You can do what you want, you just won't be paid to do it anymore.

I think most are going to wait on the side lines watching the bleeding edge. The promise is great but so is the risk of disaster. Imo it's going to be a generational shift.

I still get paid for project involving Oracle 9i running on Itanium HPUX and Delphi application running on Windows XP. This project is not going anywhere in the next 5 years. And there are numerous other projects which will not go anywhere either. I just don't believe that programming landscape will change much. May be in California startup world. My world moves slower.

I don't think anything significantly changed in my approach to the code since 2013. We will see how 2033 goes, but I don't expect nothing big either. ChatGPT is just Google replacement, Copilot is just smart autocomplete. I can use Google instead of ChatGPT and I could use Google 10 years ago. I can use vim macros instead of Copilot. This AI stuff helps me to save few hours a months, I guess, so it worth few bucks of subscription, but nothing groundbreaking so far.

And they generally get outcompeted sooner or latter.

All disciplines evolve over time and those who fail or refuse to keep up will be left behind.

Just because you can have a robot/machine that can efficiently churn out 1000 frozen lasagnas a second doesn't necessarily mean that italian restaurants have been "outcompeted" or "left behind" by not using such a machine in their business.

Sometimes quality and responsibility matter. Even if a machine is really good at producing bug-free code, often someone is going to have to read/understand the code that the machine produces and take resposibility for it, since machines cannot take responsibility for things.

In the end, you'll always need a human that understands the formal algorithmic language (i.e., a programmer), capable of parsing the formal program that will be run, if you want to be able to trust the program, since any way of mapping an informal request (described imperfectly in an informal language) to a formal construct is always going to be "lossy" and prone to errors (and you'll know this if you ever used an automatic code generator). Just because someone is willing to blindly trust automatically-generated code, doesn't mean everyone else is: there are contexts in which you need a person to blame, when things go wrong.

Ok, but to continue this analogy, industrialization and the ability to create 1000 frozen lasagnas a second had an enormous impact on the world. Not only on the economics of production, but ultimately on human society.

Sure, handmade lasagna still exists, but the world looks nothing like it did 200 years ago.

Heh, most cooking these days is like using libraries to build an application.

I don't slaughter an animal, I buy a cut of meat.

It's very rare I make pasta, I rehydrate dried husks.

The cheese comes in some kind of jar or package. The vegetables come from a store.

This has been the general move in applications too. I see companies with very large programs that are just huge sets of node modules joined together with a small amount of code.

> and take responsibility for it, since machines cannot take responsibility for things.

That's an interesting thought; people "taking responsibility" as a form of labour, for machines that stole their lunch. Probably be around zero applicants for that job.

Responsibility is a complex quality needing capacity and competence. Right now even the manufacturers of "AI" are unable to assert much about behaviour.

Where "responsibility" exists around robotics and ML it will more likely be a blunt legal instrument tied to ownership, like owning a dangerous animal.

AI can be used to support that activity too. Models can just as well used to explain existing code, possibly cranked out by another AI. I bet many companies are thinking about fine-tuning or LoRA-ing language models on their moldy codebases and outdated pile of documentation to make onboarding, refactoring, and routine extensions easier.

To interpret what AI models themselves are actually doing, researchers employ AI models as well.

People do things because they enjoy doing them. And people will continue to do things they enjoy doing such as programming.

I don’t think it has anything to do with competition or being left behind.

The point is that people won't get paid anymore to do it. It has happened before: many activities that have been replaced by technology have been almost forgotten (for example the newspaper reader in the factory) or are practiced as art or niche crafts only. Careers built on these are either wildly successful or have highly unsteady income since they are literally reliant on the whims, not on the needs, of people.

We can't all run a YouTube channel for the programming equivalent of Primitive Technology, fun though that would be. 99.99% of us will have to adapt to AI being a coworker, who will probably eventually replace us.

Right now we're still OK because the AI isn't good enough; when it gets good enough, doing things manually is as economically sensible as making your own iron by gathering a few times your mass in wood, burning some of in a sealed clay dome to turn it into charcoal, digging up some more clay to make a porous pot and a kiln to fire it in, filling it with iron rich bacterial scum from a creek, letting the water drain, building a furnace, preheating it with the rest of the wood, then smelting the bacterial ore with the charcoal, to yield about 7 grams or iron.

Nice analogy! I saw an estimate recently on the cost of programming and they predicted that automated coding will cost 10,000 times less than human coders. It was all back of the envelope and questionable but still it was food for thought. Will we be 10,000 times more productive or will we be out of work? I think a lot of people will be out of work.

Thanks! :)

> Will we be 10,000 times more productive or will we be out of work? I think a lot of people will be out of work.

It can be both. Automation of farming means we've gone from a constant risk of starvation to an epidemic of obesity, while simultaneously reducing the percentage of the workforce in agriculture.

who will probably eventually replace us.

no one is going to be using AI and then just have it 'replace them', they're going to use it to augment their abilities and avoid replacement.

The people using AI to write code aren't necessarily former professional programmers, for the same reasons people using AI to make pictures aren't necessarily former professional artists, and those using aim bots aren't necessarily former professional snipers or olympic shooters.

A manager can prompt a chatbot to write a thing instead of prompting me to write the same thing — for the moment, what (I hope) keeps me employable is that the the chatbot is "only" at the level of getting good grades rather than n-years professional experience.

I have no expectation for any specific timeline for that to change. Perhaps there are enough incentives it will never get trained to that level, but also perhaps it was already trained 4 months back and the improvement to capabilities are what caused the OpenAI drama.

I mean, if we had something that capable, I have zero idea why you think your manager is going to be in a safer position to you? That seems ridiculous.

You could easily flip it around, ask the bot to manage you better than your manager and make the best use of your time, or something like this?

Managers have more business contacts and access to money.

But others your point is valid.