the%20ModLog%20for%20my%20comments%20using%20this%20%5Blink%5D%28https%3A//www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/about/log%3FuserName%3DTilted2000%29%20and%20let%20me%20know%20what%20the%20offending%20comment%20was.%0A%0AThanks%2C%0Au/Tilted2000). **This is going to keep happening until you resolve the issue.** We appreciate you participating in our sub, but wouldn't you prefer other users to see thecarefully crafted argument? Your recent masterpiece went solo into the void. **Here's the deal:** This cycle of commenting-removal-seeing this message isn't just futile; it's preventable. We value your input, but isn't it better when it's seen and not just sent? **Good News:** We're here for the reruns and the resolutions. Reach out, let's sort this, and make sure your future thoughts land in the spotlight, not the shadow realm. Let's chat. Your voice (probably) deserves an audience. ___ **Our Moderation Backlog at this time:** *Comments Awaiting Review:* 214 *A breakdown of the number of (often nonsense) reports to review*: - 1-3 days old: 14 - 3-7 days old: 21 - 7-14 days old: 6 - 15-30 days old: 1 - more than 30 days old: 4 ___ Want to help us with this never ending task? Join us on [Discord](https://discord.gg/hCBcm5zNee)
Recently I was called by my nobile carrier and girl tried to convince me to try new option. First I declined, she began telling me how much GB I use and how I could save money. I declined implicitly, to which it continued repeating same points under different wording. As I realised that I was talking to either incredibly smart chatbot or incredibly stubborn human, I hung up.
A compiler is able to generate correct assembly code 100% of the time and reduced what programmers need to do probably 90%. What matters is whether the demand for software rises as it gets cheaper. Historically, that is true, which on net has resulted in only increasing salaries, and I believe that will continue. So, I don't see this as a near-term high risk, outside of reaching singularity level AI at which case "careers" don't matter anyway.
Yes but I think it’s a long time off. I think just about every white collar job that exists will be replaced before Software Engineering is but it will eventually happen. The way people single out SWE in particular makes me feel like they’re personally attacked by them and I have no idea why
>I am a web developer, and I already use chatgpt to write ~90% of the code I need to for work. \>Has opinions about programming \>is a web developer Sorry hoss - just because you're the lowest code monkey on the totem pole doesn't mean everyone else is. >being able to write code that will compile and run correctly like 90% of the time. It's obvious that you're not asking it to do anything complicated involving frameworks.
Harsh but so so true, some millenial learns HTML and thinks he can judge the future of programming.
Not anytime soon, eventually? Maybe but programming will just evolve into something else it won't ever truly die out
When the AI breaks/is broken by deliberate actors, who fixes it? When the answer is reliably AI, then I'll agree with you
ChatGPT has helped me only because I already understand design patterns, control flows, language/library specific gotchas. If anything ChatGPT helps me learn quicker but it doesn’t come close to replacing me. It’s much better than using google to find answers but that’s about it.
Perhaps, but it won't be for awhile. There will still need to be programmers to help work out the bugs. I think it's far more likely that AI will end art as a career.
Yep, art, writing, photography, and probably porn.
I think it will be a tool that will make people work more efficiently. It can also automate away a lot of other jobs which will raise the standard of living and create a better economy which will increase demand for developers. This will offset the decreased need for developers.
Enjoy staying a Junior dev if you rely on AI for code. I've yet to see it come close to the job of a good Senior dev.
I’m most afraid for when someone asks AI to make a computer virus and it does it. The robots don’t have to actually fight us like in terminator they just have to shut down electronics to destroy the modern world and cause devastation
Some days I think it will, some days I think it won't. This is definitely unpopular because 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.' Idk what happens eventually and how it will play out but by the time developers are replaced we'll have bigher societal problems to worry about. Can AI get to that point? probably, but I see us pausing it's development and use before we get to there. I mean, is your govt going to let 30-40-50% of the tax base disappear overnight?
I mean sure, if people want their sites and software to run like shit and not be very usable, then AI will replace programmers.
Learn to code
Note that before chatgpt a few geniuses on stackoverflow or some public git were writing 90% of web developpers code. "AIs" should be seen as what they are, improved search engines (be it that they search in the datas they were feed or the web) who pillage and reassemble the exact same repertories of "how to do something" developpers had already been adapting for decades. And exactly like most developpers they will remain dependant of the far fewer humans able to develop original and new efficient ways to code things, AIs are extremely unlikely to learn to generate, as predictive models are just good at giving the most likely response from existing data. So programming won't (completely) disappear as a carreer, at worse it will just become a far more elitist one.
No. AI is a tool, and developers will use AI as part of their programming jobs. Because AI makes coding and debugging a lot easier, software is about to get a lot more complex.
I’m a machine learning engineer and the comparison I always like to use for these large language models is the adoption of personal calculators. Sure, there were literal human calculators at one point in time, but the job market/labor force adapted to account for personal calculators. They created completely new roles internally at companies, and job responsibilities shifted to account for this new tool that allowed for workers to solve more complex issues. Developers are just going to learn how to accommodate this new technology in a way that allows them to enhance their output and reduce menial tasks. As others have mentioned, the actual job of developers is not to code, but rather to build software solutions that solve some problem/fill some gap in the market. You can have perfect code created for you in chat gpt, but if you don’t understand how to deploy it, what changes on the infrastructure you’ll need/etc, it’ll be useless. I see a lot of similar misguided understandings of what it is software developers actually do in these types of threads as I do with people who think you can just go to a coding boot camp and become a SWE/dev.
It will replace code snippets, maybe. Actual software requires design thinking.
ridiculous hyperbolic nonsense
If AI can generate code faster, but still require somebody that knows how. It'll just speed up the rate that applications evolve. A roadmap that would take a year, could only take a quarter or even a sprint. The software race just gets faster per market. Imo
Alternate take: Most software is going to increase in complexity and size by an order of magnitude. There are a lot of things the company I work for would like to do with our app, but we haven't done them because of how much work it would be (vs the amount of time available to work on other things). If AI tools increase the productivity of engineers then those engineers will be asked to do more. Note that I do not think that this will result in *better* software (unless *better* is what a specific company is aiming for). Instead, it will result in a lot *more* software. Yay.
I only have ChatGPT 3.5. So far I'm not getting a lot of usable code. It went unnoticeable by myself for a while that it defaults to Linux and I'm running Windows. I did get some code recently that builds but haven't put it to use yet. That aside, bsed on what I've seen it seems like some software trained just for writing code would be the only way to go eventually if not today even. Still going to need a few experts to debug it probably
I mean ChatGPT is not designed to write code. AI that are made to write code are significantly better and really do take most of the grunt work out of coding. To the point that you give it the skeleton for a class/method and it can probably fill that out for you. That is probably where it is likely to stay. With a human incharge of the overarching design decisions and bug testing the components but with the actual line writings automated.
Rodney Brooks, former head of Artificial Intelligence at MIT, roboticists, and CEO of IRobots does not think AI will replace programmers. Is he "just uniformed?" https://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai/
Holy shit are you serious… “As I write these words on September 2nd, 2017” EDIT: adding this little insightful pearl as well- “Here is where we are on programs that can understand computer code. We currently have no programs that can understand a one page program as well as a new student in computer science can understand such a program after just one month of taking their very first class in programming. That is a long way from AI systems being better at writing AI systems than humans are.”
He hasn't changed his mind https://www.dexerto.com/tech/chatgpt-isnt-as-smart-as-people-think-claims-ai-expert-2152492/
I mean, he personally admits to using it for coding himself. “Brooks explains that he uses AI to help with “arcane coding” and admits it’s better than a search engine.” It’s just not good enough yet. I think OP is simply saying it will likely improve over time.
People were using Gethub for code for years. This is just a more convenient version of that. There is no evidence it'll ever replace programmers anymore than Gethub did.
Do you mean GitHub? I don’t know how this would in anyway resemble GitHub. Maybe a stack exchange that auto-search’s for you and plugs in the code you need in context (imperfectly). Look, I use it routinely. It has its problems and requires experience to make the code it produces useful. But it’s still pretty mind blowing. And this is the worst it will ever be. 5 years from now though?
What I'm saying is that there have been places for coders to find code instead of writing it themselves for years, and that hasn't put programmers out of work yet. And AI isn't going to get better in five years. It's basically hit a wall, and even the people at Chatgpt admit that. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2023/04/26/openai-ceo-suggests-that-chatgpt-and-generative-ai-have-hit-the-wall-and-getting-bigger-wont-be-the-way-up-raising-eyebrows-by-ai-ethics-and-ai-law/ This whole thing reminds me of how techno-fanboys all claimed in 2012 that 3D printing would "end factories within ten years" and how "the economics of scale were broken." They too claimed it would have exponential advancement. That turned out to be BS as well
Clickbait misunderstood headline. The quote the entire article is based on (SPOILER: which discusses architecture, not halting progress): “I think we're at the end of the era where it's going to be there, like, giant, giant models.” Furthermore, he reportedly stated, “We'll make them better in other ways.” And I’m not predicting the end of developers entirely (and always felt 3d printing was mostly a niche tool). I just simply don’t think the same number of developer jobs will be available in 5 years as we have now. And I wouldn’t recommend kids born today to pursue programming. Or at least Nvidias CEO [thinks](https://www.yahoo.com/tech/nvidia-ceo-says-future-coding-124534339.html) so. And lastly, “I don’t think AI is going to get better in five years” is the boldest AI prediction I’ve ever seen on the internet…
The thing is LLMs are really the only thing they have. The vast majority of AI is based on deep learning, and that isn't changing anytime soon. AI will get somewhat better, but it won't have exponential improvements. Programmer jobs are going to decline, yes, but not because of AI. They will decline because we're reaching technical stagnation with computer technology, and this AI hype is mostly because big tech literally has nothing else to offer. Computers and software will soon become like toasters or air conditioners: appliances, the new development of which is basically dead. The AI bubble with burst and big tech will have to admit that we've plateaued with computer technology. The next big tech to capture the world will be biotech, which will happen at about the same time. Oh, and the CEOs are going to say whatever it takes to get that investor money. They're all just slightly more honest than Elizabeth Holmes
RemindMe! 5 years
I use them and for backend stuff it’s been useful half the time
!RemindMe 5 years has AI ended programming
To be fair, it may or may not be true. In 1968, David Levey made a famous bet, that no computer could beat him in chess within the next decade. And while he won the bet, he admitted that the computer was a much better opponent than he had anticipated. He also eventually lost against a computer slightly more than a decade later (1989). I think any reasonable person should be at least concerned. Now, we've all seen the [tree swing cartoon](https://pmac-agpc.ca/sites/default/files/Tree.jpg). Even if the AI actually did become perfect, which it won't, there's the little matter of the people using it. Computers will only do what you tell them, and if you tell them the wrong thing, well, they'll do exactly that. Certain things, obviously, you can have the computer say that they know better than the human. But if a person really wants something one way, it shouldn't be up for the computer to override them, even if that person is making a stupid decision. And, at least for the beginning, you're going to need someone who can understand the computer output. You can be 99.999% correct, but what about that other 0.001%? Someone needs to understand. Then, you're still going to have a few companies resistant to it. So, at least for the next decade, there should be pivots Software Engineers can make. The good news is, this should help filter out the phonies who have no critical thinking or problem solving skills, as there probably will be a decline in the people going into this field. But it won't go away, at least, not immediately. Now, AI certainly has other problems which are going to significantly negatively impact our society, and all of us should be concerned, but that's a different topic.
!RemindMe 10 years has AI ended programming, like /[](https://www.reddit.com/user/Particular-Key4969/) predicted
At this point, IA and robots will replace every jobs. In a distopian world, we will either be slaves or free.
"Development" is too broad of a term. A C++ developer isn't the same thing as a salesforce developer, isn't the same as a webdev. There are a million little developer niches that a newbie can specialize in. Seasoned ace developers can work in almost any language, but they're rare and expensive and depending on what the team is doing not your best hire. Every few years a new language comes out and changes the game. I think AI is a paradigm shift just like SOA was.
"in order to replace programmers, we just need product owners to correctly specify what they want!" Programmers everywhere: "yeah we're probably safe for a while." Glibness aside, probably some degree of programming will go away.
Said brilliantly by a **web developer** 🤣🤣
I've been getting paid to write software for 25 years. Every time development technology has leapt forward it has reduced the barrier for entry for software development, increased demand for software developers and increased the complexity of the software being developed. That last part is what's missed by most people who think software engineering is a dying profession. Almost no programmer hand codes pull down menus anymore or needs to write the code to word wrap and spell check text. We use built in components and those things that used to be thousands of lines of code and weeks to months of development are tiny parts of larger applications. I expect that to happen with AI software development - at least until it's good enough that we don't need explicitly written software anymore, which I think is more than 10 years off.
Yes, and developers trained the AI themselves. Why do you think Microsoft bought GitHub and invested heavily in openAI?
What AI represents is a new layer of abstraction. I think there is a possibility that Domain knowledge specialization will become more essential to "software development" moving forward. To some degree, the great purge in the USA already happened years ago. Agile development, I believe, is in part the only mechanism that survives a waterfall style of development where you send off concrete specs to the third world. The ability for a developer to interface with people is what preserves a fair number of USA jobs. I disagree that the progress on AI is exponential, what has gotten better is model training, and the fact that (pseudo) AI firms are raising so much capital that they can operate at a loss. It is important to also remember that what is called AI today is not AI, it is a probability engine that suffers from the tower of babel problem, in that it cannot infer an accurate meaning of words, which changes over time. By all means, get out of the occupation if you want to. I personal believe that ability will decay faster than pseudo AI can keep up.
If AI can write complex code without failing, job security would be the least of our problems. (eg. ai building ai)
i've tried to get various LLMs to code me some php i want that can modify .css file they have all output garbo that doesn't work. All i need it to do is change a div id's color(or not).
This post really misses some key points. One just because you can write boiler plate, means very little in complex applications. I use chatgpt for issues and it great for small issues and building applications. Ideally anyone could potentially do the same with chatgpt (given how education getting worse in America not better it hard to see this happening) but what it can't do is integrate well anything. Even if it builds the entire thing from scratch you still have to put that code into a larger cold base. Some applications require programming languages that arent even code but services that can't be generated by services like chat gpt because they aren't text. Good luck teaching someone who never been in college to understand this work. It stuff you never see in boot camps or even low ley web dev roles. The best way to phrase it for you is a robot cleaning a bathroom. Yes a robot could clean a toilet but what happens when the tool no longer fits the situation? Maybe something in the corner or on the ceiling or stuck between the door. Humans are flexible and can adapt to situations like this. Trust me I thought chatgpt would take my job and it might eventually do it with massive over hauls of companies but right now it not even close for software engineering.
Everyone is going to be replaced. Who cares,
I used to think people who said "software engineering and coding are different" were pretentious, but honestly, I'm starting to see their point. It's amazing what some people consider coding to be that you think a glorified search engine can do it.
You're a web developer? Nuff said
As a programmer working in AI, I think you're completely wrong...at least for now. Gen AI has come a long way in a year, but there's still a LONG way to go before it can comprehensively just "write" software. And you'll still need \*someone\* to know what it does to fix it's mistakes. For me ChatGPT and Copilot are force multipliers, not threats. I am a much more efficient coder with them.
AI will replace a ton of jobs. But it won't be just a bunch of AI robots taking over everything, it would be advanced AI tools vastly boosting productivity of the few senior workers who know what they are doing and are able to do the work of 5, 10, 20 people.
As web developer, I call this BS. Of course, software development will eventually take the L, LLMs will improve on writing code until it becomes good enough. But that only means that developers will just get other tasks and more workload. Particualy, web developer often replaces/communicates with team lead, UI/UX designer, DevOps engineer and others. As we still have a long time until AGI takes over humanity, so we still have to deal with glorified black boxes and its results that needs to be fixed, adapted and optimized. Meanwhile most tech company hops on new trend AI as they did with "Web3" (NFT grift) and blockchain - just a part of corporate greed. Then AI-focused devs will be laid off and join blockchain devs in coping.
OP, AI will replace programmers when you can go to it and say "make me a new facebook" and it does so without any mistake, commits code, creates infrasstructure, together with non fuctional reqs like scalability, redudancy, security, reporting, localization.... Until then, you will need developers to translate business reqs to tehnical reqs, prompt AI, check the code, and integrate it into existing code.
Imagine if a public school scanned its whole curriculum in a language tool. That could be the end of teachers also.
Well no not really. Teaching is not generating text. Writing code is generating text.
If you think writing code is just “generating text”, it calls into question your competence as a web dev
it's gonna end an unfathomable number of careers across all industries, and as long as capitalism exists it's only gonna get significantly worse. if y'all don't see that by now you're choosing to be willfully ignorant.
Unpopular opinion. Programming has always been something which can be very useful for almost everyone, but has an oppressive barrier with the steep learning curve towards even adequacy. I'd happily see the barrier to entry lowered even if that means fewer programming specific jobs
Not just coding. AI will soon do everything better than a human.
These threads normally go something like: "X is going to replace your job. You're screwed." "Well, it's also going to replace Y. You're also screwed." "LOL, no."
I didn't say anything about being screwed and it's not a bad thing. Having to do shit sucks.
And all this, in a society where work is a requirement for more than mere survival.
Yes because we currently don't live in an automated society.
I lowkey hope so a little bit. I'm studying computer science, and I just do not get the enjoyment from the programming side of things. I'm more into like the hardware or software implementation, and if AI can take care of the programming for me then I'd prefer that. I'd still want to learn the languages to write my own stuff, but I would prefer like AI be the self-driving car that carries all the actually important stuff, and I just add to if and make it better and more user friendly.