Obs.: I’m using “[REDACTED]” to not look like I’m doing some advertising.
Sorry to bring AI subject here, but I’m terrified by how efficient AI generation code became in the past few years.
Last year I was seeing a designer community with desperate people because of AI generative images, many people hopeless because how more convenient it is, way more than paying for a freelance to do something reasonable.
Now I’m with the same feeling as a programmer. I just decided to take a look into AI a little deeper, as I don’t use it very often. So I tried the recent [REDACTED] editor, which is just [REDACTED] with AI agent features (an AI that does more than just generate text, it create files, make decisions etc…). And I must say, programming jobs will be reduced a lot.
The app was able to do a entire module of a side project, integrating with another API and following the same conventions I did. It worked in the first try. It created all the files and everything.
Many people bring this argument: AI won’t replace devs, we’ll always need devs to check code etc. Ok, I agree with that, but if before we needed 5 devs to do a job, now we just need 1 to revise all the job an AI did alone equivalent to 5 devs programming.
So, there’s no way it won’t impact the devs market. I’m being optimistic here, because the future is still unclear, but if it keeps the same rate we can reduce the dev jobs to near zero.
This is what every executive always wanted, get rid of devs, and now they can. Devs were always an inconvenience to executives, but they couldn’t get the job done without devs.
Now they can focus all money on AI research until it gets nearly perfect, reduce the skill needed to deal with code and build projects without too much knowledge, and get rid of many devs too.
It’s undeniable that AI jobs WILL be affected in a negative way. I’m seriously considering leaving this area and use programming just as a hobby, nothing more.
In any technology career, you are going to have to adapt to changes in technology. We went through the same transition from writing machine code to writing object oriented code. And from writing monoliths to writing micro services. You may not write code letter by letter the same way you used to. But your ability to adapt is your real value, not the code you can type from memory.
AI code generators still need very clear directions. They need guidelines and restrictions. They need architectural designs and decision making. They need code review. We still need the experience of qualified people, we just don’t need you to be the one typing out every letter. Delegate that part to the AI and up level your contribution.
It’s a problem when people just generate the code, see if it runs, maybe test it once or twice, and… That’s it.
Same issue with people blindly copying Stack Overflow and other code snippets on the web.
Like you say, the value we bring is in our review and understanding of the code, as well as our ability to make judgements on things like architecture.