There’s a massive amount of hype right now, much like everything was blockchains for a while.

AI/ML is not able to replace a programmer, especially not a senior engineer. Right now I’d advise you do your job well and hang tight for a couple of years to see how things shake out.

(me = ~50 years old DevOps person)

So, I asked Chat GPT to write a quick PowerShell script to find the number of months between two dates. The first answer it gave me took the number of days between them and divided by 30. I told it, it needs to be more accurate than that, so it wrote a while loop to add 1 months to the first date until it was larger than the 2 second date. Not only is that obviously the most inefficient way to do it, but it had no checks to ensure the one in the loop was actually smaller so you could just end up with zero. The results I got from co-pilot were not much better.

From my experience, unless there is existing code to do exactly what you want, these AI are not to the level of an experienced dev. Not by a long shot. As they improve, they’ll obviously get better, but like with anything you have to keep up and adapt in this industry or you’ll get left behind.

I don’t think you are disturbed by AI, but y Capitalism doing anything they can to pay you as little as possible. From a pure value* perspective assuming your niche skills in c++ are useful*, you have nothing to worry about. You should be paid the same regardless. But in our society, if you being replaced by someone “good enough”, will work for the business then yes you should be worried. But AI isn’t the thing you should be upset by.

*This is obviously subjective, but the existence of AI with you troubleshooting vs fully replacing you is out of scope here.

I’m in IT and I don’t believe this will happen for quite a while if at all. That said I wouldn’t let this keep you up at night, it’s out of your control and worrying about it does you no favours. If AI really can replace people then we are all in this together and we will figure it out.

AI is a really bad term for what we are all talking about. These sophisticated chatbots are just cool tools that make coding easier and faster, and for me, more enjoyable.

What the calculator is to math, LLM’s are to coding, nothing more. Actual sci-fi style AI, like self aware code, would be scary if it was ever demonstrated to even be possible, which it has not.

If you ever have a chance to use these programs to help you speed up writing code, you will see that they absolutely do not live up to the hype attributed to them. People shouting the end is nigh are seemingly exclusively people who don’t understand the technology.

I use AI heavily at work now. But I don’t use it to generate code.

I mainly use it instead of googling and skimming articles to get information quickly and allow follow up questions.

I do use it for boring refactoring stuff though.

In its current state it will never replace developers. But it will likely mean you need less developers.

The speed at which our latest juniors can pick up a new language or framework by leaning on LLMs is quite astounding. It’s definitely going to be a big shift in the industry.

At the end of the day our job is to automate things so tasks require less staff. We’re just getting a taste of our own medicine.

As an example:

Salesforce has been trying to replace developers with “easy to use tools” for a decade now.

They’re no closer than when they started. Yes the new, improved flow builder and omni studio look great initially for the simple little preplanned demos they make. But theyre very slow, unsafe to use and generally are impossible to debug.

As an example: a common use case is: sales guy wants to create an opportunity with a product. They go on how omni studio let’s an admin create a set of independently loading pages that let them:
• create the opportunity record, associating it with an existing account number.
• add a selection of products to it.

But what if the account number doesn’t exist? It fails. It can’t create the account for you, nor prompt you to do it in a modal. The opportunity page only works with the opportunity object.

Also, if the user tries to go back, it doesn’t allow them to delete products already added to the opportunity.

Once we get actual AIs that can do context and planning, then our field is in danger. But so long as we’re going down the glorified chatbot route, that’s not in danger.

I’m both unenthusiastic about A.I. and unafraid of it.

Programming is a lot more than writing code. A programmer needs to setup a reliable deployment pipeline, or write a secure web-facing interface, or make a useable and accessible user interface, or correctly configure logging, or identity and access, or a million other nuanced, pain-in-the-ass tasks. I’ve heard some programmers occasionally decrypt what the hell the client actually wanted, but I think that’s a myth.

The history of automation is somebody finds a shortcut - we all embrace it - we all discover it doesn’t really work - someone works their ass off on a real solution - we all pay a premium for it - a bunch of us collaborate on an open shared solution - we all migrate and focus more on one of the 10,000 other remaining pain-in-the-ass challenges.

A.I. will get better, but it isn’t going to be a serious viable replacement for any of the real work in programming for a very long time. Once it is, Murphy’s law and history teaches us that there’ll be plenty of problems it still sucks at.

They haven’t replaced me with cheaper non-artifical intelligence yet and that’s leaps and bounds better than AI.

I’m a composer. My facebook is filled with ads like “Never pay for music again!”. Its fucking depressing.

If you are afraid about the capabilities of AI you should use it. Take one week to use chatgpt heavily in your daily tasks. Take one week to use copilot heavily.

Then you can make an informed judgement instead of being irrationally scared of some vague concept.

Programming is the most automated career in history. Functions / subroutines allow one to just reference the function instead of repeating it. Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler in 1951; compilers, assemblers, and linkers automate creating machine code. Macros, higher level languages, garbage collectors, type checkers, linters, editors, IDEs, debuggers, code generators, build systems, CI systems, test suite runners, deployment and orchestration tools etc… all automate programming and programming-adjacent tasks, and this has been going on for at least 70 years.

Programming today would be very different if we still had to wire up ROM or something like that, and even if the entire world population worked as programmers without any automation, we still wouldn’t achieve as much as we do with the current programmer population + automation. So it is fair to say automation is widely used in software engineering, and greatly decreases the market for programmers relative to what it would take to achieve the same thing without automation. Programming is also far easier than if there was no automation.

However, there are more programmers than ever. It is because programming is getting easier, and automation decreases the cost of doing things and makes new things feasible. The world’s demand for software functionality constantly grows.

Now, LLMs are driving the next wave of automation to the world’s most automated profession. However, progress is still slow - without building massive very energy expensive models, outputs often need a lot of manual human-in-the-loop work; they are great as a typing assist to predict the next few tokens, and sometimes to spit out a common function that you might otherwise have been able to get from a library. They can often answer questions about code, quickly find things, and help you find the name of a function you know exists but can’t remember the exact name for. And they can do simple tasks that involve translating from well-specified natural language into code. But in practice, trying to use them for big complicated tasks is currently often slower than just doing it without LLM assistance.

LLMs might improve, but probably not so fast that it is a step change; it will be a continuation of the same trends that have been going for 70+ years. Programming will get easier, there will be more programmers (even if they aren’t called that) using tools including LLMs, and software will continue to get more advanced, as demand for more advanced features increases.

You’re certainly not the only software developer worried about this. Many people across many fields are losing sleep thinking that machine learning is coming for their jobs. Realistically automation is going to eliminate the need for a ton of labor in the coming decades and software is included in that.

However, I am quite skeptical that neural nets are going to be reading and writing meaningful code at large scales in the near future. If they did we would have much bigger fish to fry because that’s the type of thing that could very well lead to the singularity.

I think you should spend more time using AI programming tools. That would let you see how primitive they really are in their current state and learn how to leverage them for yourself. It’s reasonable to be concerned that employees will need to use these tools in the near future. That’s because these are new, useful tools and software developers are generally expected to use all tooling that improves their productivity.

As someone with deep knowledge of the field, quite frankly, you should now that AI isn’t going to replace programmers. Whoever says that is either selling a snake oil product or their expertise as a “futurologist”.