Amazing listening to all of the HN coder apologists here come up with excuses for why they aren't going to lose their jobs, too.<p>If anything, abstraction, ever-tighter vendor lock-in, and improvements in static analysis will kill off many coder jobs.<p>There aren't too many jobs out there for recreating basic UNIX tools like sed or grep -- soon, this will be true for higher level tools as well, until what you're doing now at your desk as a coder becomes a "tool" or already exists as a library.<p>It will eventually be like self-driving cars: Not totally automated, but enough to make the job of programming like a modern-day pilot's -- throw it in autopilot, and then step in whenever (rarely) necessary. Then people will realize fewer people are needed to keep watch and step in, and that one person is enough to do the same thing as many people.
The end of code seems like a title created by a sensationalist... I am excited for how these forms of pattern recognition and decision making can allow us to do more with software. There is still plenty of code to be written as we continue to apply software to every aspect of our world.
Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery.<p>Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI.<p>edit:<p>Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.
There will be a day when the last programmer writes the last program. Long after we are all dead. While some types of jobs may be automatable, most of what I have to do makes little sense to smart people much less a rigid AI. What AI can take almost random requirements, strange UI designs and animations and clueless VP driven features and turn it into something people want to use.<p>I think the VP's are more likely to be replaced by an AI.
articles with this identical thesis and conclusion have been published from time to time for the past 25 years.<p>i started coding in the early 1980's and began coding professionally just after graduating from MIT in 1992.
The "guidance counselor" at my high school recommended that i major in something other than computer science because he has read several thoughtful pieces that suggested the job of professional programmer would become "extinct" not because programming wasn't important but because it was too important (to leave to programmers)--sort of like the way many companies 50 years ago had large "typing pools"; these are gone because everyone can type.<p>looking across the span of my career so far, it seems these predictions are correct, in a horizon sense--ie, we've reached this distance line we pointed to 20 years ago, but there's no horizon there, it's still far in the distance.<p>here's what i mean: in 1992, my first job involved writing small extensions to numerical libraries, in C and FORTRAN. Probably 90 percent (if anything it was higher) of my time was spent "managing memory"--allocating it, deallocating it, pointing to it, etc.<p>now, the time i spend on those sorts of tasks is de minimis. So the march of technology never took away my job (the only job i have ever wanted to do) but it did take away 90% of it.<p>With 90% of my former tasks now handled elsewhere, far more interesting and challenging tasks have taken their place.<p>this is the trend i see--not the one-sided (or perhaps short-sited) trend described in the Wired post--but a continuous iteration of the programmer's work characterized by swapping well-characterized, routinized tasks for more challenging ones, most of which are would take some thought to foresee.
AI techniques don't require acres of developers writing acres of if/thens (traditional software development is just that).<p>The Deepmind Atari player is only 1500 lines of code.
why would AI program? Programming is a way to make hardware perform some task. Well, couldn't AI just go straight to performing the task, skipping the programming step, at least as we know it.
If you have been following the recent advances in AI (and are not clueless) then it should be getting really REALLY obvious that <i>most</i> coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years.<p>AI will eat your career.