Somnath Singh

Somnath Singh

Jan 20

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8 min read

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Coding Won’t Exist In 5 Years. This Is Why

Those who won’t adapt would cease to exist.

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Once upon a time, in a world not too different from ours, handmade clothing was the norm.

Skilled artisans would spend countless hours creating beautiful garments, each one unique and crafted with care.

But as technology advanced, machines were invented that could produce clothing at a much faster rate and at a fraction of the cost.

At first, many people were skeptical of the new machine-made clothing.

“Oh — the new clothing lacks the quality and beauty of the handmade.”

“The machine-made clothes suck!”

“No way it is going to replace us.”

However, as time passed, more and more people began to embrace the new technology, seeing the benefits of faster production and lower prices.

The artisans who had once made a living crafting handmade garments found themselves struggling to compete with the new machine-made clothing.

Some feared that the art of handmade garments would be lost forever and that the new clothing would lack the quality and beauty of the handmade.

Many were forced to adapt and learn the new technology, while others were left behind.

Gradually, handmade clothing became a rarity, and the vast majority of clothing that you see today is produced by machines — not humans.

History is repeating itself.

But this time it is for the people in the tech world.

AI-powered tools are here to replace human coders.

These tools will be able to write and debug code faster and more efficiently than humans and at a lower cost.

If you’re worried about job losses and the end of the coding profession — you’re probably right!

I’m not here to make doomsday predictions, I’m here to tell you the truth.

Are you ready?

They Are Coming for You

“Don’t ever get too comfortable, you can be replaced.”

— Anonymous

Coding, which was once the backbone of the digital world, will become obsolete soon.

AI-powered tools are ready to take over, and traditional ways of writing code will become less popular.

The future may be far different than you have ever imagined.

The tech industry is shifting, and the race is on to adapt or be left behind.

You don’t have to believe me — all you have to do is to take a glance in the reality and you will know what I mean.

Let me show you.

First, let’s look at what all you do in the name of coding, and then we will see how all of it will become irrelevant.

Let’s start from the beginning.

When you were learning to code, you focused on writing code.

That’s what programming is for most people, right?

Like everyone, you’ve learned to write code, but you haven’t learned how to read it.

That’s why you struggle, when it comes to debugging, don’t you?

Imagine that you’re in the middle of a lot of work, and you want to quickly identify what this function does:

Don’t load yourself — All this function does is:

- It duplicates a spreadsheet.

- It throws an error if the original spreadsheet isn’t saved.

- It prepends “Copy of” to the new spreadsheet’s title.

That’s it?

Well, there is one more thing that you might not have noticed (great job if you did!) is that this function also accidentally changes the title of the original spreadsheet.

Missing bugs like this, happens every day.

Debugging is an undervalued skill. Coders who are good debuggers work faster, get more done, and are less stressed out.

Don’t worry if you couldn’t find the bug at all — it just means you’ll get the most out of AI-powered tools like chatGPT!

Now, most developers work in a codebase that is usually not written by them.

It is common for developers to push out code quickly than writing clean, maintainable code. Meanwhile, the poor souls who come after them are left to pick up the pieces and try to make sense of the mess.

They would spend countless hours trying to untangle the twisted web of code, trying to fix bugs and add new features.

A never-ending cycle of frustration and despair.

I remember this code (written in C ) from my teenage years, and the thought of how on earth someone could ever read and understand this code lingered in my mind to this day (but not anymore).

In real life, you might not come across code like this (if you do, go find the person who wrote it).

Using ChatGPT is much quicker than trying to figure out convoluted code.

Imagine how much faster one could move by generating summaries of codebases.

What else do you do?

Yes — Improve the existing code (or add features)

Adding features?

You’re feeling out of this world now that you’ve added some features and improved the existing code, and you decide to go one step further and make the codebase more readable.

The first step would be to align the existing mess of code with the coding conventions.

The person who wrote the code before you came from a C background and has no idea about being declarative, so it is time to correct it — isn’t it?

You’re still not satisfied. Especially after you discovered that some parts of the code are overly complicated, and as the hero that you are, you end up spending some more time simplifying those parts of the code (and sacrificing your personal life).

You’re not sure if the code you wrote is actually performant.

You don’t want to leave the codebase in shambles, as the previous coder did.

So, you decide to document the code.

That’s not it.

You want to make sure that the code not just works but works well.

Programming ≠ Writing Code

One can blabber a lot and say nothing, or one can utter nothing and end up saying a lot.

Words have no meaning when you don’t place them together the way it needs to be.

Merely speaking is not equal to having clear communication — If you were married, you would know what I mean.

If you start speaking in your native language, the computer won’t understand a thing.

Code is a conspiracy between you and the computer.

Writing code is not programming. Programming has more to do with problem-solving than writing code.

With the current ways of doing things, we are still stuck in writing code as a way to instruct computers — just like the people who use to code in machine language were struck in 0s and 1s.

Hello World

You might poke fun at those binary coders and wonder why they went through all those troubles to instruct the computers.

Future generations will feel the same way.

Programming is the process of solving problems using a computer. Writing code is just one aspect of this process. It’s a necessary part, but it’s not the whole picture.

You are the Sentient — You Just Don’t Know It Yet.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent — it is the one most adaptable to change.”

— Charles Darwin

Darwin is one of the most significant men to walk in the West.

When everyone was high on religion, he was the one who made you question your own existence. He was the one who told you that you are here not by chance or some grand plan but because your ancestors strived hard to survive.

Whether you like it or not, with tools like chatGPT, writing code and those who only know how to write code will be of no use.

However, just as artisans were able to adapt and learn new skills to remain competitive, coders will be able to do the same by learning more about how to use these tools to their advantage.

The problems and ways we spend our days solving those problems may change. But there will always be problems for humans to solve.

Once writing code will become obsolete, problems solvers would become more valuable.

The shallow showbiz of jargon in name of programming is going to fall, the real thing will prevail.

Programmers in the future will be far more productive than programmers today, capable of feats we can only dream of.

It’s fantastic that the technologies we use are becoming smarter.

It’s a far more intelligent approach.

Only someone who aspires to be the smartest person in the room will be concerned if everything around him becomes smarter than him.

Otherwise, it’s a true blessing.

The tools you are using are evolving scarily fast, it is time you evolve too.

Go out and learn — not for that bloody job but because this is your life, you have to live it.

Yes! Adapting to new ways is painful, but only the living can feel the pain — The dead don’t even feel the cremation fire.

2023) could have as many as 1 trillion parameters, capable of delivering more accurate responses.

The currently available AI-powered tools (GPT-3) are still in their infancy, but they are powerful enough to make a significant difference.

The next generation of tools will be far more powerful and accurate.

Those who will leverage it — will go forward, and those who won’t adapt would cease to exist— it is simple as that.

The choice is yours.

Note of Gratitude

I wanted to take this last opportunity to say thank you.

Thank you for being here! I would not be able to do what I do without people like you who follow along and take that leap of faith to read my post.

I hope you’ll join me in my future blog post and stick around because I think we have something great here. And I hope that I will be able to help you along in your career for many more years to come!

See you next time. Bye!

More content at PlainEnglish.io. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Discord.

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Programming

Artificial Intelligence

JavaScript

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Responses (137)

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MOST RELEVANT

Christopher Strolia-Davis

Christopher Strolia-Davis

22 days ago

AI will not replace developers, any more than programming languages did when they replaced punch cards. It will only change how they develop.

It's true, we don't code in punch cards anymore. Thank goodness.

There are a number of things AI does not do well and anyone beyond entry level development knows that writing software is one thing, but knowing what to write is completely different.

In my many years of experience, I've found one consistent thing. The people asking you to do stuff for them rarely know what they actually want. As a Sr. dev, it's often my job to help them figure that out. This often requires push back from me, and asking clarifying questions. It requires me to understand the whole app, what it's used for and why. I get better at the job as my understanding of what the business wants improves. Without that, if I simply always did what the product folks asked for, they would never get what they actually wanted. Chat GPT and similar AIs are likely to give them exactly what they ask for every time. Not what they actually want.

My job will likely turn into closer to an architecture job than a programming job, in that I will be directing the AI to program things that I know the business actually wants. I will be going over the results and making sure it meets our requirements. Eventually, it will get good enough that I can review the results less and trust more that it is adhering to our standards. But I will need to be creating more standards to adhere to.

I'm actually very happy about this technology. It may really start helping software developers tackle those things that are difficult and don't seem to readily produce any value, such as making sure to secure holes in code and make existing code more efficient when needed. Those algorithms can be much harder to think through, and having an AI instantly create one for you (and with proper fitness tests, perhaps even try out a number of different possibilities and find even faster more secure ways to handle things).

This won't replace devs, it will enhance them. It will change the way we develop, for sure, and the demand for what developers will do will actually increase as the technology helps us accomplish more (clients always seem to want more than you can actually give). This technology will allow some people who could not do development before to finally be able to enter the field, but again, I believe the demand will actually rise. We are going to want all those things we simply couldn't have before this tech came out.

Will some devs be displaced? For sure. Those who are unwilling or unable to adapt to the new paradigm will find themselves needing to find a new line of work (e.g. they will be forced to adapt). Also, there will still be a need for the old style devs, just not as much.

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Eduge

Eduge

13 days ago

I'm wondering if you read the article at all.

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Werner Glinka

Werner Glinka

13 days ago

That is exactly what the writer said

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2 replies

Qua Zi

Qua Zi

13 days ago

You appear to have just read the headline and come here to comment.

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1 reply

William Schreiber Jr

William Schreiber Jr

6 days ago

I was going to write exactly what you stated. It will be one more acronym on the resume, yet another skillset to acquire being able to work with a specific AI to get a job done. It will be a big shift in what we do everyday but ultimately a good one…...

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Shudhanshu Satyam

Shudhanshu Satyam

8 days ago

What a explanation Great!!

Anders Ramsay

Anders Ramsay

27 days ago

The analogy of clothing to software is flawed. In those cases, the mass production of IDENTICAL pieces of clothing is what resulted in the demise of those who created them by hand. Every piece of new software is UNIQUE, even though created from many pre-built building blocks. We are more like novelists than makers of identical widgets and aren't going anywhere. See you in five years :-)

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Ashley Pillay

Ashley Pillay

27 days ago (edited)

We shouldn't forget that ChatGPT was trained by human knowledge.

Can it solve novel problems?

Would it invent cryptocurrency?

Would it recognise the problem of client-server security & reach into the field of mathematics to invent asymmetrical…...

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Christopher Schmaeche

Christopher Schmaeche

15 days ago

One big issue I have with any post about this topic is that code examples are being shown that are incredibly easy or all over the internet.

Wow! The AI can give me the code to execute a POST request. Something I find in 10 seconds of googling.

I have never seen a real life example.

Because herein lies the real challenge. The hardest part in my day to day work is understanding the (often times incomplete) requirement from business.

This element will always introduce uncertainty and thus the need arises to correct the outcome of the AI.

In other words, I am not convinced that coding will go anywhere (in the next 5 years.)

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Leonard

Leonard

26 days ago

What a fantastic piece of writing.

Beautiful analogy!

Somnath, you made me nostalgic.

I recall coming home from college (80s) after being exposed to methods of structuring data (data structure and algorithm as we know it now), and being the only one…...

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Christian

Christian

18 days ago

Clean code is far far more undervalued. Too many write spaghetti spiderwebs and then debug wildly "around" with their live debugger tools. It would be better the other way around.

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Eduge

Eduge

13 days ago

It's ironic that many tech workers fall into this category.

They argue, "Well, AI will always require humans for providing the data"

True.

But the question is, "Will you be that human?"

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Arend Melissant

Arend Melissant

19 days ago

Chatgpt is a very eleborate parlor trick, one with lot's of (usefull) applications. Artificial it is, intelligent, not so much. They still have a very long way to go before they get to the point where it can actually understand and reason, but in my opinion the current model is not capable of doing that, it is a ver elaborate language model, nothing more, nothing less. In it's current form it can be a great help, esp. for junior developers, but those developers will not outgrow the junior phase if all they do is copy from Chatgpt,......

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Andrew Zuo

Andrew Zuo

14 days ago

I think you're vastly overestimating the power of AI. Right now ChatGPT frequently makes mistakes and it refuses to acknowledge them. Adding more parameters is not going to magically make things better. And also the CEO of OpenAI debunked that 100 trillion parameters picture https://medium.com/@impure/prepare-to-be-disappointed-by-gpt4-bf17c3d1ea93

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Matt Robb

Matt Robb

20 days ago

Good thought provoking article. Thank you.

However I would be delighted if AI coding became more the norm! I’m an Indie App developer for children. And I’d like to spend most of my time designing and developing new Apps. Sadly about 90% of my time or my team’s time goes on coding.

That becomes the cost driver and it seriously limits the quality and content of the Apps. So I’d rather have truly capable AI code writing and then I’d invest in better design, better art work to enable me to produce more enjoyable educational Apps for children.

Perhaps some of these would be redundant coders could move into design, development and production too?

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Anopheles

Anopheles

13 days ago

We're still waiting for the paperless office....

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Anurag Mendhekar

Anurag Mendhekar

14 days ago (edited)

No need to hit the panic button as yet. Large Language Models (LLM's) are confident bullshit generators. You should only worry about them replacing you if you're working mostly on low-value code (i.e., simple problems). They sometimes fluke their way into higher value code, but I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. Will they get better? Yes, for sure. But guess what ... this only means you'll stop wasting your time doing low-value code and focus on solving harder problems. Until ( if ever) we hit the singularity, you really don't need to worry about AI at the level of LLMs.

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Federico Kereki

Federico Kereki

20 days ago

I wouldn't read too much in this -- the spreadsheet copying issue was already published (for instance, in 2020 at https://github.com/allenGKC/Just-Javascript-Reading-Notes/issues/1) and all ChatGPT does is answer based on the already available answer.

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Qua Zi

Qua Zi

19 days ago

That has always been the case.

Wonderful way to convey a message while also demonstrating the features and capabilities of chatGPT.

It's always a pleasure to read you, Somnath!

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Charlie Tarr

Charlie Tarr

26 days ago

Mind blowing article. VERY exciting!

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1 reply

Vikram Kamath

Vikram Kamath

20 days ago

So there will be programmers in the future, but they will be more than just coders.

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Jeremy Smith

Jeremy Smith

8 days ago

A brilliant and hopeful article! You’re absolutely right that programmers are problem solvers first. Writing code is not as important as understanding the underlying logic as it applies to the problem you’re trying to solve.

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Quy Langridge-Tien

Quy Langridge-Tien

10 days ago

Great observation.

Thank you for this analysis. I understood it even though I'm not a programmer / coder, and it's given me a new appreciation of ChatGPT.

You explain things fantastically well, kudos to you sir.

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Galih indra

Galih indra

12 days ago

I love this article. The only ChatGPT content i really like. I'm tired of contents out there saying "How to make money with ChatGPT". We need more perspective like this about AI

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1 reply

Adam Hughes

Adam Hughes

17 days ago

High quality article thanks

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Siya mishra

Siya mishra

19 days ago

What a line ✨✨✨

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Goran Vinchi

Goran Vinchi

12 days ago

The article is thought-provoking and will likely spark a lot of discussions among the tech community. Overall, it provides valuable insight into the future of technology and the impact it will have on the field of coding.

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Stefano Della Pietra

Stefano Della Pietra

14 days ago (edited)

Great article. ChatGPT is remarkable. I agree that it disrupts the 9 to 5 coding jobs. But it speeds up independent projects. AI may cause some workers to lose their jobs, but it enables independent creators to bring their ideas to life more efficiently. Also, people love handmade stuff.

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Osher El-Netanany

Osher El-Netanany

16 days ago (edited)

AI in the context of code brings the AI-misalignment problem. This is true not for just ChatGPT, but also for copilot and it's like.

You want code completion for the best code - performant, readable, and above all - implements your target logic.

The AI gives you what's most likely to come next given what it had seen so far.

Those are not the same goals.

If your logic is unique or ground-breaking - there is very little chance that the AI have seen anything like it before.

It will be able to help you with the nits and grits of the bits and bytes - these can get repetitive. But with high probability it will lose both your logical goal and the high level narrative of your problem.

I tried.

And I got tired of reading it's apologies every time I had to point to a mistake it made.

When I asked it to stop apologizing, here is what it had to say:

"As a machine learning model, I don't have the ability to remember previous interactions or retain information about individual users. However, I will do my best to respond to your requests in the future. And I apologize for the excessive use of apologies, I will try to be less apologetic in the future."

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Jacky Choi Kin Lung

Jacky Choi Kin Lung

16 days ago

Was trying to rebut, but ended up being convinced. You're right that we all need to adapt to this new change by learning how to live with it. In my opinion, AI does help alleviate a lot of repetitive coding job from us and let us focus more on the…...

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Saikumar Iitkgp

Saikumar Iitkgp

16 days ago

This is an incredible article. Thanks a ton for sharing

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Siya mishra

Siya mishra

19 days ago

You got me! 😅

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Tepes Alexandru

Tepes Alexandru

16 days ago

What an incredible article! Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us about AI

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Robert Cordery

Robert Cordery

17 days ago (edited)

I read a while ago in a Gallup poll that most professionals believe other professions are at risk (~75%) for substitution by automation, but not their own (~25%)!

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Priyanka Kinger

Priyanka Kinger

8 days ago

Loved reading your article. It conveyed important points in a comprehensible manner.

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Qua Zi

Qua Zi

19 days ago

Some of my friends are still adamant about moving to HLL from assembly.

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Ben Roberts

Ben Roberts

11 days ago

Well written and very prescient Somnath. I have been thinking about this for a while and I believe you've hit the nail on the head. It's not what AI tools are now but what they will become. Many predictions were that AI would not be useful for a…...

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Davor Pihac

Davor Pihac

16 days ago

Future will bring more meta (or higher level) programming languages which will help us interact with the AI.

Writing prompts like ChatGPT is not effective enough. Those higher level languages will have to do less with algorithm complexities, garbage collections and much of the plumbing that we do these days.

Coding is not going anywhere, because it's the perfect interface between human and machine. How we write that code will change.

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Joel Hess

Joel Hess

16 days ago

I found the bug in under 30 seconds while driving to work on the highway in tri-state area traffic. I then stopped reading the article. Is chatGPT open source? I wanted to use it because that'd be great if something else wrote my code. I'd get so…...

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Christian Matthew

Christian Matthew

8 days ago

It's starting to turn into a religion. lol see you in 5 years

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Ricardo Morales

Ricardo Morales

9 days ago

I remember the days when Wordpress was going to replace developers... We are still here. If you know at least a little bit about how AI works internally ChatGPT shouldn't worry you. Humans are needed to write code, and humans are needed for the models to learn because humans feed AI data, not the other way around.

LOL

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Luis Casillas

Luis Casillas

9 days ago

The piece where you use the code example of duplicating the file and the bug associated with it, seems to me like I read it originally in a @dan_abramov newsletter or course. I’d say attribution would be good if that’s the case. Otherwise great…...

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Titus Decali

Titus Decali

11 days ago

ChatGPT doesn’t actual compile and run it’s code. Yesterday it spit out a function that wouldn’t work because it was trying to reassign a const. I saw this and told it “this won’t work as you can’t reassign a const” and then it said “You are right. You can fix this by changing the const to let like this…”

Far from useful when it literally generates broken code at the very simplest of levels.

Aside from that, someone will have to prompt it to generate the right thing, and in a world of possibilities, this is where much of our time as “programmers” will likely be spent. It will not replace, only supplement us like some kind of cyborg implant in our IDE.

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Luca Pulira

Luca Pulira

18 days ago

Obviously Coding should not existed till now !!!

What we need are Software Engineer Logical Scientists Math researchers software system and solution architects etc …

Instead we promoted a lot of bricklayers 🤷🏻‍♂️ …

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Brent K

Brent K

19 days ago

We all knew this day would come. Thanks for providing useful information.

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Bepopeg

Bepopeg

3 days ago

It's not true that most people used to buy everyday clothing from artisans. Most clothing is still made by humans, what has been automated is weaving of fabric. Sewing has been accelerated by machines. Millions of people are still needed to produce…...

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Derek Coleman

Derek Coleman

6 days ago

Without looking it up ask yourself what a noun phrase is. Moving on what is a proposition. Yet now however we expect this lot to ask charGPT to create.

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ptschneider

ptschneider

7 days ago

...and electronic documents will get rid of printed paper...

change never happens as quickly as we think it ought to

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Dean Schulze

Dean Schulze

7 days ago

I first heard this argument in 1995. But software development is more important than ever.

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Scott Foster

Scott Foster

9 days ago

The issue from my pov with this argument is specification. To create some of the monolithic code bases you need pages and pages of requirements and specifications (in TDD form generally) and those specifications need to be transformed into exact rules (code) which enforce the business spec (business rules). If one could some how get ahold of exact specifications to inform code of what it needs to do... You are just reinventing code, code is the translation of business rules (or management there of) so you've not so much replaced programmers as invented a coding language through a common language. The issue here therefore is semantics, you say programmers are to be replaced by AI where as I would say the only potential is replaced by one programming in a language we may speak. Fortunately this too is not happening any time soon, sorry, replacing code with exact specifications to remove ambiguous elements is still going to need human to read the code and ensure it meets the requirements - coding is still way faster (to create and validate) and more secure. So your article basically does not address the business side or how professionals program large systems - very different to hobbyists. AI is neat though.

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Aleksey

Aleksey

13 days ago

This is an interesting perspective. I still think that coding will exist into the decades that follow, but I do think that ChatGPT will change how the market for coders will look like. So coders do need to adapt and think more critically, learn to read code and debug.

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Mlberkow

Mlberkow

14 days ago

I think 5 years is overly optimistic or pessimistic depending on your view of things. Where the AI systems are going to struggle is with getting good explanations of what product wants. How many times have any of us gotten a product spec that was difficult to understand? An AI is going to have an even harder time.

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oni angel

oni angel

about 21 hours ago

Who is this stupid?

"Coding Won't Exist In 5 years.", this is really stupid title.

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Zsofia Gyori

Zsofia Gyori

about 22 hours ago

chatgpt failed to write me a react state twice then froze and the servers stopped working

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1 reply

Adrian Milliner

Adrian Milliner

1 day ago

People were saying “no programmers in 5 years” in 1977.

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Thomas Baumgartner

Thomas Baumgartner

2 days ago

Yawn. I heard the same thing 20 years ago. At that time it wasn't AI, but "graphical programming", supposedly enabling any dummy user to drag and drop their programs instead of writing code.

You see, the tools might change, but they are still just that -- tools. Without someone who knows how to use them properly (a.k.a. developers), they are worthless.

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zgdaf

zgdaf

3 days ago

1980s say hold my beer.. this was the mantra back then. Programming won’t be needed in 5 years.

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Yakov Keselman

Yakov Keselman

4 days ago

Fewer developers, more designers and architects is what we need, really. I'm all for software engineering automation.

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Phil Bunyan

Phil Bunyan

5 days ago

Powerful piece and agree. Problems will always exist, and it will be the people that can identify and solve problems that will stay around

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Devon Ivanix

Devon Ivanix

5 days ago

Now if only we can get chatGPT to run for office, perhaps politicians can finally be replaced.

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Lars Oestreicher

Lars Oestreicher

6 days ago

Unfortunately, ChatGPT not only detects bugs, it creates them too... and that is exactly why we will need human programmers in the future too. Every line created by ChatGPT needs to be checked for errors. If we trust it to only create proper , functional code, we run a large risk of having very bug ridden software in the future...

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Stefan Lang

Stefan Lang

8 days ago

Answering questions is not what a programmer is. Knowing what questions to ask is!

People who know how to program will learn to use ChatGPT as one of their tools for programming just as they learn new programming languages. There still need to be people around who understand the actual problem well enough to pose the right questions.

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Bill in Austin

Bill in Austin

8 days ago

AI tools will certainly make code maintenance and understanding a lot simpler, but most of the "real work" of programming consists not of writing the code itself but in translating poorly-articulated requirements and incomplete "specifications" into what's actually desired/needed. In this AI will be a great assistant in handling a lot of the grunt work, but we're still a far cry from the "Powerpoint compiler" that managers have dreamed of for decades.

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Sam Warain

Sam Warain

8 days ago

It is not accurate to compare clothing to computer programs. The downfall of those who made clothes by hand was caused by the widespread fabrication of identical garments. Even while they all utilize a large set of standard components, each and every one of today's cutting-edge programs has its own distinct identity.

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Counterflow

Counterflow

8 days ago

I think it will just be a matter of time. I've played around with ChatGPT and asked it what are the usual problems in a particular area and possible solutions, it can surely identiy the problem and possible solutions. It can create a sample project for a solution and you can guide it to step by step to create a ready-to-deploy solution.

At the moment, it needs technical people who knows how to build a software system to feed the instructions on what to do. You can tell ito design you a database schema, build an API on top of it, write an ORM, create classes and models, write controllers, add documentation, etc.

Soon though it will learn and have the capability to recognise the patterns and piece things together starting from identifying the problem, coming up with the best solution, and ultimately build the solution.

Where do humans fit in this future scenario? I believe it will still be for a short period of time in linking what's happening in the real world and elaborating that for an AI to work around. For instance, saying "Oh I think I have a performance issue with this particular area of the assembly line in my factory."... Whether that will be done using visual patterns or via your factory data, again the AI will eventually learn and piece things together.

Another area that will still involve humans are areas that need a creative opinion such as visual arts. In the end an AI will just develop its own sense of style based on certain parameters, which is like that friend of yours with a weird sense of style.

Can an AI innovate and continuously improve? Does it have the usual drivers, curiosity, motivation, and triggers that humans have to be able to decide to improve something that is around it? How would you parameterise curiosity?

Will an AI be able to explain something that is unknown to it before? How will it do that if it has not been trained on a particular concept or area before? Can it train itself on new datasets?

1

Vir Diya

Vir Diya

9 days ago

There's a caveat to this: product owners will still have to choose what logic they want, and they're notorious for not wanting to do that in admin panels. They just wanna tell someone what they want, and the coder/designer figures it out. Maybe the coder/designer become logic/design-selection administrators, and don't code or edit a single file, but the bots are not gonna be able to read product owner's minds anytime soon.

1

raj dash

raj dash

11 days ago (edited)

"AI-powered tools are ready to take over, and traditional ways of writing code will become less popular."

No, they're not. And yes, coding will still exist in five years. If you've actually tested AI's ability to code to the level I have, you'd know how far from replacing humans it is. But it will probably become a part of the developer's toolkit. So to say "Coding won't exist" is just clickbait.

1

Jay Dearien

Jay Dearien

11 days ago

There is such a thing as commenting one's code. Computer code is deceptive in that it seems to blur the "description of the thing" and "the thing itself." In all other endeavors we read the owner's manual for our car, we use recipes to cook things, we understand that our friends' emails and phone numbers are not interchangeable for the people themselves (we understand the concept of "a wrong number"). Most people don't pop the hoods on their cars every time they start them, or every time something odd happens. I don't mean to sound patronizing, but I have worked for decades creating computer systems (some completely hand-coded and others using middleware and other tools) and it is often infuriating how programmers confuse this. Your code does what it does--it is a material thing. If you don't have an idea of what it's SUPPOSED to do, then you don't have any solid ground to stand on. Mechanical, Civil, and Electrical engineers get that their blueprints are not the thing, and that they have to work out if the blueprints are going to do what they want, and they have to apply their craft to that. Programmers seem to get the "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" thing wrong, and that's partly a "culpa mea" as well. I hope that makes sense--I'm trying to make something of a subtle point, here.

3

B4blue

B4blue

12 days ago

I have been in the business of coding for more than 20 years. I can tell you this is BS and I will let you learn why. I had a lot of assumptions as the years went by and have been proven wrong too many times. It's part of experiencing real life. It's exciting to be wrong. You learn more.

1

David Bui

David Bui

12 days ago

Modern Day Polymath vs chatGPT. Who will win in 5 years?

1

Lonota Lonota

Lonota Lonota

12 days ago

Bet money then coward.

1

Christopher Schmaeche

Christopher Schmaeche

15 days ago

Here is why I doubt that we will stop coding in the future.

Whatever code is being produced by and AI has to be evaluated by a human being. Is that code actually correct? Is it doing what it is supposed to do?

I question whether one would be able to read code without being able to write it. So we might still be coding in order to keep our skills up.

1

Alejandro Hernandez

Alejandro Hernandez

17 days ago

IntelliSense / Emmet on steroids?

Haven’t tried ChatGPT myself yet. From what I’ve read it can be used as a tool in a programmer’s arsenal to make their job easier by taking care of boilerplate type code. Something akin to IntelliSense and Emmet on steroids. I think this is ok as long as programmers don’t become lazy copy pasters and actually understand the code that’s being generated and use the newly freed up time to focus on providing the best possible solution to the problem at hand.

1

codevil

codevil

26 days ago

It will replace only pers who won’t adopt, but don’t forget… code can be done by AI but AI is human driven :)

4

Jacques Mostert

Jacques Mostert

14 minutes ago

You're wrong, in every way possible. Christopher Strolia-Davis is right, AI will change the way things are done, but for the most part, programming will stay and coders will have a new awesome tool to use at their disposal. Industry will always exist and come back to life because people need people and the stuff we make, people need those too. Coding exists due to computing. There will always be problems that computers can't solve, for that you have programming, coding, whatever you want to call it.

Claudio Valerio

Claudio Valerio

36 minutes ago

It is since I was a university student that this idea of $"programmers won't be needed anymore in {years} years" bubbles up some article.

It was almost 30 years ago, and I'm still here, doing my thing.

So.. maybe you're right, maybe you're not.

For what I've seen so far, AI won't be replacing me any time soon, probably long enough for me to retire in a pretty mountain cabin.

The Elder Ones

The Elder Ones

about 5 hours ago

1. ChatGPT is not AI, it is ML and is undirected.

2. ChatGPT and a lot of ML doesn't know how to quantify or adjust for incorrcet information

As such ML improvements will have the same effect that good search requests do, you can quickly debug and lookup information., but the direction of what a programmer is doing will almost always require the alteration of the code and the directions the programmer give ML are just as important.

Isaac Daniels

Isaac Daniels

about 7 hours ago

Scary but true,

I know a few people who were developers for smaller companies, and they were let go, and replaced by "chatbots"

Hel P!

Hel P!

about 14 hours ago

I'm confused . Even here in the UK people still make clothes - even the cheapest mass produced clothes are all stitched by humans and I'm not aware that they can be put together in any other way. If feels like I've just read an article that slipped through spacetime. People use sewing machines. Machines are used in the making a fabric. You might be surprised to know that it is even humans who still design patterns that go on the fabrics.

Steven Hatfield

Steven Hatfield

about 21 hours ago

The major difference today is that the people making the machines are the people who will lose their jobs to them.

Dani Sarfati

Dani Sarfati

about 21 hours ago

It’s important to keep in mind that most machines clothing manufacturing require people to operate them, the same way how ChatGPT hired people in Kenya to help train the model, we find sources of labor in cheap labor markets. For some more details on clothing manufacturing take a look at this article - https://www.wired.com/story/why-robots-cant-sew-t-shirt/

Augusto S. Cadini

Augusto S. Cadini

about 22 hours ago

Valid considerations. Just missing out the cake's cherry: how to getting start to learn this approach to improve my developer skills? Also, do a test like I did: ask to ChatGPT: "Will you replace developers?". The answer is going against this article.

Perryshops

Perryshops

1 day ago

You falsely state in your sensational title, "Coding Won’t Exist In 5 Years".

Of course it will - and you know it will, because you later state your thesis that "Those who will leverage it - will go forward, -those who won't adapt would cease to exist." This is nothing new. I began my very successful career with Java, while those who tried hanging on to older languages or antiquated platforms perished. New names. Same game.

Yevgeniy Yermoshin

Yevgeniy Yermoshin

1 day ago

The industry will re-emerge… coding might won’t exist but the problem solving will still require a lot of creativity and writing a good scalable software. A developer in the future will need to fill a gap between a business (customer) and AI generated code snippets. P.S. who will be responsible for production issues created by developers overusing AI generated codebase? I can see some legal professionals joining a line to handle AI legal cases with banning it….

Gdsimpson

Gdsimpson

2 days ago

Yeah, since chatgpt and ai is made with wood...... no mate it was made by coders, ofc the basic jobs will be replaced but the more advanced ones will stay

Gijsbert Huijsen

Gijsbert Huijsen

2 days ago

'No silver bullet' from Brooks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet) still holds.

And this is a risk as well: https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/chatgpt-automatic-expensive-bs-at-scale-a113692b13d5

Peter Nann

Peter Nann

2 days ago

I've got news for you buddy... - Most clothes ARE still sewn together by hand, often with 60 year old sewing machines. Cheap hands are still cheaper and more reliable than robots.

I accept the gist of your article here, but I'd say the ascension of our robot (programming) overlords is a lot further away than you think.

Juan Reynolds

Juan Reynolds

2 days ago

AI will replace most professions one day but it is much further off than you make it out to be. Only a AGI can properly replace a programmer.

Hamish Davie

Hamish Davie

2 days ago (edited)

This article seems scarier then it actually is. I agree you need to adapt and continue to upskill, but the fact that engineers/developers who code will become redundant in the next 5 years? or even 10? Not a chance. Quit trying to scare people.

Mdmcgrath

Mdmcgrath

2 days ago (edited)

Lol. As a software developer of nearly 30 years, and the holder of a graduate degree in AI, I can tell you that AI won't be replacing programmers anytime soon.

Cut-n-paste code from someone's GitHub homework doesn't cut it... but the AI doesn't know any better.

Let me ask you... is software development about writing the program, or describing the problem to the letter? When you figure that out, you might rethink your statement

Chris Kennedy

Chris Kennedy

3 days ago

I will wait 5 years.

Wish your guess will be right. :)

Christopher Smith

Christopher Smith

3 days ago

I believe this article provides an argument for the engineer vs. developer vs. programmer/coder distinction argument. I'd take the thesis of this article to say that AI will easily take over programmer/coder jobs, but will take much longer to take…...

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Mario Gonzalez

Mario Gonzalez

3 days ago

Yeah really smart, at least you need to be able to read it. Someone has to babysit and know how to intervene.

Dilbert Deinstein

Dilbert Deinstein

3 days ago

1. ChatGPT will tell you what the code does because it has seen a similar (or exactly the same) snippet while training. It won't "understand" that a random given obfuscated snippet is a chess program.

2. If you feed it just slightly more complex algos (like binary search) with a typo, it will fail to find the error in 90% of the cases, but will instead confidently state that the error is in the wrong place and spit out incorrect code.

3. The only people who can benefit from AI spitting out code are developers, i.e. people who already code (and btw AI is a misnomer - it does not have any intelligence, nor will GPT-4 have any intelligence). So the only thing the AI can do is help reduce mundane repetitive tasks.

Krystof Huang

Krystof Huang

3 days ago

This is slightly interesting--but what interests me more is--when are we going to have platforms and codes that are immune to viruses? I do not know any programming. But instinctively it seems to me that the whole shebang of constant updating and virus protection is woefully childish and primitive. Except that maybe that is where all the profit is going to be in the future. We should easily be able to write codes that work flawlessly for a thousand years. Instead we have a built-in form of eternal "planned obsolescence." Has any so-called tech genius even bothered to think in this direction? Or are they routinely assassinated by secret society of programmers? Yeah of all the hacker-genius scifi films this is one possible theme they missed. Lots of films about secret agents fighting over the ultimate hacker app. No films about an app that is far more deadly to the economy becase it cannot be hacked.

Jason Smith

Jason Smith

3 days ago

Adapt or die; arguable always true in this field.

Look how many project managers are still desperately clutching to waterfall and gantt charts. Imagine this change will be even more polarizing then devops/agile or cloud.

Jonh Doe

Jonh Doe

3 days ago

Ridiculous, clearly no idea about what CS means. Calculators will replace all jobs that requires math

Jakob Ullmann

Jakob Ullmann

3 days ago (edited)

I don't think this is going to happen (and definitely not within 5 years). True, ChatGPT has a lot of potential and there is going to be less need for coders. But it won't go away. We will probably see an increase in subtle bugs because some class will be utilized somewhere in a way that is not 100% compatible with its intention. We will see poorly written code (after all, if the AI can figure out the purpose of the chess engine code, then why should you care about Clean Code or unit tests?). This means that code will be cranked out at high speed until it becomes unmaintainable. ChatGPT may be doing a phantastic job, but even if it gets it right 99.9% of the time, you will still need human talent for the 0.1% it gets it wrong. And for that it's important that people continue to engage with code at a "low" level (though a lot of that will be AI-generated, as it already is today when people use e.g. Github Copilot).

Ultimately, it will become clear that natural language never was and never will be optimal when precision is needed.

Nasir Altaf

Nasir Altaf

4 days ago

Weren’t we supposed to have flying cars by now? In short highly unlikely

Nyadet Dojiok

Nyadet Dojiok

4 days ago

Dystopian

Agostino

Agostino

4 days ago

Have you guys actually tried out gpt on some real problem? I did it, and the results were not so accurate, it produced a sort of a mix of the terms presents in my question. So my question is: will it repalce coders or will it assist them? Will we rely on code entirely written by AI with nobody ever inspecting it? Or will it help us to write much better, cleaner, understandable code even for humans?

Charles Robertson

Charles Robertson

4 days ago

But have you ever seen the machines that create clothing. Each part of the clothing piece requires a different machine to carry out different stitching requirements. These machines took immense human ingenuity to create. Of course, these machines can now be bought by a new clothing business, at great cost.

I feel the author skipped over this part.

In the same way, there are many areas of coding that are hard to pin down. Computers are very bad at understanding context. Context is extremely important when building an application.

Yes. Asking AI to do a simple coding exercise, in isolation, is easy. But try asking AI to put all these disparate parts together in a meaningful way, is much harder.

Robots are very good at doing one task very well. Currently there are no robots that can carry out all the different tasks that a human can do. This will remain the same way until robots learn how to replicate themselves.

At this point, we will have a much bigger problem, than who writes our code. 😱

Charles Robertson

Charles Robertson

4 days ago

But clothing businesses are still run by humans. Humans also oversee certain jobs inside the factory. In the same way, humans will always be required, in the coding industry, to make decisions about context, which computers cannot make. Even those running AI, unless they pass the Turing test, won’t be of any help here. 🤷‍♀️

Cao Thiên

Cao Thiên

4 days ago (edited)

You have totally missed the point in focusing on AI trendiness.

First of all, the reason people have trouble reading code is because most of it is completely illegible and too many consider making it legible to be beneath their dignity. I've never seen a single JavaScript file that didn't have me reaching for the headache medication.

But you make no mention of the real trend in software. The last time you wrote low-level algorithmic code like a linked list or a string search was probably in one of those idiotic whiteboard interviews. We almost never write low-level code anymore; we write glue code for components like NuGet packages. Low-level coding and optimization are increasingly specialized skills.

This trend began with assembly language emerging from binary code, then to higher level languages like C and then to increasingly abstract layers, and that trend will continue. The reflection in .NET is the beginning of the end of glue code, too.

Programming will be more and more working with self-describing components and less and less with ints and floats.

But it will still be unreadable.

Alex Agranov

Alex Agranov

5 days ago

The way I view ChatGPT is it will replace a lot of StackOverflow & Googling for code snippets for the rest of this decade. Beyond that who knows.

IgorJACKPOT777

IgorJACKPOT777

5 days ago

You actually have 3 options:

1 - Adapt to the environment. (Darwin, your point)

2 - Migrate to new surroundings. (In case you wanna quit programming)

3 - Adapt the environment itself. (Outlaw, Ban AI which is very likely to happen outside of tech)

1 reply

Stephanie

Stephanie

5 days ago (edited)

Lets ask ourselves.

can chatgpt create a website? The answer is No.

Chatgpt (like stackoverflow) provides starting blocks. Chatgpt also act as a senior coder that helps out when you get stuck.

When people online has an issue we often say. Did you google that?

I would say the first thing a coder asking for help you will say. Did you ChatGpt that? Instead of saying did you StackOverflow search that?

If something, Chatgpt will be the tool to help us navigate the everso-increasing coding languages.

Forgot how to write a fetch statement in JavaScript? Ask chatgpt to get the basics. Starting with Go and wondering how fetch works in contrary to JavaScript? Ask Chatgpt.

Instead of

1. Google searching

2. Find stackoverflow threads

3. Look at people's answers to questions that "sort of" fits your question.

4. Don't find a real answer and create a Stackoverflow question

5. Get mammed by seniors and de-voted for trying to learn.

6. Visit discord / forums, ask your question

7. Get an answer or people saying thinking they're teacher giving you a 30min answer to default usercases with that issue.

So you either

A. Have issue, Chatgpt, gets answer, 5min passed, continue working.

B. Have issue, Stackoverflow/Forum/Discord/Ask, spend 1 hour finding an answer, take a break, continue next day.

What world would you like to live in?

Johann de Swardt

Johann de Swardt

6 days ago

By the time you've massaged responses from ChatGPT, you could have copy/pasted most of the code from stack overflow or you could have found an implementation somewhere in Github.

Tyler Tibbets

Tyler Tibbets

6 days ago

I agree that ChatGPT is helpful but only for basic code examples unless you know how to prompt it correctly which most people do not. From my experience, building complex applications with ChatGPT takes a lot of arguing with the model lol. I have built some applications using it but I am not convinced AI will be replacing any programmers in the workplace any time soon. You are right about us having to adapt though, we do need to learn to use this technology to our benefit. However, AI is only as smart as the person using it + the programmers who programmed it / the data it was trained on. Insightful article, but let's not panic just yet :) Also beginner programmers do need to learn how to code on their own before resorting to ChatGPT and StackOverflow, just giving a bit of advice to those just starting out.

Kevin Dunn

Kevin Dunn

6 days ago

Darwin did not actually say this: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/04/adapt/

Yahyasaid

Yahyasaid

6 days ago

I am not convinced that coding won't exist in 5 years! Most programming problems are unique therefore no single solution can address them all.

meitoli

meitoli

6 days ago

Only if quantum computing becomes reality...

Amazon BBC News

Amazon BBC News

6 days ago

It's beautiful to know about this

Urmo Rae

Urmo Rae

6 days ago

In my mind, all other points aside, software development doesn't follow "most efficient, most productive wins" logic. It never has. Entire field is constantly reinventing itself and it's toys if not faster than in a decade. For desktop development…...

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Reem Khattab

Reem Khattab

7 days ago

Funny enough I am learning javascript and I was thinking about all this AI stuff. However, I find having the programming knowledge to even know what to ask the AI is important. I believe there are a lot of people who want to develop their own apps, and still can't even if powerful tools like AI exist. For example I would love to make animation videos on youtube for kids, and tools like Adobe suite exist to do that, but I don't have the skill to use the tool, nor do I really have the artistic ability to design characters. I just wonder if this is a similar situation where you still need to be highly technical to best utilize AI powered tools.

Sorin Gatea

Sorin Gatea

8 days ago

LLM will not replace problem solvers with coding skills. LLM do not "think", do not rationalize, thay lack critical abstraction capabilities. Thye simply cannot have them since they are just LLM's

ChatGPT has been trained by humans cobining Supervised, and Reinforcement learning techniques on a knowledge base created by humans (limited up to mid 2021).

It is a goood helper tool for coding support, however one needs to test thoroughly its code suggestions since at times they are completly wrong.

Lastly ChatGpt 4 will not have 1 trilion parameters "capable of delivering more accurate responses"

Fodda Play

Fodda Play

8 days ago

I mean, that's fine. Except from experience, AI gets about 90% correct and completely fails to notice the 10% it doesn't. Try asking it to write a function that performs some simple logic in a specific engine for example. The results will probably compile, but likely won't achieve exactly what you want, and will likely do so in a convoluted and redundant manner.

It's exactly the same for people who think AI Art is going to make all human artists redundant. How exactly do you think AI learned to make that art in the first place? If you take the results of AI art and pump it back into the system as learning material eventually you end up with nothing but feedback and noise (as seen in the "what does googles AI see?" images from a few years back). These systems fundementally REQUIRE human input to exist, even if it's in purely in the form of learning materials.

Brian Simpson

Brian Simpson

8 days ago (edited)

It's not going to replace programmers "just yet" but will change the way we work. We can use it to generate the heavy lifting, create the tests etc. Debugging will become an important skill as it's all very well asking it to generate discrete functions but its not going to help tracking bugs in an existing application.

I have been using it to generate tests and it works ok but its not perfect but its saving a lot of time.

I agree with the comments about readability because as a programmer you spend a lot of time reading code generated by others. Sometimes I find this soul destroying.

Alexander Simon

Alexander Simon

8 days ago

Thank you for putting this together. It's an exciting analysis of how ChatGPT enhances development - and leaves more time for problem-solving than for transforming the solution into tokens.

Time to start programming again: After many years, I felt exhausted by the relatively low-power programming languages gave me (too many tokens to accomplish simple things).

Combining model-driven development with generative AI would be interesting as it might close the remaining gaps between designing solutions and writing code.

TheLongView

TheLongView

8 days ago

I am not a coder. Can ChatGPT create an updated version of my favorite (very old) video game, according to my specifications?

1 reply

Brettcdugan

Brettcdugan

9 days ago

Agreed but cringe title.

1 reply

Vir Diya

Vir Diya

9 days ago

This is not a good analogy with coding. Saying anything is equivalent in coding to writing code. If you code nothing, you've said nothing in an app. It would have been better stated "one can utter little and end up saying a lot". I can't think of an example where an app with no code does a lot, or anything.

1 reply

Jamie

Jamie

9 days ago

It would have been wiser to suggest that AI could replace coders. Putting a 5 year mark means you've set yourself up for humiliation.

:: marks calendar 5 years into the future :::

Ella Gale

Ella Gale

9 days ago

I don't disagree with your thesis here, but it is important to acknowledge that these tools are not perfect and are easy to break.

I tried to use ChatGPT to document some of my code and describe simple use cases (as I was too lazy to do my own technical manual). It confidently told me that one of the inputs to a function (True or False) was for whether to use parallelisation or not. Presumably, this is what most coders use as the last input to a function. But it had seen my documentation and several of my functions where the last input is always 'verbose=True', and is used as a simple switch to print out debugging information. (i.e. if verbose, print the values of things to the screen).

So, it failed to read my code or pick up my documentation or how the input 'verbose' was used, and worse, 'confidentially' 'lied' about it. I am sure that you could find examples of this in your code base. (The overconfidence is a general problem with machine learning, btw).

So, to begin with, programmers will have to act as fact checkers for these tools. Eventually, everyone will use the same coding patterns and style, which will make it easier for the algorithm.

Cpguy

Cpguy

9 days ago

Well, you may be right. I've been in IT for over 30 years and fought like mad to never be a coder or a programmer. During the one course I took in Javascript, all I could think was, "Why can't a machine just tell me what's wrong with the code?"

Nevertheless, don't know much about ChatGPT, but hopefully it will not only read code well, but can write well.

Perhaps it can write sentences.

And string them together into a thing called a paragraph.

Sorry, Somnath, but this was really hard to read.

I'm wondering if writing lines of code leads to writing independent sentences.

Roman

Roman

10 days ago

What is replt.it ?? I only know replit.com. It used to be hosted at repl.it.

Jay Dearien

Jay Dearien

11 days ago

We all get that those comments are really just narrating what the code does, rather like:

/* increment the variable a by one */

a += 1;

At some point the code needs to speak for itself, but only at a very low and local level. Better might be:

/* DESIGN BUG: the variable a is set outside the loop, to control how long the loop runs.

* it should count the number of records PROCESSED as opposed to merely EXAMINED

* ENHANCEMENTS NEEDED: var a may have off-by-one issues (test!) and it may not be incremented or examined in all cases of records being processed.

* var a should contain the count of records processed when the loop exits, and this is passed back to the calling routine.

*/

a += 1;

I would probably put a lot more stuff in a comment like this, certainly at the function header level.

Jay Dearien

Jay Dearien

11 days ago

This is an interesting point. It's true that software is infuriatingly handmade. This may be an apt comparison and I'll see what you have to say below. One obvious question is whether there are fundamental differences between clothing and software. I would say to look at "detail" and "scale". Clothing also doesn't have synchronization issues in the same way software does, in fact, it's pretty static. A sock as compared to a tuxedo is not the same scale difference (or synchronization) as, say, a pocket calculator versus a national air traffic control system or banking system. It's not to say that the same or similar principles of automation might not apply between clothing and coding, but there are only so many panels and stitches on a business suit, but the scale may almost be unlimited for many software systems. And unlike clothing, where a factory may turn out thousands of pieces, a lot of these larger software applications are singular, or are customized instalations of COTS software.

Nick Maiorano

Nick Maiorano

11 days ago (edited)

The true concern of this technology is not whether it will make developers obsolete (it won’t), but rather if it will make application development obsolete.

Once AI knows how to code, why bother writing instructions in a human abstraction only to convert them back into CPU instructions, which are themselves human abstractions, when it can BE the machine itself. In other words, if I can ask it to BE the website, BE the database server, handling requests all day long, then it’s time to say good night. And we are still decades away from that.

Nom de Plume

Nom de Plume

11 days ago

They have released CODEX which is an even more powerful natural language code generator that even renders the code so you no longer need to cut paste and edit to view on VS Code etc., This part of the world will look radically different in the next 5 years.

Traiano Welcome

Traiano Welcome

12 days ago

But will chatgpt pass a code review ... ?

Selena Routley

Selena Routley

12 days ago

This is not true. Pattern cutting and sewing is all done for big fashion labels in sweatshops in disgusting conditions. In theory, the first could be taken over by a software configurable cutting robot, the second by an industrial robot with AI to learn sewing gracefully along a seam.

It's not done this way, even though it is eminently possible. The reason: it is cheaper to burn up a human slave, grinding her slowly out of existence doing close, deft work 14 hours a day than it is to install an advanced industrial robot and then to maintain its mechanical articulation systems to the mechanical tolerances needed in the face of intense wear and tear to do these things.

Meanwhile, in Germany, strict labor laws limit the exploitation of sweatshop labor. It is very common for people to spend a little more on their clothes, have fewer of them, love them more and keep them over their whole wonaïverkable lives. It is quite feasible in Berlin to make a modest but comfortable living as a designer in your own boutique, either cutting and making your own clothes and maybe hiring a couple of skilled apprentices to do it.

What's the point of my writing above? I agree with the sentiment of what you write, but your optimism is callous, or a little naïve.

I think the Berlin Boutique example shows that beneficial use of AI and automation is about consensual introduction of technology, so that the jobs that are rewarding and enriching to people remain. This is the German concept of Industry 4.0: hopefully this catches on. This, as you say, could be very possible with ChatGPT for coders. But, unless strict government regulation accompanies wholesale automation, capitalism will just use AI to further rape society.

As an afterword: many people would be surprised how much artisan work is used in something like personal computing. Miniaturized laptops and cellphones have curcuitboards and parts manufactured to tolerances that are totally beyond any automated mechanioca assembly technology.

Yanick Duchesne

Yanick Duchesne

13 days ago

Grandiose claims. As made numerous times throughout History about any new potentially disruptive technology. More often than not: the consequence is new ways of working, efficiency gains, the creation of new skills and the opening of new horizons. Disappearance and replacement prove overblown.

Okhae Adeleye

Okhae Adeleye

13 days ago

AI still has a long way to go. I fed chatGPT a question about a code structure and it gave me an older version which didn’t work with what I specified. So AI won’t replace developers. There will still be bugs, and specific use cases that AI can’t deal with

Frederik Krautwald

Frederik Krautwald

13 days ago

It’s more important for humans to understand WHY a certain piece of code is there rather than WHAT it does.

Arni Richard Arnason

Arni Richard Arnason

13 days ago

If I give ChatGPT my code for review will it then be at risk of being shown to other people?

Gubju

Gubju

13 days ago (edited)

Coder will die, Programmer will survive. We already noticed it when the modern web appeared.

Programmers don't just type code in the first place.

So, if audiences were most "Programmers", I can't agree with your opinion. it overrates features of the mere language model. if not, I agree with you.

Dmitriy Kharchenko

Dmitriy Kharchenko

13 days ago

Oh yeah, I hear that every 5 years.

What would probably happen is that we will have something like a programming language for things like ChatGPT.

Parth Upadhye

Parth Upadhye

14 days ago

How things are programmed and developed will change.

The thinking human and the frameworks to create those future code blocks will always exist.

We will be developing code and application generators.

Esteban-gs

Esteban-gs

14 days ago

So, slack overflow is getting replaced? great!

Ira Rampil

Ira Rampil

15 days ago

Is JavaScript even coding? 😂

Justin Haut

Justin Haut

15 days ago

The future is here. ChatGPT massively upped my development game. It’ll be fun to see what we all create!