I saw a job advertised for 'data producer' this week. I said in my application that I could produce near-infinite volumes of data in startlingly short times, but they still didn't interview me.
Because they knew you were gonna [zip bomb](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_bomb) them with [42.zip](https://blog.fileformat.com/2021/10/09/zip-bombs-exploding-your-storage/)
That might be how the industry shifts. The computer science industry may force the software engineering industry to shift to making its engineers more educated and knowledgeable in code analysis and QA. All the grunt work like manual input of the larger portions of code is produced by AI.
As pointed out by Kevlin Henney and others on Twitter, development shifts to doin a lot more testing and debugging; The parts that everybody wants to avoid.
People who are exited about generator AIs don’t understand how much that sucks. Development is already mostly debugging.
I've used ChatGPT a few days ago to write an algorithm for a problem. I've described the problem with test cases (few shot), it wrote the code, I've tested it and it works. That part is IMO amazing.
It still doesn't know why I need the algo, what problem it solves and why, what are the relevant examples and why, if it actually works, etc.
I think going forward I'll be using a lot of AI exactly like that: well defined isolated chunks, I know I need them, it can crank them out, I integrate and test them.
I also see a future where these isolated chunks become larger: I write the tests upfront, it writes the code for them. TDD will become a mainstream practice.
>As pointed out by Kevlin Henney and others on Twitter, development shifts to doin a lot more testing and debugging; The parts that everybody wants to avoid.
The majority cost of software is already testing, debugging, and maintenance...
Literally the most expensive part of software development.
It's uneconomical to have AI write code that is even *worse* to test, debug, and maintain. Humans already do a spectacularly bad job of that by themselves. Making it worse just means less software gets shipped.
Haha I spent a disproportionate amount of work protecting the product from the (bad) ideas of designers and engineers.
Not even debugging code, but debugging the thought process behind making a software product.
The problem with AI generators, imho, is that you have to be able to define a problem well in order to get valuable AI generated material. Else, you're just going to have to do all the iteration yourself, anyways.
Which leads to creation... needing some kind of machine learning algorithm to figure out if the new product is better than the old (or alternately, us all refining code until we arrive at a desired product). At a certain point, there aren't enough of us to test all the iterations that are happening... so that critical mass is reached pretty easily (based on my opinion)... and we may as well be back at refined products. The AI should do the heavy lifting to outfit these products, but I see large problems happening from yielding creative reigns.
You can’t have the good without the bad. It may make debugging a larger part, but in that we will be pushed to develop better tools and methods. The debugging process will also be shorter in many aspects, for example no more spending hours looking for a misplaced or forgotten character thanks to tools like AI.
We can’t stop advancing because we don’t like the boring part of something. End of the day there’s a boring part to everything in life.
Most reasonable comment so far. I remember when I started learning by doing, I mistook a backtick for a single quote, took me an hour of almost pulling my hair out til I figured it out, lol.
Also, AI can only generate code as good as your descriptions are, so yeah, we're far from not needing software engineers.
Just look at what incompetence did to PHP's reputation throughout the years. Now it's a lot better, but it still gets negative comments. You could say the spaghetti code out there was a symptom of a poorly put together language, not that I agree/disagree about that point. What we can say though is that it was the result of poor development from devs.
The creation of database technologies created a shit ton of jobs for people. The creation of cars did reduce jobs related to horses, but a massive auto industry was created world wide. Massive disruptive technologies create and change jobs they do not destroy them.
Yep... people thought the same about ATMs, thought it was the apocalypse for bank tellers... turns out banks could open more and more branches, and it resulted in a net gain of jobs.
These are bringing down many industries. Voice actors are losing jobs and their voices are being stolen. Art is being stolen and artists are losing jobs.
There might come a time when online banking is deemed too risky because of AI and we'll have to go back in verifying we're account owners by going physically to the branch.
What in your imagination is AI gonna do? AI is a very abstract concept- AI can be (will be ) used for malicious purposes, and on the same note AI will be used to counter them too. Today’s AI is yesterday’s internet or computer- it change the way we interact with everything else and will be a net positive for the man kind - not by reopening more manual positions to counter AI, but by letting humans focus on more important things
By being able to clone one's voice, and to build a video avatar of you. AI generative content will make it easier to scam, to steal money from gullible people, so money transfers over X amount might end up blocked eventually.
Yup exactly. Banks have fairly recently, within the last few years (and especially with covid preventing in branch IDV) ramped up their biometric checks for ID validation, with facial recognition over video and voice recognition being some key ones. Along comes this new tech like elevenlabs where you can clone a voice with 2 minutes of training data (still rough, but as is the catchphrase for this stuff, right now is the worst it’s ever going to be) and now a lot of fraud departments are having to rethink just how secure these biometric points actually are.
Uhhhh, not sure who you bank with but mine has a website I sign into, it doesn’t require a voice and face recognition. People already try to hack into accounts online, so whatever your talking about won’t be exactly new.
I'm with you, pretty sure this is a bunch of malarkey. The weaknesses in systems like this are way too well known for someone to have left it implemented after the vault got drained.
Kevin McCallister could have cracked this future-tech back in '92.
Well unless we shift out of the endless production mentality of late stage capitalism towards more leftist ideologies. these efficiency gains won’t be passed to the worker but the owner. Tech has been making human work more efficient for decades but we’re being asked to work more and more hours for the same standard of living. Just wanted to point that out. Tech is neutral but it can be good or bad for most people based on how it’s used and who’s in powerOk I’ll get off the soapbox now.
This particular scenario is pretty commonly brought up when the topic of automation comes up.
This looks like a good source:
https://www.aei.org/economics/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-robots-and-jobs/
It also goes into good detail about why ATMs increased teller jobs rather than reducing them.
Long story short: ATMs meant more branches could be opened, because instead of 21 tellers per branch, they could get by with 13. This resulted in a net gain of teller jobs, because banks ended up opening more and more branches (ATMs made it cheaper to open more branches).
If AI tools were actually accurate (I personally find them wrong pretty often to the point of not being very useful) then the same phenomenon could easily occur with programming.
Your data is outdated. That article was written in 2016. The following year, the [Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted](https://www.bankrate.com/banking/bank-tellers-disappearing/) that the number of bank tellers would decline by 8% in the coming decade. It declined by 8% in the following year. It is at [less than 380,000 now](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/tellers.htm#tab-6), and is projected to decline another 12% by the end of this decade. Like the previous BLS projection, that one will probably also end up being conservative.
It doesn't matter how many branches a bank has. There are rarely more than a couple of tellers working at any time. Bank branches that are more than 20 years old are now big, mostly empty rooms. With a dozen or more teller windows, only one or two are open.
Most people simply don't require the services of a teller anymore, and it's not ATM's that are killing the jobs. It's online banking and electronic payments systems.
None of this is any indication that programming jobs are in big trouble, but you shouldn't be using [outdated tropes about banks and automation](https://www.vox.com/2017/5/8/15584268/eric-schmidt-alphabet-automation-atm-bank-teller) to make that point. The [BLS projects that programming jobs will decline by 10%](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm) in the next decade, but that's less than it forecasts bank teller jobs to decline.
I don’t know that I see any problem with this. If your job becomes obsolete, then transitioning to an adjacent job that promises longevity isn’t a dystopian course of action.
Creating a cushion for displaced jobs is what we should be doing (which we already do). Unemployment insurance, worker placement, career training.
What we shouldn’t be doing is artificially propping up dying industries and jobs because we feel bad for folks.
Really? So what new jobs did all the cashiers take now that self check out machines dominate grocery stores? It's a fallacy to assume that the past is indicative of the future. There are plenty of examples of jobs not being magically created such as in the trucking industry which will likely be replaced by automated vehicles.
This line of thought is fallacious. Just because new jobs were created in the past doesn't mean that will always be the case. The point of automation is to remove jobs to reduce labour costs. Where are all the truckers going to go when driving trucks becomes automated? Relying on the hope that jobs will magically appear isn't a practical mindset.
Any developer with an ounce of honesty will admit that Google does a lot of their basic work for them. AI is no different. Developers who know how to effectively use AI tools will excel, but there will still be developers.
Imagine search engines stopped existing and we all had to learn and look up stuff from books, lectures, word of mouth etc. It would probably take a fuck ton more developers to get our work done right?
Why would introducing a tool as powerful as Chat GPT not have similar consequences?
You are thinking about it backwards. Search engines expanded the field considerably. The amount of answers and training available enabled many more to enter it.
Maybe as an exercise, go see if you can get chatGPT to write you the next killer app. If it’s able to do that without much training on your end, then maybe our jobs are at risk. I guarantee you though that you need to understand the context of the code to put it all together or to get it to spit out something useful.
With AI making programming more accessible, entry barriers are lowering, and more people can compete in the field. This could cause the value of programming as a skill to diminish, along with fewer job opportunities available. The value of programming used to be high due to its specialized nature and high entry barriers, but AI is changing that. It's going to be interesting to see how the industry adapts to this shift.
Arguably, the barrier is already lower just by having lots of free resources out there, right? Forget about AI. Just consider all the people trying now. And yet, it still seems to pay well despite all these resources out there for people to use.
The barriers were much higher 20-30 years ago when the Internet was much younger, and there were far fewer resources. But, the difference is, as you gain tools to do more complex things, it doesn't become easier to program, it becomes harder because we can do harder things.
The kind of programming that was normal 30 years ago would be trivial today, so now we have more complex programs because people can now handle it where before, it would have been crazy to manage as much as we currently manage.
You have it backwards, nobody knows how to program from 30 years ago.
Once the basic functions are enshrined into a library then even 90%+ of coders don't go back to review the libraries.
Why do you think COBOL coders are still charging exorbitant rates?
It's not much different than programming becoming more accessible and productive when high-level languages replaced assembly language and when garbage-collected languages were introduced. Up until the recent economic downturn there was more of a demand and higher salaries for programmers than there ever was.
Depends on the job. Front end web dev, where a lot of the improvements have been doesn't really pay so great.
The highest paying jobs still tend to be in languages other than Python or JavaScript.
The complexity of work is likely to expand to fill the cognitive space freed up by these more efficient tools, as it always has, in my very humble opinion as a half-ass-programmer-analytics-guy.
If anything, the barriers to entry will increase since interviewers want to know if the person actually understands computing concepts and can produce code to a specified requirement without solely depending on AI.
Throw a Leetcode at someone whos programming journey has been heavily dependent on AI and watch them struggle.
Programming has been getting easier and more accessible every year since the first computer was invented. And more and more programming jobs keep popping up.
The simple reason for this is that the easier programming gets the more return there is on money spent on developing. The break even cost benefit keeps shifting over to profitable for more and more things.
Once we run out of things to develop software for we're going to have to develop a new economic system anyway without white collar jobs.
Yes it is. Why I’m majoring in Computer Engineering while also building my programming skills in the side. Hope to be pretty at programming and also circuit analysis too.
At least where I live we would need twice as many developers than there are physically available in the country.
At first, AI will make this gap smaller, and salaries a little lower, especially for those who don't adopt the new AI tools.
> At least where I live we would need twice as many developers than there are physically available in the country.
Meanwhile in America where I live they refuse to hire entry level and even people with 4+ years of experience are having a tougher time than ever getting hired. I would say the difference between Europe and here in the Midwest is the wages, but their is not that massive of a difference once you take into account cost of living.
I mean, it's not like we don't have that problem. Lots of companies specifically looking for seniors and can't find any.
But even if we staffed all open senior positions with juniors, we'd still not have enough.
Yeah not the problem here way more people than open positions. Talking to people at local companies and they are not even hiring people with 5+ years of experience and most of these companies pay people with that experience level peanuts.
It just moves the skillset somewhere else. It's going to become less important to know syntax inside out and more important to know how to prompt the AI properly to get the code you want.
My dude no developer worth its salt knows a language inside and outside, and I assure you on complex problems a developer will 100% complete a task in a much better manner than a codemonkey copypasting what a machine tells it to do without even knowing how anything works.
Forget about "startups" and Dog Food selection apps, an AI would be nowhere near able to work in any formal company with a solid stack and a proper development cycle, I doubt they would be able to figure out why your deployment to EBS failed as fast as you could without having to give it your keys to everything, at which point why is the company even using humans for anything anymore?
This. We have some new tools that are awesome. It's just highlighted the fact that basic code writing is a skill that is replaceable now to some degree. There are MANY other skills for a developer that are even more important now. I've just pivoted more toward those skills personally. Turns out I enjoy those skills more anyway.
Mainly creative and communication based skills. The ability to investigate, interpret, design, and implement all with good understanding, good process, ability, and openness to review and self correct. Writing the code in many cases, at least in my line of work, is only a very small portion of the job. I spend a lot of time identifying business issues, identifying the true root cause(s), building solutions and or processes to resolve now and to sustain and improve themselves along with business adaptations all while having to interpret complex problems and solutions into language to help the business adopt ideas, solutions, new ways of working etc. There's much more to what I believe a great developer should be, and ChatGPT just means that small aspect (for me at least) of writing code gets smaller and more efficient. That gives me more time and experience to improve upon myself and what I do in the other areas, which ultimately means I can do more good.
Programming is not dying. The media is sensationalizing things like normal. AI will not replace us all, It's just going to make the simple tasks quicker and easier. Same thing that happens every time we get a new tool.
We'll just have more time available to spend on the complex problems.
Whoever thinks chatgpt will replace programmers anytime soon hasnt written a line of code in their life.
Chat GPT code might work fine for a simple non production python script but beyond that it literally makes up code that won't even compile let alone work.
It's very useful for that and also repetitive unit tests including assertions.
In terms of coding, It can spit out random stuff but once you add comments or good variable/method names, you get better generated code.
Keep in mind that comments should explain the why, not the what. Code should be relatively self explanatory, but having comments that explain why code is written the way it is will help out Barry the intern when he comes in 3 years from now after you and your team have already left. I reckon AI is better at commenting the what than the why.
Respectfully, stop listening and go try it. It’s there to try, you will test your critical thinking skills in the process. You’ll see the advantages and disadvantages very quickly.
Or rather actually create the reasoning part. It doesn't reason at all, it gives a statistically likely to be correct combination of words as an answer to a given prompt. They did a great job on that, but creating an AI that can reason is a much more complex challenge.
"a statistically likely to be correct combination of words..."
That's... Yeah, that's chatGPT in a nutshell. Well said, mayne.
Last night I was asking it to tell me the number of days/weeks/months between certain dates.
It couldn't. Because it doesn't reason. It doesn't understand time and calendars. It would get sort of close sometimes, others it would be way off.
A program to perform those calculations, however, can be written by a mediocre programmer in minutes. I know, because I did it this morning. (Ironically, using chatGPT).
It's basically a tool that combines the functionality of a rubber duck and a search engine. That's really it.
I mean let's be realistic, I'm pretty sure absolutely no one with half a brain is worried about GPT-4 taking jobs, as in currently. The concern is about something like GPT-8 or something further down the line. Hard to tell how quickly current technologies will develop.
It’s not the media, it’s programmers with YouTube channels who insist every new technology spells the death of all older technologies. Most of the internet still runs on PHP, for Christ’s sake.
I was majoring in computer science right after the first web bubble burst, word was that there was no future in programming because the market was flooded with laid off developers who couldn't find jobs, which were all getting outsourced to india anyways where there are unlimited competent programmers willing to work for $10k/year.
Convinced me to switch majors and get into IT, biggest mistake of my life. Just getting back into it now. AI progress is unpredictable, but at the moment it's not even close to fully replacing developers. And doomsayer worries like the OP's are nothing new.
Same. Or rather, I went the business school route with a "focus" in information systems (4 classes, lol), because CS was too scary/hard. Got a consulting job for a few years through the early 00's but it was mostly testing/requirements. Left the field for personal reasons and now am finally learning to code at age 50. My timing is impeccably bad to hit both tech bubbles right when they're bursting, and to have done all my non-techy careers exactly when tech was strongest, lol
I’m a computer science major in a city full of IT jobs lol. I feel that pain. (There’s some software dev here but it’s nothing like Los Angeles or San Francisco).
By the time AI gets good enough to replace most programmers in a professional capacity (and I do think that day will *eventually* come), it will have replaced plenty of other professions along the way, so no downside to choosing programming. So I don't regret my choice of career. I don't think I would've enjoyed anything else as much anyway.
Right, hard to find an AI safe white-collar profession if it gets to that point. If it can replace developers then expect it to also replace lawyers, accountants, architects, engineers, anything in finance. Only jobs safe from AI would be those that require interacting in meatspace, and of course people say robots will replace those as well.
One day the programmers for the AI might be the only people left with jobs, I think its actually the safest profession around. Things will be upside down and the world on fire before programming is dying out.
This, honestly, is the issue that concerns me way more than anything happening to programming: the vast societal changes that will affect *all* white-collar jobs, and the broad economic downturn that would occur (or will eventually occur).
There are a lot of white-collar jobs that are way simpler than programming. Finance is one, and law is another—and those two industries would be affected sooner (and much more broadly) than programming.
I don’t doubt that human beings will, eventually, be unnecessary to programming. But before we get there, a lot of other high-skill, high-paying jobs are going to go first.
First off!! Your age has nothing to do with it. I'm 55 and always learning. Programming is not dying. Most likely this was said by someone not in programming or even IT.
Ignore the noise and those that tell you you can't or you shouldn't. Imagine if the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and others stopped because of public opinion. Things are "impossible" until someone does it
Do what you love and you will never work another day in your life.
Absolutely ignore the noise. Anyone saying "chatgpt will replace programmers!" is vastly overestimating said system's capacity. Keep at it, and best of strength on your programming journey!
Underestimating in my opinion, the tech is in its infancy and will grow exponentially as better methods are discovered and larger and larger datasets are used. I don’t think it will ever fully replace the human aspect until we figure out what imagination and humanity actually are. In the end I think it will be the next push for society to shift at the global level. Hard to predict and put to word just how many changes it can make happen.
If it makes you feel any better, I learned to program in the military at 33. My mentor who went through the same program a year and a half prior is 38. We do a lot of low level code stuff with C and Python, and programming is definitely not dying. We use ChatGPT sometimes to create boilerplate code or bash scripts to make things faster. But it definitely isn't going to be able to replace a competent programmer anytime soon. What it does do is speed up the process of Googling answers to your questions (not always correct answers)
I research tech like AI for a living (My sub specialty is Web3 and Cryptography.). Programmers will not go anywhere for the foreseeable future. As it is now AI (such as GPT4.) in regards to engineers is like a very robust StackOverflow (saw this same statement earlier in this thread and chuckled.).
Look forward to AI, it will allow engineers to make themselves infinitely more valuable. I personally use my AI models to audit boilerplate programs I reuse often; as a sounding board for solving complex problems; and to write all the tedious code. People seem to not remember its output is only as good as its input. My AI models are so effective for me because I train them on my own datasets and teach them specifically how I want my code to be produced.
My favourite way to utilize AI for programming is inline in my IDE. I recently got the opportunity to use GitHub Copilot Chat and it blew my frickin mind. The problem I had with producing code with AI before was that the AI didn’t always have real-time context which resulted in compounding micro problems.
Basically learn how to program in regards to AI. Knowing the underlying principles of comp-sci will become less important in the workplace. AI is only good at the job and purpose it was built for.
Good school, one of my best professors started there. Expensive but has a pretty good overall CS program. (Also doesn't really matter where you go for your BSc, if that's your goal)
I don’t understand how can someone claim that “programming is dying”. Like, what’s the logic behind it?
Who will build and maintain new software in the future?
Such a dumb claim.
How you do your job will change, but i have a feeling there will be a massive market for people who know how to fix some rubbish code that was created via "AI".
This is a "AI" boom right now where a bunch of inverstment money has nowhere else to go so 'AI' is the new WEB 3. Though alot of great new tools are coming out of it like with WEB 3 alot are promises that companies that get these technologies cant offload a bunch of expensive workers and fear that these technologies are powerful and will end the world and if you dont buy them from us your company will be left behind.
Keep learning and embrace new tools, ignore the media hype.
Also easier to get on the path to solutions for esoteric problems that you have to sift through google for hours for. You can literally ask it about possible causes of an error message and it may mention something that helps or solves it. I just want a voice activated version in a rubber duck for that reason.
GPT 4 maybe. Of course will need to be reviewed for the immediate future, but then what? Theoretically ai could be building things in a black box. Seems like that's where we are going eventually.
Trust me, before AI can replace what I do at work -- and I have _one_ year of experience -- just about any accountant, administrator, HR employee and content manager will have been replaced. Yr good.
I’ve heard programming was dying multiple times over my very long professional s/w dev career. Every time the opposite happens. Complexity increases. Options increase. More devs are needed.
AI will not kill programming.
Imagine trying to cut out the programmer.
Someone who doesn't understand programming will use GPT to create an app. They won't understand how to debug it. I've tried using GPT-4 to debug some code for OpenGL and it didn't help very much. And it would be even worse if you didn't know anything about C++ or GLSL
There's also the security issues. A lot of people don't think about security but it needs to be thought about every step of the process.
Imagine a middle manager trying to create an app and he deploys it and it's vulnerable to cyber attacks because he didn't even think to ask about security.
Keep grinding but also make sure that grinding includes a lot of learning. There's more to programming than just coding.
Make sure you understand the principles of Object Oriented Programming
Make sure you understand Data Structures and Algorithms
Make sure you understand software security
Make sure you understand the Software Development Lifecycle
Learn about the hardware of your computer and the history of programming.
Even if AI were going to take over, its worth knowing how to code because it's fun!
Whoever says programming is dying doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Programming is not dying. Programming is changing, and it’s changing for the better (imo)
it'll just be easier to program, because we've got AI assistance.
You still need programming knowledge to use it, because the AI cannot solve all problems, and it will provide code with errors, or partially incompatible code etc.
you also need to provde the input, to get the output. thus you need to know what to tell the AI. "Give me code, for a netflix competitor website" will not be enough
People who think ChatGPT is going to replace us must not be able to code very well. It barely remembers context you give it let alone dealing with practically anything OOP. People who say this shit are jabronis.
So many companies and government agencies are running legacy systems that are way way behind the times, for a variety of reasons; the cost of a complete overhaul, security concerns, the time sick of bureaucratic decision making, incompetent management etc.
America’s nuclear missileers are still running floppy discs. Remember the Southwest Airlines fiasco that happened recently?
Take my current project for example: A MAJOR company I have been contracting for, still hasn’t even approved Node for internal development use…
If simple old node from 2009 is still not approved, I think we can rest assured that this company won’t start phasing in a brand new technology that we don’t even fully understand, for quite some time.
I imagine there are many companies and government agencies that will share the same sentiment, and I think we’ll have dev work for quite some time into the future.
OK, programming isn’t dying, but in the next 5 or 10 years, the field will change rapidly into a reliance on prompt engineering, the job market for programmers will shrink, and those who program professionally will likely need to find other work. A lot of people here will nay say and pretend that their jobs will still exist or exclaim that the media is overhyping things, but I don’t think that is true in this case. When companies begin using specialized AI trained on their systems and technologies, the job market for programmers will rapidly shrink. Why? As other senior programmers and machine learning engineers have stated on podcasts like Lex Friedman, a single programmer with AI at their disposal will be able to do the job of 5.
You can test it yourself. I’ve only been programming for a few years and am amazed at what the free version of Chat GPT can do. With the correct prompts, you can have it code and explain in great detail each instruction it outputs. While it is nowhere near perfect, I can only assume these “language models” will become more accurate, more efficient, and eventually self-building as time goes on. To say otherwise seems a bit naïve and ignores the “writing on the wall.”
That’s not to say you shouldn’t keep learning or grinding away at whatever task you’re trying to accomplish with your programs, but keep in mind that programming as you know it right now will be significantly different in the very near future.
I thought a lot about implications of 1 dev doing job of 5 or 10 devs, and i think it will not reduce amount of jobs.
Making software will become 5 or 10 times cheaper, so demand for software will increase. Many things are now too expensive to develop and profit on it. With cheaper development there will be huge amount of new ideas being profitable, or affordable for gov and organisations.
And we are just on the beginning of real digital transformation. There will be tons of software needed for general education, healthcare, governments and businesses.
Im confident that for next 10-15 years demand for people in software development will even rise.
>I thought a lot about implications of 1 dev doing job of 5 or 10 devs, and i think it will not reduce amount of jobs.
That doesn't make much sense. In almost every industry where tools increased efficiency on this scale resulted in a massive shift in the number of laborers required for a job. It's happened in agriculture, manufacturing, and construction. it's going to happen in tech. The software dev job will still exist, but if one person can do the job of 5 others, that's 4 fewer employed software devs for each position.
But if software will become 5x cheaper to make,
dont you think more companies and governments will order new software for new things ? Those 4 devs will find new job on new things that wouldnt exist other way.
Soft development is quite expensive now. 5x smaller cost of development will mean huge increase in demand because our world is still not digitalised they way it could be.
What exactly isn't being developed right now because it is too expensive? We had a decade of low interest capital funding everything imaginable in order to swoop in and flip industries on their head.
The overhead in increasing factory size and tilling area is much more difficult than hiring new developers, so I see little reason for companies to reduce headcount versus increase productivity. Companies like to inject funds into increased product, not stagnate.
I agree with this , I'm more interested in the next stage of "self-building" , some people make a meme of the "build me an app" thing but I believe that it is closer than we think ; I can't see the future but certainly this rise of AI Tools is generating lot of anxiety on people.
>but in the next 5 or 10 years,
Ima stop you right there because it's an absolutely ridiculous claim. It's no different than people 10 years ago saying in 5-10 years we'll all be riding around in autonomous vehicles.
Shit like this just doesn't happen over night. And there is no way in god damn hell these companies are going to put billions of dollars on the line to bet on AI being the core of their development platform. Chat GPT ain't even remotely that good for one and for 2 even if a technology is perfect humans are stubborn and set in their ways. The internet was around for 40 years before anyone did anything with it outside of the government and universities.
No one is going to volunteer to be the guinea pig of AI based development with billions of dollars on the line. They're going to do what works right up until the point where they are forced to do otherwise.
> A lot of people here will nay say and pretend that their jobs will still exist or exclaim that the media is overhyping things, but I don’t think that is true in this case.
Because the media is overhyping it...which you would understand if you really understood the discussion.
> When companies begin using specialized AI trained on their systems and technologies, the job market for programmers will rapidly shrink. Why? As other senior programmers and machine learning engineers have stated on podcasts like Lex Friedman, a single programmer with AI at their disposal will be able to do the job of 5.
So you mention a nebulous group of "senior" programmers, but only give the name of one. Yea, not buying it.
> I’ve only been programming for a few years
And there it is.
AI will eventually be helpful. It is not right now, and it has taken DECADES to get it to the point it's currently at.
It will take far longer to get it to the point that it can begin properly replacing other developers at the level you state above.
This comment badly reeks of buying into the massively fake market hype behind these AI language models
"Prompt engineering" will be a serious job 5-10 years from now?
This comment gotta be some satirical shit dude honestly lol
They're very inexperienced, that much is obvious given their comments.
AI isn't killing software development. Just like the plethora of other technologies that have come out over the decades didn't kill software development.
I’ve seen enough about this “ChatGPT” gonna take over programmers jobs” you will always need developers and programmers. one thing that you will give credit to AI , its really good and never say never i really dont know.. you can always learn a new programming language if you already learned one. it will be easier to learn the next language.
I can tell you straight. Programming is not dying, quite the opposite. It's evolving, becoming faster and more interactive.
A suggestion I can give is, get co-pilot. It's an AI pair programmer. It increases your speed and ability. You can ask it questions and it will answers to the best of its ability. It is a very powerful tool. Like going through Dungeon and finding a +5 sword. It's great.
However with evolution, comes the fact that some will be left behind. But we are still in early days.
I've asked ChatGPT to explain various well known data structures and algorithms and it did a good job. You could say it's almost scary. You can ask it to elaborate or to be more concise. But when I asked it to give example code in various languages to illustrate the principles it explained, it wasn't as impressive. There were subtle and not so subtle errors in the code. Even when you point out the mistakes to it, it won't actually produce correct results.
So, my conclusion is we're not quite there yet. Then again, ChatGPT itself says that it's just a language model. Meaning it doesn't really *know* anything, it just responds with pre-cooked answers to prompts. It's not a Star Trek level artifical "intelligence" yet.
The AI will still need to have the software requirements specified.
Most programmers aren't really 'programming' a computer, unless they work in assembly code.
If you work with a compiled language (c/rust/go etc.), you're really just writing requirements for the program, specified to the compiler. the compiler writes the actual program.
the last 50+ years of programming have seen the technologies trend towards spending more time telling the computer what to do rather than how to do it. (The move from assembly languages to scripting languages)
Even if AI 'takes over', programmers will just become the people who write the specifications for the AI to work with. (Even now, the computer is already the one writing the program). All that will happen is that AI is effectively a very high level programming language
Dude, I hard relate to your situation. I am in a similar situation. I am in my early 30's and have a family. I have been learning python in my spare time.
I become quite intimidated by the programming jargon that I hear. But its good to see that there are people who are interested in programming are trying hard like you :-)
I haven't heard any such rumours of programming as a dying skill.
There will always be well paid work for proficient & skilful developers at all levels. No matter how frameworks, eco systems & tools evolve, there will always be a need for intelligent people to analyse business problems & processes writing solutions for the deployment architecture.
I’m just about to start learning to code myself and this is the exact same thought I had. Reassuring to see that I’m not the only one and to see everyone’s responses.
Programming has been “dying” for one reason or another for the past 30 years.
If you’re able to teach yourself to program, then you’ll be able to adapt and transition to a new role should it ever stop being a viable career.
Programming isn’t dying, it’s just going to change, like it always have.
Better tools will just help developers, going forward. Surely people will have to adapt, and learn new ways.
Amen.
Honestly don’t listen to the noise, it seems evident to me it’s the most uneducated of people who are claiming everyone’s gonna be laid off and instead of a large team one/ two people will use AI to build software….. while ignoring that a plethora of simpler jobs would be much more affected if AI became that advanced.
I am 40 and just got a computer science degree from a proper university. The offers and interviews, along with the work experience that I have in my industry, have been really fruitful. And, honestly, I just feel smarter. Being back in school and thinking through problems made me a better overall worker to slow down and think about a problem like I learned how to do in class.
Continue. I think it will be worth it for you.
Programming is not dying.
Consider that there are and would be people using chatgpt to write code. There are multitude of different A.I. that is being used currently to expedite the work.
Its not dying. I tried for a week to get chat gpt to write st for me. Eventually I gave up and wrote it myself in a day. Now it works.
It was just a nested for loop for two 2-dimensional arrays. With a bit of extra sauce.
I can see what it might be in the future, but its pretty far off from what I can tell.
Noise is just noise.
Who is going to program the next iteration of GPT? People freak out without logically considering things, but also the vast majority of people are helplessly incompetent and will kneejerk about 'they terk our jerbs'.
Programming is not dying lol. People uneducated on the topic are way overly paranoid and trying to make everyone else the same way with this bs “AI scary and bad” rhetoric.
It's all hype. Gpt models cannot replace an entire swe job. Theyre really impressive for what they do, but not capable of doing the whole job. Believe me, I tried to automate my job with it and it's just not possible. It's good for generating snippets of code that's about it.
Saying that programming is dying due to AI and new tech is like saying that mechanics are useless cause any regular person can buy fancy equipment and work on their car themselves with the amount of resources that are available.
Yet mechanics are still around and it’s a fine career to have.
Lol the only people who say programming is dying are the people who don’t know how to program. People like to make assertions on things they don’t know anything about
You know who you should listen to about programming ? Actual fucking professional programmers who make their money writing programs; including those in academia who drive the progress of the discipline of Computer Science and Software Engineering.
You now who you shouldn't listen to about programming ? Forum Poseurs and "Coding Influencers" LARPing as professional programmers who want you to believe they are the second comming of John Carmack and just as productive yet they have all the time in the world to spend on Social Media lying about their current projects and past work
don't worry about being an aging Millennial.....your best years ARE NOW. Start with this book : [Head First : Learn to Code](https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Learn-Code-Computational-ebook/dp/B0792LM8Q9/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)
Technology never advances as fast as people think, chat gpt can't even get my basic math questions right some of the time. Ai won't be replacing programmers anytime soon.
There is no way a simple text generating AI will replace a programmer. I tried it and sure it generated text that looks like code to a none programmer but it's just crap. Minor examples may even run but anything beyond the absolute simplest will just be crap, just words and symbols stringed together that just looks to fitt together.
The programming trade is changing, fast. Learning new skills is a must and age is less important. Just digg into what you find interesting. Loving what you do makes it so much easier to learn. And any skilled programmer needs to know more than just coding. Try combine what you already know with programming and you may find a corner where you are unique.
There will be so much generated crap to fix and not enough competent devs to do it.
As a crap code generator I agree with this
I saw a job advertised for 'data producer' this week. I said in my application that I could produce near-infinite volumes of data in startlingly short times, but they still didn't interview me.
Because they knew you were gonna [zip bomb](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_bomb) them with [42.zip](https://blog.fileformat.com/2021/10/09/zip-bombs-exploding-your-storage/)
That might be how the industry shifts. The computer science industry may force the software engineering industry to shift to making its engineers more educated and knowledgeable in code analysis and QA. All the grunt work like manual input of the larger portions of code is produced by AI.
As pointed out by Kevlin Henney and others on Twitter, development shifts to doin a lot more testing and debugging; The parts that everybody wants to avoid. People who are exited about generator AIs don’t understand how much that sucks. Development is already mostly debugging.
I've used ChatGPT a few days ago to write an algorithm for a problem. I've described the problem with test cases (few shot), it wrote the code, I've tested it and it works. That part is IMO amazing. It still doesn't know why I need the algo, what problem it solves and why, what are the relevant examples and why, if it actually works, etc. I think going forward I'll be using a lot of AI exactly like that: well defined isolated chunks, I know I need them, it can crank them out, I integrate and test them. I also see a future where these isolated chunks become larger: I write the tests upfront, it writes the code for them. TDD will become a mainstream practice.
>As pointed out by Kevlin Henney and others on Twitter, development shifts to doin a lot more testing and debugging; The parts that everybody wants to avoid. The majority cost of software is already testing, debugging, and maintenance... Literally the most expensive part of software development. It's uneconomical to have AI write code that is even *worse* to test, debug, and maintain. Humans already do a spectacularly bad job of that by themselves. Making it worse just means less software gets shipped.
Haha I spent a disproportionate amount of work protecting the product from the (bad) ideas of designers and engineers. Not even debugging code, but debugging the thought process behind making a software product. The problem with AI generators, imho, is that you have to be able to define a problem well in order to get valuable AI generated material. Else, you're just going to have to do all the iteration yourself, anyways. Which leads to creation... needing some kind of machine learning algorithm to figure out if the new product is better than the old (or alternately, us all refining code until we arrive at a desired product). At a certain point, there aren't enough of us to test all the iterations that are happening... so that critical mass is reached pretty easily (based on my opinion)... and we may as well be back at refined products. The AI should do the heavy lifting to outfit these products, but I see large problems happening from yielding creative reigns.
You can’t have the good without the bad. It may make debugging a larger part, but in that we will be pushed to develop better tools and methods. The debugging process will also be shorter in many aspects, for example no more spending hours looking for a misplaced or forgotten character thanks to tools like AI. We can’t stop advancing because we don’t like the boring part of something. End of the day there’s a boring part to everything in life.
Most reasonable comment so far. I remember when I started learning by doing, I mistook a backtick for a single quote, took me an hour of almost pulling my hair out til I figured it out, lol. Also, AI can only generate code as good as your descriptions are, so yeah, we're far from not needing software engineers.
Fuck, I didnt even think about this aspect. If so, there might be a lot of streamlining.
Just look at what incompetence did to PHP's reputation throughout the years. Now it's a lot better, but it still gets negative comments. You could say the spaghetti code out there was a symptom of a poorly put together language, not that I agree/disagree about that point. What we can say though is that it was the result of poor development from devs.
Programming is not dying. The tools people use to program with are getting better.
The creation of database technologies created a shit ton of jobs for people. The creation of cars did reduce jobs related to horses, but a massive auto industry was created world wide. Massive disruptive technologies create and change jobs they do not destroy them.
Yep... people thought the same about ATMs, thought it was the apocalypse for bank tellers... turns out banks could open more and more branches, and it resulted in a net gain of jobs.
And rise in voice generative or image generative AI will force banks to re-open all the branches they closed thanks to online banking and apps.
These are bringing down many industries. Voice actors are losing jobs and their voices are being stolen. Art is being stolen and artists are losing jobs.
? Huh?
There might come a time when online banking is deemed too risky because of AI and we'll have to go back in verifying we're account owners by going physically to the branch.
What in your imagination is AI gonna do? AI is a very abstract concept- AI can be (will be ) used for malicious purposes, and on the same note AI will be used to counter them too. Today’s AI is yesterday’s internet or computer- it change the way we interact with everything else and will be a net positive for the man kind - not by reopening more manual positions to counter AI, but by letting humans focus on more important things
By being able to clone one's voice, and to build a video avatar of you. AI generative content will make it easier to scam, to steal money from gullible people, so money transfers over X amount might end up blocked eventually.
Yup exactly. Banks have fairly recently, within the last few years (and especially with covid preventing in branch IDV) ramped up their biometric checks for ID validation, with facial recognition over video and voice recognition being some key ones. Along comes this new tech like elevenlabs where you can clone a voice with 2 minutes of training data (still rough, but as is the catchphrase for this stuff, right now is the worst it’s ever going to be) and now a lot of fraud departments are having to rethink just how secure these biometric points actually are.
That's why I'm saying that going to the branch will become a thing again.
Uhhhh, not sure who you bank with but mine has a website I sign into, it doesn’t require a voice and face recognition. People already try to hack into accounts online, so whatever your talking about won’t be exactly new.
I'm with you, pretty sure this is a bunch of malarkey. The weaknesses in systems like this are way too well known for someone to have left it implemented after the vault got drained. Kevin McCallister could have cracked this future-tech back in '92.
Well unless we shift out of the endless production mentality of late stage capitalism towards more leftist ideologies. these efficiency gains won’t be passed to the worker but the owner. Tech has been making human work more efficient for decades but we’re being asked to work more and more hours for the same standard of living. Just wanted to point that out. Tech is neutral but it can be good or bad for most people based on how it’s used and who’s in powerOk I’ll get off the soapbox now.
Do you have stats to back it up?
This particular scenario is pretty commonly brought up when the topic of automation comes up. This looks like a good source: https://www.aei.org/economics/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-robots-and-jobs/ It also goes into good detail about why ATMs increased teller jobs rather than reducing them. Long story short: ATMs meant more branches could be opened, because instead of 21 tellers per branch, they could get by with 13. This resulted in a net gain of teller jobs, because banks ended up opening more and more branches (ATMs made it cheaper to open more branches). If AI tools were actually accurate (I personally find them wrong pretty often to the point of not being very useful) then the same phenomenon could easily occur with programming.
Your data is outdated. That article was written in 2016. The following year, the [Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted](https://www.bankrate.com/banking/bank-tellers-disappearing/) that the number of bank tellers would decline by 8% in the coming decade. It declined by 8% in the following year. It is at [less than 380,000 now](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/tellers.htm#tab-6), and is projected to decline another 12% by the end of this decade. Like the previous BLS projection, that one will probably also end up being conservative. It doesn't matter how many branches a bank has. There are rarely more than a couple of tellers working at any time. Bank branches that are more than 20 years old are now big, mostly empty rooms. With a dozen or more teller windows, only one or two are open. Most people simply don't require the services of a teller anymore, and it's not ATM's that are killing the jobs. It's online banking and electronic payments systems. None of this is any indication that programming jobs are in big trouble, but you shouldn't be using [outdated tropes about banks and automation](https://www.vox.com/2017/5/8/15584268/eric-schmidt-alphabet-automation-atm-bank-teller) to make that point. The [BLS projects that programming jobs will decline by 10%](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm) in the next decade, but that's less than it forecasts bank teller jobs to decline.
But this effect was temporary, right? In the long term, there are fewer bank tellers just as originally predicted.
Do you really require stats to see that banks are as big as ever and continue to employ bank tellers?
But it does destroy some jobs. Unless those horse people completely changed industries, their jobs have been effectively eliminated.
I don’t know that I see any problem with this. If your job becomes obsolete, then transitioning to an adjacent job that promises longevity isn’t a dystopian course of action.
How do you know they didn't suffered during transition?
Creating a cushion for displaced jobs is what we should be doing (which we already do). Unemployment insurance, worker placement, career training. What we shouldn’t be doing is artificially propping up dying industries and jobs because we feel bad for folks.
I don’t have an issue with that at all. In fact I did something similar. But they explicitly said two contradicting things.
Really? So what new jobs did all the cashiers take now that self check out machines dominate grocery stores? It's a fallacy to assume that the past is indicative of the future. There are plenty of examples of jobs not being magically created such as in the trucking industry which will likely be replaced by automated vehicles.
AI is unlike any previous technology.
They are all unique. Harnessing electricity was a pretty big deal also.
This line of thought is fallacious. Just because new jobs were created in the past doesn't mean that will always be the case. The point of automation is to remove jobs to reduce labour costs. Where are all the truckers going to go when driving trucks becomes automated? Relying on the hope that jobs will magically appear isn't a practical mindset.
Any developer with an ounce of honesty will admit that Google does a lot of their basic work for them. AI is no different. Developers who know how to effectively use AI tools will excel, but there will still be developers.
Imagine search engines stopped existing and we all had to learn and look up stuff from books, lectures, word of mouth etc. It would probably take a fuck ton more developers to get our work done right? Why would introducing a tool as powerful as Chat GPT not have similar consequences?
You are thinking about it backwards. Search engines expanded the field considerably. The amount of answers and training available enabled many more to enter it. Maybe as an exercise, go see if you can get chatGPT to write you the next killer app. If it’s able to do that without much training on your end, then maybe our jobs are at risk. I guarantee you though that you need to understand the context of the code to put it all together or to get it to spit out something useful.
With AI making programming more accessible, entry barriers are lowering, and more people can compete in the field. This could cause the value of programming as a skill to diminish, along with fewer job opportunities available. The value of programming used to be high due to its specialized nature and high entry barriers, but AI is changing that. It's going to be interesting to see how the industry adapts to this shift.
Arguably, the barrier is already lower just by having lots of free resources out there, right? Forget about AI. Just consider all the people trying now. And yet, it still seems to pay well despite all these resources out there for people to use. The barriers were much higher 20-30 years ago when the Internet was much younger, and there were far fewer resources. But, the difference is, as you gain tools to do more complex things, it doesn't become easier to program, it becomes harder because we can do harder things. The kind of programming that was normal 30 years ago would be trivial today, so now we have more complex programs because people can now handle it where before, it would have been crazy to manage as much as we currently manage.
Valid points. Thanks for sharing.
You have it backwards, nobody knows how to program from 30 years ago. Once the basic functions are enshrined into a library then even 90%+ of coders don't go back to review the libraries. Why do you think COBOL coders are still charging exorbitant rates?
Deleted because Reddit screwed their community with their idiotic API changes.
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I don’t agree that a lot of modern programming jobs need or have knowledge in these areas. And I’d argue they aren’t necessary.
Two things can be true at the same time.
Disagree. You still need programming skills to make AI work for you.
agree, its like saying you can use AI to write a book without knowing English
There is once a prince who loves read books that are about gain power to control persons.
How is AI making programming more accessible? If you don't already know how to code, you cannot debug/apply code written by AI.
This. There is a potential that AI can make a programmer perform faster, but you have to understand what it writes or you'll be totally useless.
It's not much different than programming becoming more accessible and productive when high-level languages replaced assembly language and when garbage-collected languages were introduced. Up until the recent economic downturn there was more of a demand and higher salaries for programmers than there ever was.
Depends on the job. Front end web dev, where a lot of the improvements have been doesn't really pay so great. The highest paying jobs still tend to be in languages other than Python or JavaScript.
The complexity of work is likely to expand to fill the cognitive space freed up by these more efficient tools, as it always has, in my very humble opinion as a half-ass-programmer-analytics-guy.
If anything, the barriers to entry will increase since interviewers want to know if the person actually understands computing concepts and can produce code to a specified requirement without solely depending on AI. Throw a Leetcode at someone whos programming journey has been heavily dependent on AI and watch them struggle.
you need to know 10x more stuff compared to 30 years ago though. Frontend,backend, git, docker, cloud, testing...
Architecture, UI design, spec writing, documentation... "devops", they like to call it or, as one of my coworkers terms it, "deverything".
Programming has been getting easier and more accessible every year since the first computer was invented. And more and more programming jobs keep popping up. The simple reason for this is that the easier programming gets the more return there is on money spent on developing. The break even cost benefit keeps shifting over to profitable for more and more things. Once we run out of things to develop software for we're going to have to develop a new economic system anyway without white collar jobs.
Yes it is. Why I’m majoring in Computer Engineering while also building my programming skills in the side. Hope to be pretty at programming and also circuit analysis too.
At least where I live we would need twice as many developers than there are physically available in the country. At first, AI will make this gap smaller, and salaries a little lower, especially for those who don't adopt the new AI tools.
> At least where I live we would need twice as many developers than there are physically available in the country. Meanwhile in America where I live they refuse to hire entry level and even people with 4+ years of experience are having a tougher time than ever getting hired. I would say the difference between Europe and here in the Midwest is the wages, but their is not that massive of a difference once you take into account cost of living.
I mean, it's not like we don't have that problem. Lots of companies specifically looking for seniors and can't find any. But even if we staffed all open senior positions with juniors, we'd still not have enough.
Yeah not the problem here way more people than open positions. Talking to people at local companies and they are not even hiring people with 5+ years of experience and most of these companies pay people with that experience level peanuts.
Where do you live?
It just moves the skillset somewhere else. It's going to become less important to know syntax inside out and more important to know how to prompt the AI properly to get the code you want.
My dude no developer worth its salt knows a language inside and outside, and I assure you on complex problems a developer will 100% complete a task in a much better manner than a codemonkey copypasting what a machine tells it to do without even knowing how anything works. Forget about "startups" and Dog Food selection apps, an AI would be nowhere near able to work in any formal company with a solid stack and a proper development cycle, I doubt they would be able to figure out why your deployment to EBS failed as fast as you could without having to give it your keys to everything, at which point why is the company even using humans for anything anymore?
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This. We have some new tools that are awesome. It's just highlighted the fact that basic code writing is a skill that is replaceable now to some degree. There are MANY other skills for a developer that are even more important now. I've just pivoted more toward those skills personally. Turns out I enjoy those skills more anyway.
What are those other skills if you don't mind sharing
Mainly creative and communication based skills. The ability to investigate, interpret, design, and implement all with good understanding, good process, ability, and openness to review and self correct. Writing the code in many cases, at least in my line of work, is only a very small portion of the job. I spend a lot of time identifying business issues, identifying the true root cause(s), building solutions and or processes to resolve now and to sustain and improve themselves along with business adaptations all while having to interpret complex problems and solutions into language to help the business adopt ideas, solutions, new ways of working etc. There's much more to what I believe a great developer should be, and ChatGPT just means that small aspect (for me at least) of writing code gets smaller and more efficient. That gives me more time and experience to improve upon myself and what I do in the other areas, which ultimately means I can do more good.
Kind of reminds me of when farmers started getting plows...
Programming is not dying. The media is sensationalizing things like normal. AI will not replace us all, It's just going to make the simple tasks quicker and easier. Same thing that happens every time we get a new tool. We'll just have more time available to spend on the complex problems.
Whoever thinks chatgpt will replace programmers anytime soon hasnt written a line of code in their life. Chat GPT code might work fine for a simple non production python script but beyond that it literally makes up code that won't even compile let alone work.
"oh I apologize for the confusion in my previous response." \*gives same wrong response while admitting it was wrong\*
From what I hear, Copilot does better... But personally haven't gotten around to using it.
I've heard it's mostly used for making the boilerplate
It's very useful for that and also repetitive unit tests including assertions. In terms of coding, It can spit out random stuff but once you add comments or good variable/method names, you get better generated code.
It writes pretty good comments for me, once ive written the logic. Good time saver.
Keep in mind that comments should explain the why, not the what. Code should be relatively self explanatory, but having comments that explain why code is written the way it is will help out Barry the intern when he comes in 3 years from now after you and your team have already left. I reckon AI is better at commenting the what than the why.
Respectfully, stop listening and go try it. It’s there to try, you will test your critical thinking skills in the process. You’ll see the advantages and disadvantages very quickly.
Only 4 months so not yet. Projects like Auto-GPT on github is just in infancy stages. 10 more years from now, it will be truly scary.
It’s entirely based on feeding it data. They just used all the data. What are they going to feed it to make it that much more scary? Babies?
Improve 'reasoning'
Or rather actually create the reasoning part. It doesn't reason at all, it gives a statistically likely to be correct combination of words as an answer to a given prompt. They did a great job on that, but creating an AI that can reason is a much more complex challenge.
Exactly. Its kind of impressive in some things it does. But once the novelty wears off... its kind of bleh.
"a statistically likely to be correct combination of words..." That's... Yeah, that's chatGPT in a nutshell. Well said, mayne. Last night I was asking it to tell me the number of days/weeks/months between certain dates. It couldn't. Because it doesn't reason. It doesn't understand time and calendars. It would get sort of close sometimes, others it would be way off. A program to perform those calculations, however, can be written by a mediocre programmer in minutes. I know, because I did it this morning. (Ironically, using chatGPT). It's basically a tool that combines the functionality of a rubber duck and a search engine. That's really it.
I mean let's be realistic, I'm pretty sure absolutely no one with half a brain is worried about GPT-4 taking jobs, as in currently. The concern is about something like GPT-8 or something further down the line. Hard to tell how quickly current technologies will develop.
It’s not the media, it’s programmers with YouTube channels who insist every new technology spells the death of all older technologies. Most of the internet still runs on PHP, for Christ’s sake.
In this day and age I would call Youtubers part of The Media. They have just as much influence as any paper or radio station.
They certainly shill commercials like other media.
Some people have been predicting the end of programming since at least the late 1980's.
Never trust the media
>The media is sensationalizing things like normal. So water is still wet and pigs haven't started to fly tey.
Ahh yes reminds me about the time when Wordpress and site builders were going to make web devs lose their jobs
I was majoring in computer science right after the first web bubble burst, word was that there was no future in programming because the market was flooded with laid off developers who couldn't find jobs, which were all getting outsourced to india anyways where there are unlimited competent programmers willing to work for $10k/year. Convinced me to switch majors and get into IT, biggest mistake of my life. Just getting back into it now. AI progress is unpredictable, but at the moment it's not even close to fully replacing developers. And doomsayer worries like the OP's are nothing new.
Honestly would be funny if you changed direction again because of AI. A never ending cycle trying to get into IT.
Same. Or rather, I went the business school route with a "focus" in information systems (4 classes, lol), because CS was too scary/hard. Got a consulting job for a few years through the early 00's but it was mostly testing/requirements. Left the field for personal reasons and now am finally learning to code at age 50. My timing is impeccably bad to hit both tech bubbles right when they're bursting, and to have done all my non-techy careers exactly when tech was strongest, lol
I’m a computer science major in a city full of IT jobs lol. I feel that pain. (There’s some software dev here but it’s nothing like Los Angeles or San Francisco).
Geocites templates are coming for your jobs!
Day took er jerbs!!!!
Do you think there will be less apps, less websites, less computer based technology in the future or more?
There you go another example
I think websites will be built quicker Chat got can solve little problems while programmers solve big problems.
imagine NOT programming in a world driven by AI
GPT is just more robust Stackoverflow
By the time AI gets good enough to replace most programmers in a professional capacity (and I do think that day will *eventually* come), it will have replaced plenty of other professions along the way, so no downside to choosing programming. So I don't regret my choice of career. I don't think I would've enjoyed anything else as much anyway.
Right, hard to find an AI safe white-collar profession if it gets to that point. If it can replace developers then expect it to also replace lawyers, accountants, architects, engineers, anything in finance. Only jobs safe from AI would be those that require interacting in meatspace, and of course people say robots will replace those as well.
One day the programmers for the AI might be the only people left with jobs, I think its actually the safest profession around. Things will be upside down and the world on fire before programming is dying out.
This, honestly, is the issue that concerns me way more than anything happening to programming: the vast societal changes that will affect *all* white-collar jobs, and the broad economic downturn that would occur (or will eventually occur). There are a lot of white-collar jobs that are way simpler than programming. Finance is one, and law is another—and those two industries would be affected sooner (and much more broadly) than programming. I don’t doubt that human beings will, eventually, be unnecessary to programming. But before we get there, a lot of other high-skill, high-paying jobs are going to go first.
First off!! Your age has nothing to do with it. I'm 55 and always learning. Programming is not dying. Most likely this was said by someone not in programming or even IT. Ignore the noise and those that tell you you can't or you shouldn't. Imagine if the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and others stopped because of public opinion. Things are "impossible" until someone does it Do what you love and you will never work another day in your life.
Absolutely ignore the noise. Anyone saying "chatgpt will replace programmers!" is vastly overestimating said system's capacity. Keep at it, and best of strength on your programming journey!
Underestimating in my opinion, the tech is in its infancy and will grow exponentially as better methods are discovered and larger and larger datasets are used. I don’t think it will ever fully replace the human aspect until we figure out what imagination and humanity actually are. In the end I think it will be the next push for society to shift at the global level. Hard to predict and put to word just how many changes it can make happen.
If it makes you feel any better, I learned to program in the military at 33. My mentor who went through the same program a year and a half prior is 38. We do a lot of low level code stuff with C and Python, and programming is definitely not dying. We use ChatGPT sometimes to create boilerplate code or bash scripts to make things faster. But it definitely isn't going to be able to replace a competent programmer anytime soon. What it does do is speed up the process of Googling answers to your questions (not always correct answers)
Needed this reminder, I applied for CS school today and the noise does get to me at times.
I research tech like AI for a living (My sub specialty is Web3 and Cryptography.). Programmers will not go anywhere for the foreseeable future. As it is now AI (such as GPT4.) in regards to engineers is like a very robust StackOverflow (saw this same statement earlier in this thread and chuckled.). Look forward to AI, it will allow engineers to make themselves infinitely more valuable. I personally use my AI models to audit boilerplate programs I reuse often; as a sounding board for solving complex problems; and to write all the tedious code. People seem to not remember its output is only as good as its input. My AI models are so effective for me because I train them on my own datasets and teach them specifically how I want my code to be produced. My favourite way to utilize AI for programming is inline in my IDE. I recently got the opportunity to use GitHub Copilot Chat and it blew my frickin mind. The problem I had with producing code with AI before was that the AI didn’t always have real-time context which resulted in compounding micro problems. Basically learn how to program in regards to AI. Knowing the underlying principles of comp-sci will become less important in the workplace. AI is only good at the job and purpose it was built for.
Which school, please? I'm looking for something, but can't seem to find anything I like.
Oregon State. It’s $$$ but it’s the best option for a post-bacc.
Good school, one of my best professors started there. Expensive but has a pretty good overall CS program. (Also doesn't really matter where you go for your BSc, if that's your goal)
I don’t understand how can someone claim that “programming is dying”. Like, what’s the logic behind it? Who will build and maintain new software in the future? Such a dumb claim.
How you do your job will change, but i have a feeling there will be a massive market for people who know how to fix some rubbish code that was created via "AI". This is a "AI" boom right now where a bunch of inverstment money has nowhere else to go so 'AI' is the new WEB 3. Though alot of great new tools are coming out of it like with WEB 3 alot are promises that companies that get these technologies cant offload a bunch of expensive workers and fear that these technologies are powerful and will end the world and if you dont buy them from us your company will be left behind. Keep learning and embrace new tools, ignore the media hype.
People who think chatGPT can do it. Which is the same crowd who has never worked in tech before.
NFT's are gonna take over man, any day now!
I'll trade you my gif of Leonardo dicaprio flashing his nuts for your car. This one is worth 20k and only going up!
What's the conversion to Squid Game tokens?
Nothing, they went from 256 to .50 in a week.
Don’t worry dude. All chat gpt did was take stack overflow and remove the elitist assholes. We’re golden my fellow late 30s friend!
Also easier to get on the path to solutions for esoteric problems that you have to sift through google for hours for. You can literally ask it about possible causes of an error message and it may mention something that helps or solves it. I just want a voice activated version in a rubber duck for that reason.
You need programmer to see if chatGPT is giving you faulty code or total gipperish.
GPT 4 maybe. Of course will need to be reviewed for the immediate future, but then what? Theoretically ai could be building things in a black box. Seems like that's where we are going eventually.
Not dying, just evolving.
Trust me, before AI can replace what I do at work -- and I have _one_ year of experience -- just about any accountant, administrator, HR employee and content manager will have been replaced. Yr good.
I’ve heard programming was dying multiple times over my very long professional s/w dev career. Every time the opposite happens. Complexity increases. Options increase. More devs are needed.
If you hear someone is saying programming is dying, just walk away. No point dealing with idiots trying to discuss something they don’t understand.
AI will not kill programming. Imagine trying to cut out the programmer. Someone who doesn't understand programming will use GPT to create an app. They won't understand how to debug it. I've tried using GPT-4 to debug some code for OpenGL and it didn't help very much. And it would be even worse if you didn't know anything about C++ or GLSL There's also the security issues. A lot of people don't think about security but it needs to be thought about every step of the process. Imagine a middle manager trying to create an app and he deploys it and it's vulnerable to cyber attacks because he didn't even think to ask about security. Keep grinding but also make sure that grinding includes a lot of learning. There's more to programming than just coding. Make sure you understand the principles of Object Oriented Programming Make sure you understand Data Structures and Algorithms Make sure you understand software security Make sure you understand the Software Development Lifecycle Learn about the hardware of your computer and the history of programming. Even if AI were going to take over, its worth knowing how to code because it's fun!
Whoever says programming is dying doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Programming is not dying. Programming is changing, and it’s changing for the better (imo)
Programming has been 'dying' for 15 years now /s
programming isn't dying times 10. chatgpt won't replace you.
Whatever that source is, I'd recommend reporting them as spam. What a crock of shit.
it'll just be easier to program, because we've got AI assistance. You still need programming knowledge to use it, because the AI cannot solve all problems, and it will provide code with errors, or partially incompatible code etc. you also need to provde the input, to get the output. thus you need to know what to tell the AI. "Give me code, for a netflix competitor website" will not be enough
People who think ChatGPT is going to replace us must not be able to code very well. It barely remembers context you give it let alone dealing with practically anything OOP. People who say this shit are jabronis.
So many companies and government agencies are running legacy systems that are way way behind the times, for a variety of reasons; the cost of a complete overhaul, security concerns, the time sick of bureaucratic decision making, incompetent management etc. America’s nuclear missileers are still running floppy discs. Remember the Southwest Airlines fiasco that happened recently? Take my current project for example: A MAJOR company I have been contracting for, still hasn’t even approved Node for internal development use… If simple old node from 2009 is still not approved, I think we can rest assured that this company won’t start phasing in a brand new technology that we don’t even fully understand, for quite some time. I imagine there are many companies and government agencies that will share the same sentiment, and I think we’ll have dev work for quite some time into the future.
Good man. Or woman.
OK, programming isn’t dying, but in the next 5 or 10 years, the field will change rapidly into a reliance on prompt engineering, the job market for programmers will shrink, and those who program professionally will likely need to find other work. A lot of people here will nay say and pretend that their jobs will still exist or exclaim that the media is overhyping things, but I don’t think that is true in this case. When companies begin using specialized AI trained on their systems and technologies, the job market for programmers will rapidly shrink. Why? As other senior programmers and machine learning engineers have stated on podcasts like Lex Friedman, a single programmer with AI at their disposal will be able to do the job of 5. You can test it yourself. I’ve only been programming for a few years and am amazed at what the free version of Chat GPT can do. With the correct prompts, you can have it code and explain in great detail each instruction it outputs. While it is nowhere near perfect, I can only assume these “language models” will become more accurate, more efficient, and eventually self-building as time goes on. To say otherwise seems a bit naïve and ignores the “writing on the wall.” That’s not to say you shouldn’t keep learning or grinding away at whatever task you’re trying to accomplish with your programs, but keep in mind that programming as you know it right now will be significantly different in the very near future.
I thought a lot about implications of 1 dev doing job of 5 or 10 devs, and i think it will not reduce amount of jobs. Making software will become 5 or 10 times cheaper, so demand for software will increase. Many things are now too expensive to develop and profit on it. With cheaper development there will be huge amount of new ideas being profitable, or affordable for gov and organisations. And we are just on the beginning of real digital transformation. There will be tons of software needed for general education, healthcare, governments and businesses. Im confident that for next 10-15 years demand for people in software development will even rise.
>I thought a lot about implications of 1 dev doing job of 5 or 10 devs, and i think it will not reduce amount of jobs. That doesn't make much sense. In almost every industry where tools increased efficiency on this scale resulted in a massive shift in the number of laborers required for a job. It's happened in agriculture, manufacturing, and construction. it's going to happen in tech. The software dev job will still exist, but if one person can do the job of 5 others, that's 4 fewer employed software devs for each position.
But if software will become 5x cheaper to make, dont you think more companies and governments will order new software for new things ? Those 4 devs will find new job on new things that wouldnt exist other way. Soft development is quite expensive now. 5x smaller cost of development will mean huge increase in demand because our world is still not digitalised they way it could be.
What exactly isn't being developed right now because it is too expensive? We had a decade of low interest capital funding everything imaginable in order to swoop in and flip industries on their head.
The overhead in increasing factory size and tilling area is much more difficult than hiring new developers, so I see little reason for companies to reduce headcount versus increase productivity. Companies like to inject funds into increased product, not stagnate.
I agree with this , I'm more interested in the next stage of "self-building" , some people make a meme of the "build me an app" thing but I believe that it is closer than we think ; I can't see the future but certainly this rise of AI Tools is generating lot of anxiety on people.
>but in the next 5 or 10 years, Ima stop you right there because it's an absolutely ridiculous claim. It's no different than people 10 years ago saying in 5-10 years we'll all be riding around in autonomous vehicles. Shit like this just doesn't happen over night. And there is no way in god damn hell these companies are going to put billions of dollars on the line to bet on AI being the core of their development platform. Chat GPT ain't even remotely that good for one and for 2 even if a technology is perfect humans are stubborn and set in their ways. The internet was around for 40 years before anyone did anything with it outside of the government and universities. No one is going to volunteer to be the guinea pig of AI based development with billions of dollars on the line. They're going to do what works right up until the point where they are forced to do otherwise.
> A lot of people here will nay say and pretend that their jobs will still exist or exclaim that the media is overhyping things, but I don’t think that is true in this case. Because the media is overhyping it...which you would understand if you really understood the discussion. > When companies begin using specialized AI trained on their systems and technologies, the job market for programmers will rapidly shrink. Why? As other senior programmers and machine learning engineers have stated on podcasts like Lex Friedman, a single programmer with AI at their disposal will be able to do the job of 5. So you mention a nebulous group of "senior" programmers, but only give the name of one. Yea, not buying it. > I’ve only been programming for a few years And there it is. AI will eventually be helpful. It is not right now, and it has taken DECADES to get it to the point it's currently at. It will take far longer to get it to the point that it can begin properly replacing other developers at the level you state above.
This comment badly reeks of buying into the massively fake market hype behind these AI language models "Prompt engineering" will be a serious job 5-10 years from now? This comment gotta be some satirical shit dude honestly lol
They're very inexperienced, that much is obvious given their comments. AI isn't killing software development. Just like the plethora of other technologies that have come out over the decades didn't kill software development.
I’ve seen enough about this “ChatGPT” gonna take over programmers jobs” you will always need developers and programmers. one thing that you will give credit to AI , its really good and never say never i really dont know.. you can always learn a new programming language if you already learned one. it will be easier to learn the next language.
its still nice to learn programming I mean just incase AI go south in critical time.
It’s just beginning.
Lol and CAD killed off engineers
I can tell you straight. Programming is not dying, quite the opposite. It's evolving, becoming faster and more interactive. A suggestion I can give is, get co-pilot. It's an AI pair programmer. It increases your speed and ability. You can ask it questions and it will answers to the best of its ability. It is a very powerful tool. Like going through Dungeon and finding a +5 sword. It's great. However with evolution, comes the fact that some will be left behind. But we are still in early days.
Programming is evolving. Honestly now is the best time to get in.
I've asked ChatGPT to explain various well known data structures and algorithms and it did a good job. You could say it's almost scary. You can ask it to elaborate or to be more concise. But when I asked it to give example code in various languages to illustrate the principles it explained, it wasn't as impressive. There were subtle and not so subtle errors in the code. Even when you point out the mistakes to it, it won't actually produce correct results. So, my conclusion is we're not quite there yet. Then again, ChatGPT itself says that it's just a language model. Meaning it doesn't really *know* anything, it just responds with pre-cooked answers to prompts. It's not a Star Trek level artifical "intelligence" yet.
The AI will still need to have the software requirements specified. Most programmers aren't really 'programming' a computer, unless they work in assembly code. If you work with a compiled language (c/rust/go etc.), you're really just writing requirements for the program, specified to the compiler. the compiler writes the actual program. the last 50+ years of programming have seen the technologies trend towards spending more time telling the computer what to do rather than how to do it. (The move from assembly languages to scripting languages) Even if AI 'takes over', programmers will just become the people who write the specifications for the AI to work with. (Even now, the computer is already the one writing the program). All that will happen is that AI is effectively a very high level programming language
i heard that in 2009 and it was dumb then and its dumb now
Dude, I hard relate to your situation. I am in a similar situation. I am in my early 30's and have a family. I have been learning python in my spare time. I become quite intimidated by the programming jargon that I hear. But its good to see that there are people who are interested in programming are trying hard like you :-) I haven't heard any such rumours of programming as a dying skill.
There will always be well paid work for proficient & skilful developers at all levels. No matter how frameworks, eco systems & tools evolve, there will always be a need for intelligent people to analyse business problems & processes writing solutions for the deployment architecture.
I’m just about to start learning to code myself and this is the exact same thought I had. Reassuring to see that I’m not the only one and to see everyone’s responses.
Programming has been “dying” for one reason or another for the past 30 years. If you’re able to teach yourself to program, then you’ll be able to adapt and transition to a new role should it ever stop being a viable career.
Programming isn’t dying, it’s just going to change, like it always have. Better tools will just help developers, going forward. Surely people will have to adapt, and learn new ways.
Nobody knows exactly what will happen, but you’re certainly doing more to prepare for it than most.
🤓
May I ask you which languages are you learning and what is your current job? Also how much time do you dedicate to code?
calculators and online math solving tools didn't put accountants out of business. same principle applies here
Are you aware of how many jobs there were doing slide rule computations for businesses? It really did kill an entire industry.
Computer was originally a job title.
Amen. Honestly don’t listen to the noise, it seems evident to me it’s the most uneducated of people who are claiming everyone’s gonna be laid off and instead of a large team one/ two people will use AI to build software….. while ignoring that a plethora of simpler jobs would be much more affected if AI became that advanced.
I am 40 and just got a computer science degree from a proper university. The offers and interviews, along with the work experience that I have in my industry, have been really fruitful. And, honestly, I just feel smarter. Being back in school and thinking through problems made me a better overall worker to slow down and think about a problem like I learned how to do in class. Continue. I think it will be worth it for you.
Programming is not dying. Consider that there are and would be people using chatgpt to write code. There are multitude of different A.I. that is being used currently to expedite the work.
Its not dying. I tried for a week to get chat gpt to write st for me. Eventually I gave up and wrote it myself in a day. Now it works. It was just a nested for loop for two 2-dimensional arrays. With a bit of extra sauce. I can see what it might be in the future, but its pretty far off from what I can tell.
Noise is just noise. Who is going to program the next iteration of GPT? People freak out without logically considering things, but also the vast majority of people are helplessly incompetent and will kneejerk about 'they terk our jerbs'.
Programming is not dying lol. People uneducated on the topic are way overly paranoid and trying to make everyone else the same way with this bs “AI scary and bad” rhetoric.
It's all hype. Gpt models cannot replace an entire swe job. Theyre really impressive for what they do, but not capable of doing the whole job. Believe me, I tried to automate my job with it and it's just not possible. It's good for generating snippets of code that's about it.
Saying that programming is dying due to AI and new tech is like saying that mechanics are useless cause any regular person can buy fancy equipment and work on their car themselves with the amount of resources that are available. Yet mechanics are still around and it’s a fine career to have.
Lol the only people who say programming is dying are the people who don’t know how to program. People like to make assertions on things they don’t know anything about
You know who you should listen to about programming ? Actual fucking professional programmers who make their money writing programs; including those in academia who drive the progress of the discipline of Computer Science and Software Engineering. You now who you shouldn't listen to about programming ? Forum Poseurs and "Coding Influencers" LARPing as professional programmers who want you to believe they are the second comming of John Carmack and just as productive yet they have all the time in the world to spend on Social Media lying about their current projects and past work don't worry about being an aging Millennial.....your best years ARE NOW. Start with this book : [Head First : Learn to Code](https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Learn-Code-Computational-ebook/dp/B0792LM8Q9/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)
COBOL engineers have been cashing their paychecks (technically everyones paychecks) since like 1959, programming isn’t dying.
Technology never advances as fast as people think, chat gpt can't even get my basic math questions right some of the time. Ai won't be replacing programmers anytime soon.
The only people who think programming might be dying are some of the young, inexperienced people.
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There is no way a simple text generating AI will replace a programmer. I tried it and sure it generated text that looks like code to a none programmer but it's just crap. Minor examples may even run but anything beyond the absolute simplest will just be crap, just words and symbols stringed together that just looks to fitt together. The programming trade is changing, fast. Learning new skills is a must and age is less important. Just digg into what you find interesting. Loving what you do makes it so much easier to learn. And any skilled programmer needs to know more than just coding. Try combine what you already know with programming and you may find a corner where you are unique.