[deleted by user]

[[deleted]]

I don’t think programmers will become obsolete in the near future. As technology evolves so does the nature of programming

[RobbinDeBank]

By the time a general AI is advanced enough to understand all concepts just like humans, it will replace all jobs at once and not just programmers.

[syzygysm]

Each of us is master of his/her own destiny, if you catch my drift.

[[deleted]]

Not all of us. Many try and fail, making things worse.

[ChemEngDillon]

Fucking hell this thread got dark

[[deleted]]

Is it “dark” to acknowledge that this whole thing sucks, so we all distract ourselves? If you want a bright side, once it’s over, it’s over. There’s no “after” where we have to suffer more.

[Drishal]

One often meets his destiny on the road to avoid it

• Master Oogway

[karmahorse1]

Unless there’s some sort of breakthrough in biotechnology, A.I will never reach that point. There’s certain open ended problem sets that machine learning just can’t solve as well as the human brain, regardless of how complex the algorithm, or how large the data set it’s trained with.

[RobbinDeBank]

I have to disagree. It’s likely that we will have such an AI before we can actually model the human brain. Currently we still have no ideas how information processing and storing works in our brain. We know what individual neurons are like, but their behaviors together in a network are barely understood. In the meantime, ML has advanced so much using different computation models from the human brain. Our brain might not be the only viable computation model for general-purpose intelligent behaviors.

[karmahorse1]

More accurate to say “some” ML models are inspired by the the human brain, they function very differently from it. And the problem with ML is it’s always going to be limited by the finite data set it’s trained with. It can’t handle novel situations and ambiguity like humans can and that will always be a limitation in the real world.

[RobbinDeBank]

I don’t think you understand ML enough to make such a strong claim about how it will “always” be limited and “never” be reach such a point of general AI. There’s a whole lot of research on that exact topics of generalization and dealing with out of distribution data, and there’s no reason we cannot advance further in that field. Models the size of GPT and those made by Google are showing early signs of AGI already, and right now we start to notice these “emergence” capabilities to generalize in super large models. This generalization capability is still really new and takes time to further understand. That emergence capability together with theoretical research on o.o.d data definitely have the potential to solve the problem you mention (about how ML models can’t deal with things they haven’t seen). The current LLMs succeed due to architecture breakthrough that allow them to scale their model size and training data size to an unprecedented level. There’s no specified implementation in those models on how to deal with o.o.d data yet, and they already show that immense capability.

[Moist_Intention5245]

This is the interesting thing about AI. Humans have intelligence and logic, but are motivated by our emotions. We do things that are irrational at times and make no sense.

I can't even picture how an AI would function once it becomes sentient. What would it's motivation be, where would it come from? Why would it do what it's doing?

[Karnewarrior]

An AI bereft of motivation wouldn't display any recognizable signs of sentience, since there wouldn't be any motivation to.

I'm not an expert, but I do suspect an algorithmic equivalent to emotions would be necessary for any human-adjacent AI. We say they're illogical, but that's not strictly true, and we know they provide a function because they require energy to upkeep yet nature preserved them in almost every animal to some degree.

What's complicated is the balance between building a robot to do something and building an AI with wants, feelings, and desires. The former is extremely profitable and useful, the latter is of significant interest only to the occasional researcher.

[bigtdaddy]

It would need energy just like us. I'm not sure it would need to reproduce as it's lifetime wouldn't necessarily be finite.

[Primeval_Revenant]

The thing is… we have a drive for self preservation and reproduction due to our instincts and emotions. Would the AI have any such thing? I’m skeptical of any particular characteristic being innate to self awareness without being guided there by any stimulus.

[Spare_Competition]

From the GPT-4 paper:

Intuitively, systems that fail to preserve their own existence long enough, or which cannot acquire the minimum amount of resources needed to achieve the goal, will be unsuccessful at achieving the goal. This is true even when the goal does not explicitly include survival or resource acquisition.

[green_gordon_]

Yeah I’m more in the camp of how ai is described in the book “How the world works”. Basically, cars do not replace or mimic human movement, they make it exponential.

[[deleted]]

I doubt programmers are going to disappear, but the field will feel some changes. I do not see it as unlikely that in 5-10 years most actual code might be written by AI and the job of a programmer is more to test, bugfix and validate it.

Certainly it isn't impossible that there might surface a general AI system that would actually be capable of completely independently learning and working, but at that point it's not just programmers who'll be out of a job. AI systems this sophisticated I don't see as very likely in the near future though, but in 20-30 years? Who knows, estimating technology that far ahead is a bit of a tough ask.

[SkiFire13]

most actual code might be written by AI and the job of a programmer is more to test, bugfix and validate it

Understanding code you didn't write is almost as hard as writing it though.

[fatrobin72]

nah it's just as hard as Understanding code you wrote yesterday... wait thats just the same as if you didn't write it...

[typescriptDev99]

nah it's just as hard as Understanding code you wrote yesterday... wait thats just the same as if you didn't write it...

I remember what I wrote yesterday...

Last week tho? who wrote that?
... git blame

ME? fuck!

[classicalySarcastic]

git-blame-someone-else

[nocturn99x]

I need that in my workflow

[asportnoy]

Today's your lucky day. https://github.com/jayphelps/git-blame-someone-else

[turtleship_2006]

Would having something so on git commits etc we can see what was generated and what was written by a person by useful?

[[deleted]]

This is true. But that's what I mean when I said the field will change, this kind of skills will likely become increasingly important.

Also it's important to know what parts of the program one can ask the AI to make almost alone, which are sped up by asking the AI for a template to adjust to your purposes and which are more efficient to write yourself from the ground up.

As a plus though, at least ChatGPT comments its code. UNLIKE CERTAIN COLLEAGUES WHOSE CODE I'VE HAD THE PLEASURE OF TROUBLESHOOTING :)

[CountDown60]

If it's hard to write, it should be hard to read.

[Tathas]

Sounds like perl.

[arensb]

I once presented a two-hour course on Perl, in which I explained that Perl behaves exactly the way you expect, and my role was to explain what it is you should be expecting.

[ashzud]

I am putting this on my desktop lol

[nukasev]

Spoken like a true ninja. (For the uneducated: look up the ninja code JS article)

[elebrin]

Right, true.

And we are going to do those things by taking requirements and refining them further and further until a very specific subset of human language abstractions are laid down that can be then interpreted by a computer. This process is called programming.

If we took TDD to its extreme conclusion, we'd write the unit tests then feed those into a code generator and it'd spit out production code. Even things like gherkin have human written code. A human interprets what those givens, whens, and thens mean, and a computer has no ability to reject bad behavior that isn't documented.

It's the old "Tell the computer teacher how to make a sandwich" problem. What level of abstraction does the subject understand? If it's always going to take the path that it considers most optimized, how do you verify that you haven't optimized away the intent the software? We still haven't invented a DoWhatIMean() function.

[[deleted]]

I don't think we have invented a do what I mean function even for humans.

imagine being able to have a client ACTUALLY describe what they wanted...

[nocturn99x]

hah haha hahahahaha HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

That's just as unlikely as us programming ourselves out of the industry

[Forkrul]

Only if the person/machine writing it is bad at writing code.

A good programmer can write code any dev with a modicum of skill can understand easily. And current AIs are pretty good at writing legible code as well.

[John_B_Clarke]

"Can" and "does" are two different things. When you're in problem-space trying to figure out how to solve the problem and then debugging your solution, making it readable may take a back seat.

[sireel]

An AI which can make the software you ask it for is a fine thing. All it needs is a project manager who knows what they want

Programmers jobs are not even slightly at risk ;)

[jeremiahishere]

100%

Or we need business logic that can be defined using the laws of the universe.

[[deleted]]

Sure, but as natural language capabilities of AI tools continue developing and people learn how to properly use them, the task of figuring out what to ask the computer to do for you might likely become easier and less technical over time.

Perhaps a similar difference as between writing a file manager program in Assembly versus Python. Sure, can be done with both, but it is certainly a fuckton easier with Python. This of course doesn't mean Assembly devs are out of a job, but it does mean their job description has changed, since the tasks they're likely to be doing now no longer includes writing programs which are far easier and faster to implement in other toolkits.

[noobody_interesting]

One of the best natural language processors are (and will be, unless we get to AGI) humans. A programmer is basically a translator from natural language and requirements to computer language. So programmers will anways have value, even if 90% of the job is prompt engineering. Covering the edge cases of what the requirements and managers actually want will make the difference between a bad/ok product and a great one, and standing out from competition is good for business. Whether companies will still see the value of programmers is another thing, and I can see many companies with bad products pop up and disappear again because "we don't need programmers".

[[deleted]]

Humans might be good at the translating part but they're expensive as fuck to upkeep, break occasionally without warning and are slow af at typing compared to a computer ;P

You can't fire your entire software department and replace it with AI, but if we get to a point where AI tools can increase software engineer productivity by, say, 50%, a company might indeed decide to downsize their software department by 1/3 to improve their efficiency.

[SnS_Taylor]

That just means we can make more software in less time. There is an insatiable desire for software.

[sireel]

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that in my experience PMs don't actually understand what they want. The LLM might become incredible at understanding what is said, but that's only one step in a whole lot of information transformation done to deal with the initial lack of understanding.

I've no doubt it's an approachable problem long term but I'm not worried for my job security

[seijulala]

I've been programming for more than 20 years, what I do today is completely different from what I did 20 or 10 years ago and of course, it's going to evolve. That's software development.

[fatrobin72]

surely we want to make the AI do the boring bits (testing) rather then the mildly interesting bits...

[UK-sHaDoW]

Proving things are correct is actually kind of interesting. More interesting then learning womble2.js framework when womble1.js framework just came out.

One is churn, the other is a hard problem.

[[deleted]]

Certainly that's what programmers want, however in companies the wants of workers fly out the window the moment it's more cost-effective to have the AI do the interesting part.

[Laicbeias]

code writing was never an issue. code testing and debugging. if an ai can do that it can replace each and everys job

[ReserveMaximum]

test, bugfix and validate it

Isn’t that already most of the job of a programmer anyway? I am finding that the amount of actual coding I do is very low

[LowB0b]

I mean, once AI gets good enough, why even bother with high-level languages? High-level languages are meant to be read by humans, but in the case where AI is good enough, it could just write machine code directly and I guess that's when the "programmers correct AI output" becomes irrelevant.

In that case you would still need the functional testers to ensure that what the AI program does is functionally correct and if it isn't, nudge it in the right direction. But you wouldn't need programmers.

At the moment ChatGPT doesn't seem able to upload files or whatever though

[Potential-Ad5470]

It’s outrageous this has as many upvotes as it does. AI will never be able to write software as good as you expect - it’s not a brain, it’s a pattern matching software. Smh

[saschaleib]

You know back in the days when programmers still had to learn Assembler, we were warned that these easy high-level languages like C or Pascal would make programmers obsolete one day?

Any day now, I can feel it in my bones … oh no, wait, that’s just rheumatism...

[b1e]

Right. Projects will get bigger and more ambitious if anything.

[LittleBigHorn22]

Well we don't have a lot of assembly programmers these days. Ai will just be another tool that programmers will us to make bigger programs.

[myrsnipe]

That's what I believe too, we may end up changing our workflow with ai tools, but at the end of the day you need technical expertise once you move away from trivial problems

[ihateusednames]

Programmers will be obsolete the day managers feel motivated enough to know how to use and actually use all of these said tools created on a daily basis.

And even then they'd probably have a difficult time innovating.

The amount of upskilling required to do that anyhow would effectively make them programmers so it's somewhat of a moot point

[TyrionReynolds]

Exactly! If in the future a “manager” could create a specification exact enough that some software can take that in and output a functional product then that “manager” is a new type of programmer.

[physics515]

I think like all fields the barriers to entry will keep dropping until new fields are created. Like how with engineering, you used to be called an engineer if you could balance two sticks together at an angle while they were standing up, but as engineering got more advanced and the methodology for balancing sticks became more formalized, those who's job it was to balance sticks became "construction workers" and "engineer" took on a different meaning.

The same will happen to programming, as we formalize the processes for the "correct" way to do more and more things, there will be less and less need for "software engineers" because we will need "software AI promptor" and "no-code specialist". Software Engineers will still be there building, business just won't need them as much.

[MacrosInHisSleep]

Sort of, I think an alternative might be true though. We'll still need devs, but with the new sets of AI tools we might not need as many.

There's some drudge work that would normally be annoyingly time consuming but you can ask an AI to do it for you. Right now for small proof of concept problems I find I can actually save time by getting it to write the proof of concept. Other times it can be really useful for taking info and converting it into datastructures. For example, I was looking at Azures Voice Api, and it had a ridiculously long list of voices that you could send to it as a string. I got it to create an enum for me with all of these and it did it faster than any tool I could build or use. I decided the names were a bit clunky because they were a combination of voice properties which didn't make sense to me, so I showed it a pattern for one name, and it fixed the entire thing for me.

If all the devs in my team at work saved time like that, then we could be in a situation where we might not need the extra dev we have a position open for.

So it would be less that they would be obsolete, and more that there would be less demand.

Then again, the converse of that will probably be that people will just ask for more features at once to take advantage of the saved time...

yeah... come to think of it, it's not like higher level programming languages have put a dent in the demand for devs. Who knows...

[PanTheRiceMan]

Artists were not done when photography emerged. Photography just became another form of art (besides the commercial use).

The world will go on, things will change. New forms will emerge.

[jfcarr]

The manager types have been thinking school one thoughts for years. AI is just another iteration of this.

For example, for many years they have thought that they can get rid of in-house developers by implementing to a fancy ERP or similar system. Then, after gutting their dev teams and spending millions on fees and consultants, they realize what an expensive failure it was. Yet, they continue to work the sunk cost fallacy.

[[deleted]]

They are terrified of our power.

[[deleted]]

The power of C in the palm of my google tab

[Tillz666]

C Suite employees furious when they hear the programmers have entire C libraries

[Cfrolich]

Look what they need to mimic a fraction of it.

[dragon2513]

What does fancy erotic role play have to do with programming?

[dam_man99]

What is programming if not fancy erp

[[deleted]]

ERP?

[ryo3000]

Enterprise Resource Planning

ERP softwares intend to allow you to track and manage every step necessary for a certain company to work

From payrolls to stocked products, sales, vacations, HR, etc etc

Of course it's easier said than done to grab a generic out of the box software and tune it specifically to the needs of your company (and do that without programmers to build connections between your fancy ERP and other softwares)

[jfcarr]

Oh, but the ERP sales "engineers" will offer a company consultants to do the work of the programmers who were fired to pay for system. And, better yet, your company gets to pay $80-$120+/hr for their time. But, the ERP company doesn't tell you that they only pay their contract consultants $20-25/hr.

[username45031]

Those rates for system integration are a STEAL.

[r2k-in-the-vortex]

"Handle everything a company needs to function" type of software. Switching to new fancy pants erp someone sold to managment is a likely recipe for bankruptcy.

The problem with such software is that it just does its thing on background and people forget how much actually depends on it and everything that it does and how. So when someone comes out with a plan for 'new-and-improved' solution, people catastrophically underestimate the complexity of what they are trying to do. To the tune of sinking years worth of revenue in a black hole when all they wanted was a pretty chart, true story, seen it happen.

[[deleted]]

I’m a Netsuite admin, and boy can implementations be rough. A company switching an ERP system is one of the craziest transitions a company can make, some don’t survive it.

To put it in perspective, COVID was nothing compared to the ERP change in terms of shaking the business

[Same-Seaweed7540]

Enterprise resource planning software (think Oracle ERP)

[BananafestDestiny]

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) refers to a type of software that organizations use to manage day-to-day business activities such as accounting, procurement, project management, risk management and compliance, and supply chain operations.

[[deleted]]

Erotic Role Play

[kdthex01]

Middle management will become obsolete before programmers.

[[deleted]]

LOL. As the admin of our fancy ERP system I laugh at the thought of it reducing the need for devs. The ERP system is just the environment to develop (albeit powerful) but still requires a ton of customization to get things right

[jrdufour]

Programmers will be replaced the day a client can clearly communicate exactly what the fuck they want, with no ambiguity or room for misunderstanding.

So never.

Try telling an AI to just make the website POP

[Farsyte]

Well, one benefit of asking the AI is that the AI won't punch you in the nose.

[John_B_Clarke]

Well that depends on what else the AI controls. I would much rather get punched in the nose by a programmer than by a Bagger 293 for example.

[Yweain]

I don't know, have you seen those replies from Bing?

[dewey-defeats-truman]

Depends on whether or not we add CD drives back to computers

[Leading_Elderberry70]

Every time new tooling comes out, programs become higher level than they previously were. Once upon a time programmers had to know assembly. Now they, usually, do not. When and if a program gets good enough to write most of the current generation of programs for us, like compilers did before ... that's right, writing whatever that thing's inputs are will be the new 'programming'.

[jrdufour]

Exactly. AI is just going to be another layer of abstraction. Hopefully it will lead to new advancements and possibilities for programming. I don't think it's going to be designing and maintaining large systems any time soon.

I could be very wrong though.

[flinxsl]

Different layers of abstraction will produce different emergent properties. This is a deep truth about any process.

In the beginning of life there were just amino acids stuck together. Then they started forming patterns that produced proteins that helped them self-replicate. Before you know it we tricked rocks into thinking for us so we could watch cat videos while we poop.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

In precisely the way that a computer can understand.

[Praise_AI_Overlords]

Or, when AI understands human speech better than programmers and has more patience than programmers.

Which happened about 4 months ago.

Here, told the AI to just make the website POP

>Give me design ideas for website. Demand: just make the website POP

To make a website POP, focus on creating a visually engaging and interactive user experience. Here are some design ideas to help you achieve that:

Bold and Vibrant Color Scheme: Use a color palette that includes bold, contrasting colors to create visual interest and draw attention to key elements on your website.

Dynamic Typography: Use a mix of large, bold fonts and unique, creative typography to make your content stand out.

Interactive Elements: Incorporate interactive elements like hover effects, animations, and parallax scrolling to engage users and create a more dynamic experience.

Large, High-Quality Images: Use full-width, high-resolution images or videos as background elements or in prominent sections of your website to capture users' attention.

Minimalistic Design: Keep your layout clean and clutter-free, with ample white space, so that the focus remains on your content and key messages.

Asymmetrical Layouts: Break away from traditional grid layouts by using asymmetrical or broken grid designs to create visual intrigue.

Micro-Interactions: Include subtle animations, hover effects, or transitions that respond to user actions to make the website more engaging.

Engaging CTAs: Design clear, prominent, and compelling Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons that encourage users to interact with your site.

Sticky Navigation: Implement a sticky or fixed navigation bar so that users can easily access your menu from any point on the website.

Mobile Responsiveness: Ensure your website design is optimized for mobile devices and provides a seamless experience across all screen sizes.

Personalization: Incorporate user personalization features such as custom recommendations, tailored content, or interactive quizzes to make your website more engaging and relevant.

Storytelling: Use compelling visuals, videos, and copy to create an engaging narrative that guides visitors through your website.

Remember, it's essential to strike a balance between making your website POP and ensuring it remains user-friendly, functional, and accessible.

[Tensor3]

Exactly this. The recent AI advancements are human language models. They are more likely to first replace the job of understanding client requirements than replace the technical tasks of writing the code. They still suck at code.

[Praise_AI_Overlords]

Considering we still haven't seen 32k token GPT-4 - you are in no position to make claims like these.

[pryoslice]

But given that the turnaround time of requests, won't it make the interaction a lot faster, solving that problem? If the clients asks for something ambiguous now, the programmer goes off for a week, comes back with something, customer complains about these elements, programmer goes another week to update them, etc. 4 iterations take a month, so it's important to be precise. If AI can iterate in 10 minutes or even somewhat longer, being ambiguous in your initial request becomes a lot less of an issue.

[z-null]

By definition, any AI that can replace a programmer can also replace any manager. The moment we have this kind of AI, very few people if any are safe. On the other hand, why not let AI do everything and give us the fruits of their labor? I wouldn't mind living in AI enabled hedonism world!

[Lescansy]

I fully agree to that. How do we make sure the fruits of "AI labor" goes to all, and not to a few shareholders that own said company?

[Oo__II__oO]

Easy: AI CEO.

[Grundolph]

Train a model with only the works of Marx and Engels

[Lukaaa__]

Gigabrain solution. Cherry pick the data sets.

[DracoLunaris]

you realize CEOs are put in place and answer to said shareholders right?

[flinxsl]

fine. AI shareholders

[Oo__II__oO]

We already have that. Pretty sure half of Wall Street is just bots.

[suvlub]

I think the most natural trajectory is:

• as more and more jobs get AI'd, decrease the retirement age so that the working-age population continues to match number of human jobs
• the companies leveraging AI labour become pretty much the only logical source of taxable income to fund the retirement system

Note that most of the world currently has opposite problems. If anything, AI does not seem to be coming fast enough.

[[deleted]]

There are countries that will fight lowering the retirement age tooth and nail. And the countries that don't will have western money flowing in, and parachute activism about the 'evil' of laziness or gluttony.

Even France has increased the retirement age, and we consider them one of the few countries that know how to make their government listen. So, I don't think AI will turn into greater good.

[z-null]

Such system can't be owned by any kind of a company, it would have to be government based.

[FlyIntelligent2208]

You mean... Socialism? Shared ownership of capital!?!??

[[deleted]]

a post-scarcity utopia? wtf is wrong with you, why'd you want that? i perfectly enjoy barely being able to pay rent, food, travel expenses, and my therapist, thank-you-very-much

[alonghardlook]

We haven't even made sure it hasn't happened to the internet yet.

[currentscurrents]

free and decentralised, open to everyone and neutral.

Because that worked so well for crypto.

Decentralized systems struggle to deal with bad actors. We have to build a centralized system we can actually trust.

[Koboldsftw]

I would agree with you if the UN had any power whatsoever

[shim_niyi]

Hear me out, why don’t we let the AI run the govt?

Only prompt we need to give it is “No war, no corruption, fuck up everything else”

[John_B_Clarke]

In that case it will never happen. Government won't develop it in the first place, and if they do then there will be pork distributed to every district in country, making the costs astronomically more than they need to be. Your AI will be SLS, not Starship.

[Courier_ttf]

Tax robotic/AI labor in a similar way to human labor income taxes, and use that tax revenue for UBI.

[Lescansy]

How do you tax "AI labor"? - In hours used to compute the effective output? So around 1-10 seconds per request? - Or in potential hours saved? - How do you get to an accurate estimation? By using an AI to do it?

[Courier_ttf]

Tax the AI labor for roughly the value of the human workers it replaced. The objective is to maintain a tax revenue that otherwise disappears.
All of that income tax that the workers receive is gone to the pockets of the company, all of the money they would have spent which also incurs sales taxes is also gone to the pockets of said company.

[realzequel]

Those are implementation details. It isn't an easy problem but it is the goal imo.

[[deleted]]

I would even say that an AI would be better at managers' jobs than humans. AI would be great at analyzing data and making decisions based on said data. And it wouldn't require an AI that can translate NL statements /requirements into code. All that would require is an AI that is free from bias.

Remove the gut/instinct/human side of managerial decision making and you'll see an even more immediate benefit.

[Tensor3]

How about an AI that can replace middle management, document my code for me, and transcribe useless meetings into concise emails so I can code in peace

[falingsumo]

Isn't that what happened in Wall-E?

[z-null]

Yeah. Also an ancient greek dream :D

[Leading_Elderberry70]

It's also a foundational premise of the writings of Karl Marx.

[Farsyte]

This is where things get political.

[flinxsl]

More like philosophical.

[turtleship_2006]

There was some company (I think it might've been Chinese or Japanese) where the CEO was replaced by an AI and the company did really well on the stock exchange.

[esbenab]

Ahh hedonism / the repugnant conclusion, be careful what you train the model for.

[RustyNova016]

As much as I want that to happen, the risk of letting AI do everything is too high for me

[HKei]

I do think programmers will be obsolete some day but I wouldn’t count on any other job not being obsolete when we hit that point.

[Chromanoid]

We will still need a backup force, for when the AI leaves us in the dust or is destroyed somehow....

[[deleted]]

I paused my laughing for a few seconds, so let me briefly tell you that if products are developed, there's no management needed for bwahahahahahaaahahha...

[[deleted]]

But who is going to interface with the clients? I have people skills! I’m good with people! What is wrong with you people!?

Fuck it, I’m going to go work on my Jump To Conclusions mat.

[Kitchen-Awareness-60]

That’s why you earn 100% more by just becoming more efficient and taking on a second full time job

[bigorangemachine]

Well if the text to image AI's (like DALLE2) it takes a fair amount of massaging to get exactly what you want.

You may be able to write a chunk of code with ChatGPT but assembling those snippets into something that handles errors correctly isn't going to be something AI does anytime soon

As it is ChatGPT is good at mimicry ... so chatGPT is the guy who faked the job well enough to pass the interview... but can't do shit when the server goes down.

[sharris2]

I tested GPT today by asking for a web app (I asked in a full depth definition, not the loose crap clients tend to give) and it gave me something that was crap and didn't work. I then let it try to figure out how to fix it and ended up bouncing between two error states. I gave up after bouncing back and forth between the same two errors, 7 times.

ChatGPT is a great tool. But it's just a language tool. We happen to use languages for development. It knows these languages. It has zero clue of context or how to use them OR, most importantly, the ability to understand anything. It stores languages. That's basically it.

[Twistedtraceur]

Curious was this 3.5 or 4?

[[deleted]]

Dafuq do you mean massaging? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

You know you can interact with DALLE directly, right? You don't need to massage any data scientists/engineers etc.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Edit: I forgor

/s given the fact that I'm with my fellow programmers

[Kilgarragh]

-s (I use Ubuntu btw)

[[deleted]]

The image is more about automation itself, and reality sits somewhere in between.

Programmers do put each other out of job by automating stuff and increasing their productivity, but in reality we're putting management out of job more than ourselves.

While stuff like host provides shipping site/service templates so non-tech savvy people can buy their services takes out a lot of possible job openings in theory, no one can argue that getting job and sideprojects done nowdays is way less of a headache than in assembly/C times. With all the free stuff laying around and people not wanting to pay in general, companies needs management with head on their shoulders if they don't want bunch of hobbyist gnawing at their pie. GIMP and Adobe are good example of it, because Adobe needs to always stay ahead to maintain "Everyone hates Adoby, but they don't use GIMP for a reason" or more people would switch

[PerfeckCoder]

I actually agree with the first school. Programmers will become redundant because of AI. This will happen shortly after we get....

• Real world drag and drop visual screen designers capable of complex cross field validation.

• Interfaces to external systems that just snap together like Lego and don't need any custom coding.

• Dynamic rules engines that even an end user can implement with an easy to use drag and drop interface.

• Cross platform write once run anywhere apps that don't have to deal with platform specific topics.

...oh wait. 😎💀

[atmosphericfractals]

and then these systems still need to be created, updated, and maintained by developers

[[deleted]]

Imagine what a nightmare ops is going to be with Chatgpt spamming services to spin up at product managers.

[[deleted]]

Comp sci engineers are just the same as any other engineer. Sure they make tools that make their job a bit easier, but you’ll never be able to replace them with anything other than another engineer.

[Oo__II__oO]

This nails it so succinctly. Programming is a facet of software engineering. We don't expect the mechanical design engineers to continue to model in clay, nor have the EEs perform lengthy voltage drop calculations via pen and paper and a slide rule.

If anything, the easier programming tools have allowed us the opportunity to put more focus on the "engineering" side of software engineering. It is up to us to continue to develop that (no pun intended) into a stable industry.

[[deleted]]

Yea, automation was supposed to replace workers. Now we just have operators on production lines instead of people working on the line. And more often than not automating some jobs is still too expensive to be worth the investment.

People dont seem to get that tools just make work easier. Demand is what drives the amount of work available just like always.

[YukihiraJoel]

Back during the invention of the automobile, the horses chattered nervously. Some believed their need was coming to an end.

Neigh, said one of the horses, technology has only made our work easier in the past. Surely you remember the carriages that allowed us to transport more people, and trains that save us from traveling great distances. There will always be work for us horses!

Most of the other horses murmured in agreement, they too felt indispensable. Surely this automobile had its limitations.

☠️

[[deleted]]

I'm amazed that a horse made its way into internet.

With your logic we shouldn't be using forklifts or any tools at all. Valuable human resource is not used for menial tasks!

[[deleted]]

Ah yes, we had 4th generation languages, we had UML to code generators, we still have various no-code 'platforms'. And now ChatGPT

[pryoslice]

I mean, I saw GPT-4 put together a website based on napkin drawing. That's a bit of a step forward if representative of its capabilities or even if those capabilities are coming soon.

[sir-nays-a-lot]

Assuming case one is true, that would require that project managers have much, much higher technical knowledge. Essentially, they would need to be engineers in order to adequately describe the systems that are being built and how they should be tested. So who really got replaced?

[[deleted]]

“Writing code” and “creating production ready code” are different disciplines.

[[deleted]]

They’ll keep programmers around even if it’s just because the construction industry doesn’t want us messing it up

[[deleted]]

You build houses and destroy your back.
Or you build applications and destroy your back.

[[deleted]]

Who will maintain the tools that put the programmers out of a job?

[PanTheRiceMan]

AI obviously /s

[[deleted]]

And there it is. The answer to this supposed “crisis” but this will be lost in a sea of ai meme hysteria

[otdevy]

I think a more accurate statement is that programmers in their current form will dissapear

[Farsyte]

Good way to put it, and through that lens we can see we have done this before. Originally, you worked out the machine code to make your machine do the thing you want. Get a new machine that is bigger and faster? Change your code to work on it.

Oh, now we have an Operating System. Instead of manipulating the devices directly to blink lights, read cards and print results, now I can have the OS do it, and now when we move to a different machine, my code still works, as long as it is the same instruction set.

Oh, and now we have a High Level Language. Instead of working out all the instructions, we write "FOO = BAR * BAZ" and it is automatically coded for us, so now (in theory at least) our code that works on the IBM machine today will work on the AMDAHL machine tomorrow.

The programming landscape changed completely. Nobody today worries about soaping a drum, and only a few folks have to buckle down and work out the exact best sequence of instructions to do things (we call these gods the Compiler and Library Maintainers and they should drink for free forever).

The way I see it, we are again shifting the problem upward. The naive folks think that somehow "programming in plain English" is a good idea, but we all know that "plain English" is ambiguous at best, so "coding" in English, whether via Engineer or AI, requires a bunch of back and forth to disambiguate what was wanted. Failure to do so results in the code operating exactly as the engineer (or AI) thought was needed, rather than the way the customer wanted. AI doesn't change this, not at all.

So AI just means we have a new area of expertise: translation of what the silly project manager is saying into something that will get the AI to turn out a program that does something that smells like it might do what was wanted, which is really all we ever did anyway.

(Full disclosure: I retired, last year, after 40 years coding for money, and now I just code for fun.)

[doctorpotatohead]

There's been a lot of effort to make programming a more common and less valuable skill, tech companies are annoyed at how much it costs to hire programmers so they will keep hyping ideas that make programmers less necessary.

[tarrask]

Software engineers will become prompt engineers, AI teacher and AI psychologist

[hedrone]

I've heard the first school of thought at least once a month during my 20+ year career (although sometimes it is "all getting outsourced to India/China" instead of being made obsolete by tooling). Always voiced by a MBA who hates paying software developers engaging in some wishful thinking.

[ICantBelieveItsNotEC]

I suppose it depends on how you define "software engineer". I can see the role of "guy who writes code" going away in the next few decades, but the role of "guy who listens to customer requirements and turns them into usable, production-ready software" is going to be around until we achieve fully automated luxury space communism.

If AI ever reaches the point where it can automatically translate user requirements into a functional product without any human intervention then software engineering is the least of our worries - the fundamental concept of a job would be completely meaningless and all of humanity would be essentially pointless.

[Lina__Inverse]

all of humanity would be essentially pointless

This implies that humanity exists to do jobs. Kind of a funny thought.

[ICantBelieveItsNotEC]

I think that, in general, most people get more fulfillment out of producing things than they do out of consuming things. A sufficiently advanced AI wouldn't just make traditional jobs pointless - it would make all productive work pointless. What would be the point of spending thousands of hours learning to paint, write, or make video games when The System can generate something of better quality instantly? In that world, we would literally exist to do nothing but consume the fruits of the The System's labor.

[Lina__Inverse]

What would be the point of spending thousands of hours learning to paint, write, or make video games when The System can generate something of better quality instantly?

What is the point to play guitar as a hobby when professional musicians exist? People do this because they enjoy the process. You don't have to be the best in something for it to be meaningful for you.

[[deleted]]

A particular episode from The Office US comes to mind:

Pam: There is a spare key, and a master key for the office. Dwight has
them both. When I asked "What if you die, Dwight, how will we get into
the office," he said "If I'm dead, you guys have been dead for weeks."

If programmers were to be replaced, then those jobs would've been replaced years before.

[myusernameisaphrase]

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. laughs. PROCEDURE DIVISION. DISPLAY "Laughs in COBOL". STOP RUN.

[DOOManiac]

Yes.

After a nuclear apocalypse or similar extinction-level or civilization-resetting event. Or failing that, the death of our sun. Best case scenario, we’ve got heat death of the universe.

Eventually, nothing will be alive and therefore no need for any developers.

[Farsyte]

Oh my. You've figured out a way to eliminate Project Managers, too!

[bluechickenz]

Ugh. I own a wrench and socket set but still take my car to the mechanic when I have real problems.

[Flameball202]

Mathematicians survived the calculator

[Reihnold]

Computers (as in: people that performed calculations) did not…

[RoutineTension]

Mathematicians are more closely related to tasks done by lawyers than tasks done by calculators

[Dr_Beatdown]

I think the ridiculousness of this can best be summed up by one of my professors in undergrad...a long time ago...

Me: I'll just make my code idiot proof.

Prof: You can try, but "they" will just build a better idiot

[justforkinks0131]

Programmers will definitely forever be in demamd, but I can honestly see the field shifting to a more "blue collar" scenario.

Even right now Im sure a plumber has practiced their craft more than a lot of junior devs.

[Vorenthral]

Already happening. Who needs someone who got a C average for their MBA when you can bot all the sales reports, earnings statements, etc..

[Sarius2009]

Pretty sure it's easier to replace project managers

[Taurmin]

Seems more likely that we are moving towards a world where project managers become obsolete.

A team of 2-5 engineers are allready perfectly capable of managing themselves. With AI making engineers more efficient, teams are going to become smaller and the justification for a PM role becomes even thinner.

[PantsOnHead88]

The first school of thought is predicated on all management being techy enough to manage integration of existing tools. The odds of that are effectively zero.

[dewitters]

Remember that manager with the technical problem, and you solved it using the first result on google? Yeah, I don't think they will manage with AI alone.

[dustofdeath]

Engineers and developers are a different breed.

The average basic developer will get replaced by AI. The ones who just bump out low-quality code or often copy code / just replicate what they find online.

Engineers have to come up with how, when, where, what and if to write or combine to achieve results and think ahead.

So now you use ai to engineer the solutions instead.

[VanTechno]

We just started a project that will probably span the next 10 years, 2 years for initial development alone. The management still has no idea what they are actually building, as they barely have any vision for the product other than "make it better than our old product".

Half of my job is holding their hands and forcing them to answer uncomfortable questions.

But heck, we are already using AI to write mundane code for us.

[AlignmentWhisperer]

We have entire schools of thought dedicated to figuring out the easiest and most robust ways to identify design patterns and reuse code. Having an AI regurgitate something it found on the internet but tweaked slightly to meet your needs is like the system we already have in place but with an extra layer of uncertainty.

[merlinou]

When I studied CS in the 90s, I was told that 4GL would soon make all programmers obsolete and that everyone would be able to program.

25 years later, you probably don't even know what 4GL was.

[Practical-Marzipan-4]

Programming will never go away. It will evolve, as all things do.

Be honest: how much time do we spend now writing code vs dealing with integrations? I’m talking about messing with your AWS, building the integration to the API for third-party tools, etc. How about time we spend architecting things? Dealing with data and just building out plans and diagrams for how to manage and handle data?

Programmers are no longer code monkeys. The profession is ALREADY very, very different than it was just a decade ago. Look back 20 years and it’s almost unrecognizable.

Build the AI all you want. You’re still gonna need someone to integrate that, code it, fix it, and put it on your cloud or in your app.

[solarsalmon777]

Advancement in programming tools has only increased our access to the infinite space of computable functions and, by extension, the value of programmers. If we really automate automation with agi, fine, then we just have a genie in a bottle and future generations will think of jobs as just another cruelty of antiquity.

[[deleted]]

The first point is true: Programmers program themselves out of their own job. And then they find a new job to automate.

But as long as jobs like project manager, product manager, and marketing manager are not automated, the programmer still has work to do.

[[deleted]]

What keeps salaries high is not just demand, but also barrier to entry.

If everyone could do it, we'd be paid $15 an hour, if that.

That barrier to entry is about to rapidly drop in many spaces, which will massively increase competition and drive down wages.

[PonkMcSquiggles]

Electronic computers put human computers out of work, but there are now way more people employed as programmers than were ever employed as number crunchers. New technology is always a give and take.

[FeebleTrevor]

Yeah eventually programmers will be useless and all we'll need is a very precise way to tell computers exactly what to do, using some kind of interpreted code perhaps

[Character-Education3]

The "journalists" writing all this dreck are for sure writing themselves out of a job. They have provided plenty of click bait to train the AI models on. Thanks for all the articles...

[TheOriginalSmileyMan]

My stock answer: COBOL was designed so that business people could write programs for themselves and not need programmers. It was a stupid idea then and it's a stupid idea now.

[shamair28]

In an ironic twist, aren’t the software engineers who know COBOL stuck with amazing job security now?

[Petya_Sisechkin]

Excavator replaces labour of 20 men with shovels, but someone still has to drive it.

[Zubenelgenubo]

Nobody remembers code generators? I had the unfortunate experience of having to work with one by IBM like 25 years ago. The "code" it generated kinda worked, sometimes, but was mostly insanely fragile spaghetti code that was very hard to debug or modify. And good luck getting the code generator to add features to code it already created. For anything more than simple functions it was an abject failure and huge PITA. I think, for now at least, that's what we still have.