He’s laid out five stages where he says specific changes will occur. He’s extrapolating this all based on evidence from just the past few months. This is nonsense. I’m not saying I know we’re not going to be replaced, but neither does he.<p>For example, he links to an article that he says shows “OpenAI has openly stated its intent to replace developers”, but when you read that article, it’s actually about a report by another company (not OpenAI itself) saying that “OpenAI is pursuing an avenue to make basic coding practices essentially obsolete”. That’s _very_ different than making _programmers_ obsolete.<p>Listen, if all you do is plug shit together and don’t contribute at a higher level than that, yeah your job might be at risk. But if you use this as a tool to release you from the drudgery of “basic coding”, this could be an incredible tool to make you far more effective.<p>Almost every time there’s a new tool that gives us new capabilities, instead of firing programmers (except for this one period of COVID hangover layoffs), companies make the choice to do _more_ with the same number of people. (If we don’t, the the competition will!) And so the level of complexity ratchets up higher. And who are the people that can manage that complexity? The CEO? The product managers? No. Software engineers.<p>Unless they actually create AGI. It which case, everyone is fucked, regardless of the industry. At that point, we all have to become massage therapists or waiters.
Ive been really worrying about my future career wise the last month+ because of chatGPT and the incoming AI wave of innovation. The issue I have is, what’s the obvious choice for a career pivot? Do I switch to something like nursing where physical labor is involved? Do I get into networking and deal with setting up physical servers? I don’t have a great answer, so it seems to me that the best course of action is continue trying to become a better software engineer, and see what happens. I don’t know if anyone else feels more or less in the same boat or not…
This is extrapolating some amazing things without evidence. People thought we’d have moon bases and flying cars by now, too. There have been some amazing emergent behaviors as models get bigger, but there is no guarantee that the trend will continue.
This article is garbage. Look at it carefully. Where is the reasoning? Where is the evidence? It's just one magical claim after magical claim.<p>Compilers didn't replace coders, they just changed the nature of coding. AI doesn't change coding, but it may change the nature of coding in some ways.<p>A CEO of a company could theoretically manage directly every single person in his workforce. But he doesn't. Why? Because managing people requires that you understand what they do and how they might be doing it wrong. You need to track their status. Otherwise, things get completely out of control and your plans go nowhere.<p>Now imagine a perfect AI "coder." How do you manage it? You will have to know how to talk to it and how to understand its behavior. But this is exactly how human coders deal with compilers and libraries today. We will not see ANY replacement of engineers with AI. What we will see is a new category of high-level programming via prompt engineering.<p>Programmer tools have not, up until now, ever led to a contraction of the software industry. There are more programmers out there than ever before. Advances in technology merely expand what can be done with tech.<p>Imagine one more thing. Let's say you find a genie lamp and the genie inside gives you three wishes. You COULD makes those wishes yourself. But there are often unhappy side effects. What you need is to go find a Genie Whisperer-- essentially a coder who understands genies; how they think; what they can do; what the pitfalls of dealing with them are. The Genie Whisperer will translate your naive desires into carefully couched language that maximizes the probability of getting what you want.<p>You see? EVEN IF AI IS LITERALLY MAGIC business people will discover that they should not deal directly with it.
Just like how crypto was going to revolutionize everything that required trust, and cryptocurrency was going to replace cold hard cash?<p>We're good for 10 years at least. That said, I would hate to be a frontend developer for the next 10 years.
OP sets up the article that everyone is myopic, but then falls way short himself in only looking at programmers.<p>> Engineers are myopic and don’t realize they constitute a massive cost center that management is salivating to slash.<p>What is the value of a software company where these managers work when everyone can write their own OS/office suite/browser at home?<p>And if image/video generation keep up with GPT, we will see game of thrones contenders being made by a 1 man operation with a good imagination, essentially killing netflix and the like.<p>So what are we left with but compute and hardware. The risk of the future in my eyes is that everyone is without a job and the true power is with the few mega companies that provide us the hardware, and compute.<p>Apple and AWS are probably good companies to bet on. If there isn't a complete revolution by then.
My biggest fear is ChatGpt will do all the coding, and we’ll all be pushed further into being testers and QA. The end stage of development where a human eye is a necessity…<p>It feels like we are all about to become dirt poor at the expense of this system cranking out products as cheaply as possible.<p>That’s how it goes though
I feel like nobody ever takes these predictions to the next level. So no company will need us, so why does anyone need the services/products of all these companies that no longer need software developers?<p>Why do I need to use the products of a company if I can just tell my ai what software I need?
Another common prediction is that articles like these will be trivial for ChatGPT to author.<p>Will tears flow at the loss of tech bloggers? How about SEO content writers? In the latter case, copy-paste drivel writers will be the first to lose their jobs.<p>Programmers may be under the pump in many circumstances. But their skills often require human decisions beyond valid code. Decisions taking into account technical debt, business reasons, UI concerns, or making calculated compromises such as not pissing off the existing codebase, people, or legacy systems that can't be moved easily.<p>ChatGPT literally doesn't care if it gets those decisions wrong. If your Ai software engineer turns out to be a Shatbot, where is the accountability?
Any path to AI replacing all programmers that doesn’t involve replacing a huge numbers of other office workers first is nonsense.<p>Have people who write these things never heard of an “email job?
I am about to finish my bachelor's degree in applied computer sciences and am worried about my future.<p>Sure, this whole process will take some time like 10 - 20 years in which I can build up some skills.<p>But as life in general becomes more expensive and I want to make good money (let's be honest, we all want that), I consider doing a masters degree in either
- Business Informatics/(IT-)Projectmanagement, or
- Artificial intelligence<p>As I am not the strongest in maths and I like the Idea of leading a Project, the first one would be my preference.<p>Do you have any suggestions on this? Will Project-managers also be replaced to the same extend as devs?<p>I think ultimately what I am looking for is "some cool tech job that gets me paid 90K but without having to being Dijkstra-smart"
IF all this were to come to pass as described, on that ten year timeline, I wonder what would be the fate of programming languages? New dominant coding languages come along roughly every five years. Would generative AI stick with one language? Would it learn to prefer new languages over time? Would it write new languages? If not, who would?
I work on a 17.5 million line code base across 4 different languages that I know will not be something chatGPT has trained on and it won’t be due to commercial interests. Not worried about it.
I can't wait to stop writing repetitive code and get things done faster with time to market approaching zero. But around this time, I should have been sitting in my self driving car instead of ordering a taxi.