Writing the actual code is the easy part. Thinking about what to write and how to organize it so it doesn’t become spaghetti is the hard part and what being a good developer is all about.
Question is: how many developers are actually good? Or better, how many produce good results? I wouldn’t call myself a great programmer, just okayish, but I certainly pushed code I knew was absolute garbage, simply because of external pressure (deadlines, legacy crap, maybe just a bad day,…).
I’m more of a mechanical engineer than a coder, and for me it’s been super helpful writing the code. The rest of our repo is clear enough that even I can understand what it actually does by just reading it. What I’m unfamiliar with are the syntax, and which nifty things our libraries can do.
So if you kinda understand programs but barely know the language, then it’s awesome. The actual good programmers at my company prefer a minimal working example to fix over a written feature request. Then they replace my crap with something more elegant.
That sounds awful. Imaging going back and forth requesting changes until it gets it right. It’d be like chatting with openai only it’s trying to merge that crap into your repo.
It would probably mean the amount of coding work that companies want done would multiply 10 fold as well. I’m sure the content of the work developers do will change somewhat over time (analogous to what happened during the industrial revolution), but I doubt they’re all out of a job in the near future.
Where I’m really not sure is, what percentage of the software written today actually needs human work?
I mean, think about all the basic form rendering, inputs masks, CRUD apps. There’s definitely a ton of work in them and they’re widely used, but I’m pretty sure that a relatively basic AI-assisted framework could recreate most of these apps with hardly any actual coding. Sure, it won’t be super efficient or elegant, but let’s be honest: nobody cares about that, if they’re good enough.
Just look at Wix, Wordpress, Squarespace etc. Website builders basically imploded the “low effort” web design market. Who would pay hundreds for a website made by a human, if you can just click together something reasonably good looking in 2h?
There’s definitely a ton of work in them and they’re widely used, but I’m pretty sure that a relatively basic AI-assisted framework could recreate most of these apps with hardly any actual coding
Any shop that’s not incompetent switched to using frameworks for that stuff 10-20 years ago, so there’s hopefully very little work left there for the AI.
Even at a company where it’s a massive amount, that company “benefitting” from AI, really just managed to defer their “use a framework” savings 20 years late.
Even if ai took over 90% of all coding work, that still wouldn’t affect more than maybe two hours a day.
Wait until AI start to summarize meetings into email
This is basically a thing now with how good transcription become, it’s wonderful
Yup I’ve used it to write my meeting. And so many teachers using it to lesson plan
doesn’t work well with non-native english speakers though
And then use AI to take some bullet points and turn them into a well formatted response.
I am waiting… with bated breath.
That’s when AI crashes because the secret cabal of middle management will direct their brainwashed execs to divest. /s
Nah, it will create more meetings to keep the humans out of the way.
Yes, but your bosses don’t know/understand that, why pay you when they can have 3 interns & AI for freeeeeeeeeeee???
They tried it with offshoring and those bosses are now out of work.
Writing the actual code is the easy part. Thinking about what to write and how to organize it so it doesn’t become spaghetti is the hard part and what being a good developer is all about.
Question is: how many developers are actually good? Or better, how many produce good results? I wouldn’t call myself a great programmer, just okayish, but I certainly pushed code I knew was absolute garbage, simply because of external pressure (deadlines, legacy crap, maybe just a bad day,…).
I’m more of a mechanical engineer than a coder, and for me it’s been super helpful writing the code. The rest of our repo is clear enough that even I can understand what it actually does by just reading it. What I’m unfamiliar with are the syntax, and which nifty things our libraries can do.
So if you kinda understand programs but barely know the language, then it’s awesome. The actual good programmers at my company prefer a minimal working example to fix over a written feature request. Then they replace my crap with something more elegant.
I’ll just spend most of my time rejecting AI generated PR’s.
That sounds awful. Imaging going back and forth requesting changes until it gets it right. It’d be like chatting with openai only it’s trying to merge that crap into your repo.
It would probably mean the amount of coding work that companies want done would multiply 10 fold as well. I’m sure the content of the work developers do will change somewhat over time (analogous to what happened during the industrial revolution), but I doubt they’re all out of a job in the near future.
Where I’m really not sure is, what percentage of the software written today actually needs human work?
I mean, think about all the basic form rendering, inputs masks, CRUD apps. There’s definitely a ton of work in them and they’re widely used, but I’m pretty sure that a relatively basic AI-assisted framework could recreate most of these apps with hardly any actual coding. Sure, it won’t be super efficient or elegant, but let’s be honest: nobody cares about that, if they’re good enough.
Just look at Wix, Wordpress, Squarespace etc. Website builders basically imploded the “low effort” web design market. Who would pay hundreds for a website made by a human, if you can just click together something reasonably good looking in 2h?
Any shop that’s not incompetent switched to using frameworks for that stuff 10-20 years ago, so there’s hopefully very little work left there for the AI.
Even at a company where it’s a massive amount, that company “benefitting” from AI, really just managed to defer their “use a framework” savings 20 years late.
Frameworks still require work. And tons of that. Even just defining all the form fields, add basic validations, write all the crud stuff, tests, etc.