For some background, I originally wanted to break into programming back when I was in college but drifted more into desktop tech support and now systems administration. SysAdmin work is draining me, though, and I want to pick back up programming and see if I can make a career out of it, but industry seems like it could be moving in a direction to rely on AI for coding. Everything I’ve heard has said AI is not there yet, but if it’s looking like it hits a point where it reaches an ability to fully automate coding, should I even bother? Am I going to be obsolete after a year? Five years?
The automobile didn’t put cabbies out of jobs, it put horses out of work.
If anything it actually made demand for cabbies skyrocket, because now they could do the same job but way faster, so now they were more affordable abd not just a service reserved for wealthy.
In other words, expect that AI will increase demand for programmers exceptionally, as the bar for entry lowers.
An LLM still needs a “pilot” to “drive” it, and you need to still know code well enough to interpret the output and catch mistakes or hallucinations.
But typically when a field becomes more affordable, it goes up in demand, not down, because the target audience that can afford the service grows exponentially.
“But if it’s so easy to become program now, what’s to stop people from just using ChatGPT and never hiring a programmer?”
Same reason people still, today, hire cabs even if they can drive themselves.
Convenience. Time is money and just because 1 person can do all the jobs of a company, doesn’t mean they physically have the time to do it.
palebluethought@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Other than maybe a few very rote, boilerplate types of development, all this shit about replacing coders is almost entirely noise made by either the wishful thinking of oligarchs or credulous repetition of that wishful thinking by clueless journalists.
But it’s still a pretty rough time to be just getting into tech, just because of the state of the job market.
agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 4 months ago
The real question here is: how much “coding work” is there left to do?
Currently, the bottleneck is available developers (barring short term problems). Even if AI would make every developer 30% more efficient, there would still be work to do. But there will be a point, where this tipps over. At some point, there’s no additional demand anymore. We just don’t know, when this will happen. 50%, 100%, maybe 700%?
One thing to keep in mind is, that AI code doesn’t have to be good, just good enough. Many nerds seem to think that efficiency, beauty or elegance have value. But to a business, that’s just a collateral benefit. Software can be buggy, slow, hard to update. That all doesn’t matter, if the results and costs are in a good-enough ratio.
MagicShel@programming.dev 4 months ago
How much coding work is left to be done? Infinity. There will always be more needed. Always. And while there is a certain truth to the idea that software just needs to be good enough, it will very quickly become nearly impossible to maintain and add new features.
AI doesn’t make us 30% more efficient. There are certain tasks that’s it’s really helpful for, but they are really limited. I can see issues with junior developers being replaced with AI when they are in the takes more work to train them then just do their job stage. Beyond that, a good developer has skills and experience that AI will never be able to replace, especially since the code has to be maintained.
MajorHavoc@programming.dev 4 months ago
The bottleneck is developers competent to code in each specific domain. We have nowhere near enough, even for the most popular subject - writing an eCommerce store.
Source: Let’s all play a quick round of “think of every eCommerce site you don’t hate.” Okay, now let’s all try to think of a second one. Anyone still trying for three?
The specific domain list is, I suspect, currently uncountable.
Twenty five years from now, I suspect we can get a ballpark approximate count of developer specializations by starting at the top of the popular WordPress plugins list, and stopping when we start hitting obvious duplicates.
After that, we can compare that count to the known number of tailored-to-purpose AIs available.
Subtract the two, and that’s the remaining runway on “AI is taking all of our jobs”. (If feeling generous, add a bit of leeway for each AI also needing some time to stop sucking.)
Source: I’m part of the AI problem/solution. It’s fun times, but y’all excited folks are going to be disappointed for a long while, unless you’re incredibly satisfied with what you already have.
Even when we reach true sentient AI (which may still be impossible), there will be an uphill road to teach it each domain we want it to work in.
Teaching humans is difficult. Teaching computers is difficult. Teaching a computer that thinks like a human might be much easier.
Perhaps it will teach itself at an incredible speed. Some humans do. But history suggests that getting each AI up to speed, in each domain we need it for, will still be…difficult.