Well, that would be the 3rd or 4th thing during my career that was supposed to make my job a thing of the past or at least severely reduce the need for it.
(If I remember it correctly, OO design were supposed to reduce the need for programmers, as were various languages, then there was Outsourcing, visual programming and on the server-side I vaguely remember various frameworks being hailed as reducing the need for programmers because people would just be able to wire modules together with config or some shit like that. Additionally many libraries and frameworks out there aim to reduce the need for coding)
All of them, even outsourcing, have made my skills be even more in demand - even when they did reduce the amount of programming needed without actually increasing it elsewhere (a requirement were already most failed) the market for software responded to that by expecting the software to do more things in more fancy ways and with data from more places, effectively wiping out the coding time savings and then some.
Granted, junior developers sometimes did suffer because of those things, but anything more complicated than monkey-coder tasks has never been successfully replaced, fully outsourced or the need for it removed, at least not without either the needs popping up somewhere else or the expected feature set of software increasing to take up the slack.
In fact I expect AI, like Outsourcing before it, in a decade or so is going to really have screwed the Market for Senior Software Engineers from the point of view of Employers (but a golden age for Employees with those skills) by removing the first part of the career path to get to that level of experience, and this time around they won’t even be able to import the guys and galls in India who got to learn the job because the Junior positions were outsourced there.
i didn’t start my tech career after high school because every career advice i got was “all jobs going to india.” could’ve had 10 more year’s experience but instead i joined the military. ugh!
Yeah hows that goin’?
When I last tried to let some AI write actual code, it didn’t even compile 🙂 And another time when it actually compiled it was trash anyway and I had to spend as much time fixing it, as I would have spent writing it myself in the first place.
So far I can only use AI as a glorified search engine 😅
It can write really buggy Python code, so… Yeah, seems promising
It does a frequently shitty job of writing docstrings for simple functions, too!
Almost like dealing with real engineers…
It does great with common code patterns that it can just drop in place. 99.9% Artificial, 0.01% intelligence.
20 years ago at a trade show, a new module based visual coding tool was introduced in my field which claimed “You’ll never need another programmer”.
Oddly enough, I still have a job.
The tools have gotten better, but I still write code every day because procedural programming is still the best way to do things.
It is just now reaching the point that we can do some small to medium scale projects with plug and play systems, but only with very specific equipment and configurations.
20 years ago while learning web development Dreamweaver was going to supposedly eliminate the need for code on websites too. lol
But sadly, the dream of eliminating us seems like it will never die
20 years ago at a trade show, a new module based visual coding tool was introduced in my field which claimed “You’ll never need another programmer”.
It’s because people trying to sell silver bullets is nothing new.
The pace of change is about every five years, and some elements are always in transition.
All in one turn key solutions are always one to two cycles behind, so may work great with the stuff I’m already replacing.
I think these are honest attempts to simplify, but by the time they have it sorted its obsolete. If I have to build modules anyway to work with new equipemnt, might as well just write all the code in my native language.
These also tend to be attempts at all in one devices, requiring you to use devices only compatible with those subsystems. I want to be able to use best tech from what ever manufacturer. New and fancy almost always means a command line interface, which again means coding.
“Coding” was never the source of value, and people shouldn’t get overly attached to it. Problem solving is the core skill. The discipline and precision demanded by traditional programming will remain valuable transferable attributes, but they won’t be a barrier to entry. - John Carmack
Agreed! Problem solving is core to any sort of success. Whether you’re moving up or on for more pay, growing tomatoes or nurturing a relationship, you’re problem solving. But I can see AI putting the screws to those of us in tech.
Haven’t used it much so far, last job didn’t afford much coding opportunity, but I wrote a Google Apps script to populate my calendar given changes to an Excel sheet. Pretty neat!
With zero experience App scripting, I tried going the usual way, searching web pages. Got it half-ass working, got stuck. Asked ChatGPT to write it and boom, solved with an hour’s additional work.
You could say, “Yeah, but you at least had a clue as to general scripting and still had to problem solve. Plus, you came up with the idea in the first place, not the AI!” Yes! But point being, AI made the task shockingly easier. That was at a software outfit so I had the oppurtuniy to chat with my dev friends, see what they were up to. They were properly skeptical/realistic as to what AI can do, but they still used it to great effect.
Another example: Struggled like hell to teach myself database scripting, so ignorant I didn’t know the words to search and the solutions I found were more advanced answers than my beginner work required (or understood!). First script was 8 short lines, took 8 hours. Had AI been available to jump start me, I could have done that in an hour, maybe two. That’s a wild productivity boost. So while AI will never make programmers obsolete, we’ll surely need fewer of them.
This right here.
Problem is not coding. Anybody can learn that with a couple of well focused courses.
I’d love to see an AI find the cause of a catastrophic crash of a machine that isn’t caused by a software bug.
Catching up on what Carmack’s been up to for the last decade has revived the fan in me. I love that 2 years after leaving Oculus to focus on AGI, this is all the hype he’s willing to put out there.
Keen Technologies
Perfect name for a Carmack company!
Oh my god, I just got it l that, haha.
Fucking lol.
Lol, as a programmer who uses generative AI myself, I would genuinely love to see them try.
And anyone who believes that should be fired, because they don’t understand the technology at all or what is involved in programming for that matter. At the very least it should make everyone question the company if its leadership doesn’t understand their own product.
Until an AI can get clear, reasonable requirements out of a client/stakeholder our jobs are safe.
So never right?
If the assumption is that a PM holds all the keys…
I admit that I work faster with AI help and if people get more stuff done in less time there might be less billable hours in the future for us. But AI did not replace me, a 10 times cheaper dude from India did.
That guy has never seen AI code before. It regularly gets even simple stuff wrong. Was he especially good is when it gives made up crap. Or it tells you a method or function you can use but doesn’t tell you where it got that. And then you’re like “oh wow I didn’t realize that was available” and then you try it and realize that’s not part of the standard library and you ask it “where did you get that” and it’s like “oh yeah sorry about that I don’t know”.
My absolute favorite is when I asked copilot to code a UI button and it just pasted “// the UI element should do (…) but instead it is doing (…)” a dozen times.
Like, clearly someone on stackoverflow asked for help, got used for training data, and confused copilot
Spoken like someone who manages programmers instead of working as one.
The job of CEO seems the far easier to replace with AI. A fairly basic algorithm with weighted goals and parameters (chosen by the board) + LLM + character avatar would probably perform better than most CEOs. Leave out the LLM if you want it to spout nonsense like this Amazon Cloud CEO.
Cheaper too I bet.
Also lol for the AI coder 😁 good luck with that 😂
Worst case scenario the ai fucking loses it and decides to do some wacky but weirdly effective shit. Like spamming out 1 width units en masse in Hearts of Iron 4.
And no asinine private jet commute required for the AI CEO…
But plenty of electricity still needed.
Probably cheap at the price compared to burning Jet A by the tens or hundreds of gallons.
Not that I am unconcerned about the resource usage. Lesser of two evils.
Good point.
Most companies can’t even give decent requirements for humans to understand and implement. An AI will just write any old stuff it thinks they want and they won’t have any way to really know if it’s right etc.
They would have more luck trying to create an AI that takes whimsical ideas and turns them into quantified requirements with acceptance criteria. Once they can do that they may stand a chance of replacing developers, but it’s gonna take far more than the simpleton code generators they have at the moment which at best are like bad SO answers you copy and paste then refactor.
This isn’t even factoring in automation testers who are programmers, build engineers, devops etc. Can’t wait for companies to cry even more about cloud costs when some AI is just lobbing everything into lambdas 😂
It’s a good thing. After all, I don’t care when Amazon goes down.
I just want to remind everyone that capital won’t wait until AI is “as good” as humans, just when it’s minimally viable.
They didn’t wait for self-checkout to be as good as a cashier; They didn’t wait for chat-bots to be as good as human support; and they won’t wait for AI to be as good as programmers.
And because all the theft and malfunctions, the nearby supermarkets replaced the self checkout by normal cashiers again.
If it’s AI doing all the work, the responsibility goes to the remaining humans. They’ll be interesting lawsuits even there’s the inevitable bug that the AI itself can’t figure out.
We saw this happen in Amazon’s cashier-less stores. They were actively trying to use a computer based AI system but it didn’t work without thousands of man hours from real humans which is why those stores are going away. Companies will try this repeatedly til they get something that does work or run out of money. The problem is, some companies have cash to burn.
I doubt the vast majority of tech workers will be replaced by AI any time soon. But they’ll probably keep trying because they really really don’t want to pay human beings a liveable wage.
Unexpected item in bagging are? I think you meant free item in bagging area.
Already happening. Cisco just smoked another 4,000 employees. And anecdotally, my tech job hunt is, for the first time, not going so hot.
They won’t, and they’ll suffer because of it and want to immediately hire back programmers (who can actually do problem solving for difficult issues). We’ve already seen this happen with customer service reps - some companies have resumed hiring customer service reps because they realized AI isn’t able to do their jobs.
And then we should all charge outrageous hourly rates to fix the AI generated code.
You better fucking believe it.
AIs are going to be the new outsource, only cheaper than outsourcing and probably less confusing for us to fix
They’ll try the opposite. It’s what the movie producers did to the writers. They gave them AI generated junk and told them to fix it. It was basically rewriting the whole thing but because now it was “just touching up an existing script” it was half price.
Yeah they’ll try. Surely that can’t cascade into a snowball of issues. Good luck for them 😎
A strike with tech workers would be something else. Curious what would happen if the one maintaining the servers for entertainment, stock market or factories would just walk out. On the other hand, tech doesn’t have unions.
They can try. But cleaning up a mess takes a while and there’s no magic wand to make it ho faster.
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