1.For now, not by much.It will make us more productive but the world is not short of projects with endless backlogs so huge nobody can ever drain them.Maybe some of those tickets are low value or obsolete, but a lot of them represent real bugs or ideas for improvement that the cost of software development makes prohibitive to reach.
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It may change the nature of the job a lot.It could hurt developers who are very heads down and ideas constrained.
If what you love most about coding is the thrill of finding the perfect algorithmic implementation, then, well, AI may reduce the enjoyment of the job.
If what you love about coding is seeing your ideas come alive, then AI can increase your enjoyment of the job.
3.Whilst some people claim they ideate and get inspired by talking to AI, my own experience has been that GPT4 is a rather conservative and predictable sort of personality.Perhaps it’s the training and maybe via the API you can ramp up the temperature and get more creativity out of it, but whenever I’ve asked it for ideas or tried to bounce ideas around, I tend to get milquetoast yes-man type results, or the ideas it comes up with are generic and obvious.
Also with each day that passes it’s getting easier to notice the lack of “AI invents/solves something new” type stories.There was the one where it came up with a word game, which was pretty cool, and we know it can invent stories.
But it doesn’t yet seem to be producing an abundance of new ideas for things like new features, business innovations, etc.Maybe it does for other people.
Maybe it will start doing it for me soon.But for now, it doesn’t seem able to do that.
So – programmers who just want to play code golf, be ready for that to become more of a hobby than a job.But for programmers who always wished they had more hours in the day to get through all their ideas, it will enable them to create a lot more value and that value will in turn create demand for yet more value-add on top of that.So it should be a virtuous circle, in theory.
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The programming profession has always demanded that developers operate at higher and higher levels of abstraction and produce more/bigger/faster.I expect LLMs to continue that trend – a tool to get more done at a bigger scale.
For big, complex, programs I work on (multiple C programs up to 100k LoC) it’s hard to frame a question in such a way that it doesn’t need to know details of the codebase.For peripheral stuff it’s pretty useful as a quick way to get some cut’n’paste code (‘write me code to read the load average on linux and log it to a file every second’ – I know exactly how to do that, but it’s a faster typer).
So initial take is it’s a very useful new tool – so sort-of a corollary, people who learn how to use it quickly and well are going to have an advantage in the short term.And even if/when everyone uses it, some people are going to be better at using it (i.e.
asking the right question – like I find myself groping around for, when asking it about UK company law earlier today).
We expect the economy to get way worse as de-dollarization seems to be looming on the horizon, and preparing now.
As for why, my best theory is that writing code isn’t the hard part, but in fact one of the easier parts of the job, much like how drafting isn’t really the hard part when it comes to engineering or architecture.
It’s totally possible to make LLMs write actually good code that can be maintained using normal software engineering practices.
Of course there will still be a need for a human touch, such as knowing limitations of LLMs and possible workarounds and understanding business requirements.Such productivity boost may even create more jobs as products will become cheaper and faster to create, hence more new markets will be explored.The pie might also get bigger not smaller.
If so, I imagine engineers will be more productive with AI (and wages will go down, or at least stop growing somewhat), but the demand for software engineers will stay strong.
If not, then engineers being more productive would mean fewer engineers can meet the global demand for software engineering work and I would expect to see the demand for software engineers reduced.
And yet developers have always been in demand.
We just have a lot more programs now, and a lot of very-similar and/or niche programs.All the random libraries on npm, Rust, Haskell, etc.the various crypto-currencies, static/dynamic webpage builders, 3 separate JavaScript runtimes.People start businesses and actually get funding for these libraries.And it seems like a lot of companies want almost the exact same product, some “business solution” or “cloud solution”, but they have specific reasons existing solutions aren’t acceptable (performance? security? some feature?), so they pay $200k+ salaries for developers to build them.
But will this always be the case? Even ignoring GPT4, we don’t really need these developers who are working on niche and similar projects; we are having a harder time getting hired right now with the economic downturn.And still, it’s entirely possible this growth has a limit, and GPT4 will make developers turn ideas into working products faster than people can come up with them.
I feel like this is more programmers realizing they have to become the 10x they were told was a myth to survive.Which is kinda true! BUT what also is true using AI tools will make them that if they learn to use them, now they need to know security inside and out, systems design etc.Higher level concepts way above a code monkey’s pay grade, now will be expectations, all the theory side is going to be much more important.
But we don’t use punched cards anymore.
We don’t write low level machine code anymore, unless we must or we are into that.We don’t have to use complex and difficult programming languages when we can do the same in a few lines of Python that abstract everything.And now we don’t have to write most of the high level code as we can have a loose conversation with the machine.
I’m expecting that the demand for good coders will stay high, to use these new AIs, fix the bugs, check the outputs, and build much more ambitious projects.
However the demand for cheap coders that write simple applications will disappear and be replaced by machines.
The humans will do other activities instead, in software development or not..
