Coding won’t exist in 5 years? You might be right. 

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software engineers got so obsessed with optimizing, we began to optimize ourselves out of the industry

I am about to graduate with a CS degree and the thought of losing a career I haven't even started terrifies me

It's funny how programmers managed to cause chaos on lot of careers, and now they're doing it to themselves

I used to work in an accounting team producing invoices, tax schedules, policy documents (real fun shit). Overtime, I noticed that more and more software updates were coming in, making it easier to auto-generate these documents. We were a whole department of well over 20 people when I joined. By the time I left after just 2 years, there were just 3 "quality control" checkers. Personally, I never liked the job anyway and was glad to be moving on. But the worst part was there were people who had been doing that their whole life. Some had been at the company 30+ years. They didn't know anything else. My best advice to anyone worried about job security is make hay while the sun still shines and have a plan B.

Currently halfway through my bachelor in software engineering. Decided to get back to school at 27 and pursue it. How did I get like the worst timing ever wtf

I would like to offer some solace to those new CS graduates who commented on this video about their fears. I had only 5 years in the print industry before all jobs dissapeared in that industry, but what I knew about typography and layout was not obsolete. Once I learned some coding I could transition to that field and utilize what I knew. Also, a lot of what it means to do a job well is universal. I'm not going to go into particulars, but basically being a good worker is a skill of it's own, and learning is as well. Whatever the future holds, I bet you will be well equipped to handle it.

I'm literally in my first year of a CS degree and all I have ever wanted was to become a Software Engineer, gain tons of experience and within 10 years get a really well paid job. It actually sickens me that this is more than likely never going to happen now and I'm not going to lie, its seriously effecting my mental health.

Just many months ago everyone told kids to learn coding and now today adults and CS students are being told to quit college and coding? WTF?

If AI is writing software better than humans, we have a much bigger problem than being out of a job.

As a new dev still looking for job #1, it's really worrying.

I'd just like to offer some words of encouragement, I have been a professional software developer for almost 10 years now, and currently use Chat GPT to assist with bugs, issues and writing skeleton code. I can tell you that it is very far from replacing a human developer. It gets a lot of things wrong and more importantly, it doesn't "connect the dots" like a human can. I'm what I consider a below average developer technically, yet I've almost 10x my salary over the past 10 years and have a great career. We aren't going anywhere, this is just another tool to help us do our jobs, if anything, this will offer developers more opportunity. So if you're currently studying CS or similar, keep going. And if you want any further more personal advice, feel free to get in touch. Cheers, good luck!

As a student who’s about to graduate college really soon with a CS degree. I’m terrified. I basically have about 2-3 years to save as much money as I can and save that money to get into another major 😭 nursing school here I come

As a CS graduate of 1 year, my life has only recently started becoming stable with a moderate job and positive career prospects... except the advent of AI has shattered that image of stability for me. I can't predict how the following years will go, how the industry I've spent years studying for will change and morph, and when the value I've built up for myself as a software engineer will decrease or, quite possibly, become irrelevant. I thought the toughest and most doubtful years of my life were behind me, but the coming years look much more difficult to struggle through than I could have predicted :(

I just started my programming career a year and a half ago after a very long time of not knowing what to do with my life. I finally found something that I feel like is worth doing, how ironic.

The joys of higher unemployment and lower wages await us all. I think the technology will make a few people very rich, and lot of people very poor. It's all very well painting a picture of progress, but I'd argue it isn't progress if everyone is on minimum wage and struggling to find a purpose in life. The only thing AI truly achieves is putting opportunity and wealth into the hands of an even smaller group of people. No other technology has ever existed which has the potential to replace so many working people in such a short space of time. Comparing a printing press to AI is like comparing a bullet to a nuclear bomb. We're charging head first into an economic melt down and a dystopia.

This will be my 18th year developing software. I fully admit that the thought of a future where writing code is an obsolete practice makes me... If nothing else, sad. I personally have a blazing passion for learning the nuances of these technical languages and applying them to invent things that haven't been built before. I've heard many people mention that in the future, knowing how to prompt AI software will become a critical skill, and I believe that. Not really sure where I'm going with all this, but I guess I'm likely going to have to learn how to deal with my passion becoming obsolete.

I'm a full time senior dev and Chat GPT is not only assisting me in my current role, but it is also allowing me to rapidly develop side projects that I didn't dream of working on a couple of months ago let alone last year. Integrating it as part of a codebase or a workflow is the last missing piece before everything clicks in to place. Most of my time is now is already spent ensuring that ChatGPT's code and suggestions are correct instead of actually writing code in the first place.

I like how you address the possible mid/long-term impacts of AI on the industry while so many have been dismissing them by just showing the early errors with ChatGPT. It might not be nice to hear but it's important to talk about.

If you don’t have any junior developers anymore within a certain amount of time you won’t have any senior developers. They don’t magically pop out of the ground.

The entire software development process involves not only techniv skills but also a ton of collaboration between multiple parties. It feels like the automation of software development is going to be one of the last things to happen. If it does happen It would logically follow that everything else is going to be automated at that point.

This has been a topic for some times now, and people didn't care as much until now because we didn't have something like GTP 4 in place for anyone to access. That being said, there will always be a need for programmers, or at least people who can read and understand code. I agree with everything you said, only thing I would say differently is that it will take 15 years for our industry to change drastically in comparison to now. I feel like cybersecurity personnel will be the least affected in the long run but hard to predict anything at this point. The AI has to fuck up once for it to be considered unreliable and let humans continue their work, and I believe it will fuck up at some point in some way, at least for now.

I'm fascinated and terrified of this. I only had 1 year of professional web development experience before I got laid off. I've been looking for another job since then and that was a year ago. I gave everything I had to learn programming so I could make more money and build cool things but I'm struggling so bad right now and it sounds like it's only gonna get worse for someone like me

I think we've forgotten something major in all this. There's a huge portion of the IT market that exists just to put bums on seats. They actively endorse tech frameworks that require more programmers they can hire out. They will probably fight tooth and nail against this until more AI experts are required than the programmers it was set to erase.

For the people studying CS, hopefully this puts you at rest. As the future is un-predictable anyway, you should definitely continue to study what you enjoy studying. There are also many students who enjoy studying philosophy or ancient oriental languages, although there are almost no "jobs" out there for philosophers or for people who can read Ancient Assyrian. But surely also they will find their place in life --- somehow, somewhere --- after they have studied what they have enjoyed. It also helps to view the so-called "Computer Science" as a broader Methodology of systematic logical problem-solving. Edsger Dijkstra once famously said: "Calling our science >Computer Science< is like calling medical surgery >Knife Science

It is scary because these ai tools keep on learning,so i am not sure if it is possible to be 100% sure they won't take even the senior dev jobs

I am graduate student in bioinformatics and a lot of my cohort have been worried about this. I definitely have the same sentiment as you, that AI will only make our lives easier. I look at it as a calculator, a tool. At the end of the day, there needs to be someone to provide the analysis.

finally someone says it out loud. Junior devs will be hurt. For almost every profession there will be VERY FEW entry-level jobs. HOW DOES ANYONE GET STARTED!?!?! you have to go from Zero to Hero before the job interview.

The main problem we will have to deal with in the future is the complete replacement of juniors in all aspects of our lives. I had the opportunity to try the GPT-4, and I am intimidated. It started with my question about German grammar. The AI explained one of the tenses in German to me better and faster than my teacher (who has been a teacher for over 15 years). In my opinion, right now we need to focus on producing managers and developers so that the world economy doesn't collapse so quickly. This reminds me of the Great Depression in most countries, while the poor developed countries survived (as they always did). I think we will destroy each other and the 4th "world war" will be like a dogfight in the dark streets.

'Software App Administrator'. That may be a new job: an AI writes code, a senior dev makes sure it does what it's supposed to and reports to a board during a boring meeting with money people. I think you're on something Forrest. thanks for this video :)

I'm still going through my CS degree and pursuing a promising career in the industry and to me. Yes, it will make things like getting a job much more complicated than it already is, but I don't see a point in worrying and freaking out about it. it will happen with or without me whether I like it or not. so to me, I see it as an interesting challenge to overcome just like every challenge I had to overcome to get where I am today, and I choose to welcome it

I think a lot of these opinions were made before chat 4. Honestly I don't think people really considered chat 3 to be that crazy, they just hyped it up way too much. But with how quickly chat 4 came out its definitely a question of when, when will it take our jobs now cuz the improvement is major and it came really quick

The only Job that remains for programmers is to create AI's, not unless AI starts creating other AI's😂💀

As someone considering CS in September late in life (30) - this is demotivating. I worked blue collar jobs for my 20's and it was hell. I enjoy the type of work as a hobby or on my own stuff, but as a career - no way. So, here I am making the change and it feels like I'll hit a wall again..

We were saying the same about self driving systems. But the edge mistakes we see now in chat gpt and the rest, may be more difficult to fix than he assumes.

I fully agree that there will be less people writing code in the future. Another option would be that the same amount of Software Engineers write 10x more code, thereby solving problems. I guess it depends on the market demand for software and how companies actually use AI in the process.

Not knowing how to read code relying on AI, can turn into a situation like kids these days not being able to read cursive writing. I think this alarm in the tech industry will dismay many people from learning to code seeking other industries making coders more valuable in the long run.

So what this taught me is that senior devs will still be necessary. Going to work super-hard to get there then! Thank you. 🙏🏻

I am currently a CS major and the idea of AI making software engineers obsolete makes me nervous. I am seriously considering changing my major despite my infinite love for computers.

I feel as if our future generations won't be coding manually as we do, but rather at incredible speeds with the use of language models or something far more powerful

It is really interesting that a few years ago IT was the most lucrative field and now students as myself are worried about finding work after graduation.

You know... I've caught myself getting wrapped up in my pride that I can code and that I think my identity is wrapped up in that some, but I have realized that my ability to code is not what defines me. I am capable of doing different things than coding. I think I've just become kind of complacent over time in my work and I've let coding define me, but coding is not the end all be all. There will be something that comes after coding, which hopefully I'm capable of, and can do to support my family. And then there will be something after that, and after that... We'll keep evolving as humans, and that's okay. It's just about rolling with the punches as they come. But that can be hard.

I think there will be more programmers by the end of the decade by a longshot. Generative AI is just more abstraction. More abstraction has historically only increased the access of programming. What you're going to see is that Jr devs spend more time fiddling with the code to do something exact. Not fiddling with prompts. Maybe a Sr dev will run the prompt, but they're then going to send the output to the Jr dev to make sure it does X, Y, and Z. Passes tests A, B, and C. If these things don't happen, try to fix it. If you fail to fix it, send it back to the Sr dev. Regular folks might setup their own automations with generative programming, rather than read "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" to do it. But in no way do I see there being less programmers in the future. I only see less burnout in our futures, tbh.

There is a lot of generalization around this topic. Highly educated and skilled individuals will always have a job, albeit it may change. Jobs requiring physical presence are safe as well, as long as there are no robots to replace them.

I partially agree with you. I dont think programmers will ever become "project managers" only, because there are a lot of problems that require a lot more work than just writing code: perhaps you need to implemment a complex algorithm to ensure efficiency, or you have to use math to solve it and then code your answer. Thats why i think that until TRUE AGI is created there will be a need for programmers (and honestly, if AGI is created, then it will be capable of replacing EVERY job) and i dont see us doing it, at least for the next 20 years. But i do think that there will be a higher skill barrier: if a company needed 10 software engineers to perform a task, now it only needs 3 REALLY good ones to do it.

Let's keep ourselves improving and searching for growth and let AI do its thing, do not waste your energy worrying about the future. We might be dead in a minute or two. Just chase the best version of yourself while you are alive because what is going to happen will happen.

Can't wait to come back to this video in 5 years when programming jobs haven't been taken over by AI!

I'm not a professional software developer but I love coding as an hobbyist and the AI taking over the coding job sounds really scary for the most of them out there..😢

Bruh losing your job may be the last thing you should be worried about if AI becomes way better in coding than humans

At 1st, I believe you're correct. There will eventually be less need for developers at around 3-5 years. After 5-10 years, there will eventually be less need for project managers that monitor those processes. The difference in comparing tractors or kiosks is that those cannot reproduce themselves. This CAN (eventually). It can literally take on new info and learn and eventually create a better version of itself. There is really no comparison other than human beings. We are in unknown territory here.

Rule one of programming “Never copy and paste code you don’t know what it does”. The problem with AI code is, even if it could paste it into a repo and deploy, you are relying on the person asking the AI to get all the requirements correct, which never happens, also if you can’t read the code and don’t know what it does, there will bugs.

I have been thinking about this a lot as well and come to the same conclusion. There will still be a need for software developers but the job will be different and focus more on the high level overall problem, architecture, etc. Someone will need to write the tasks in Jira with the descriptions and possibly unit tests and let the AI try until it gets the tests to pass. Probably the developer role will look more like an automation engineer role or devops. There is still going to be value in knowing how to write code because at some point someone may need to open the hood and take a look at the engine. Anyway, I don't think getting your CS degree is a waste of time. You will need to get comfortable with change and embrace new technology. Your day to day will just be a little different than you had envisioned.

I think AI like ChatGPT can definitely expedite and even replace the need for additional staff. However, in order to successfully program an app with AI you still need an understanding of the fundamentals and syntax of the language you're programming in. If you know how to program then AI makes the job almost automated lol I'm not scared. I see this as the equalizer allowing smaller companies to compete against the AAA companies without having to match the budget

Thing is, there are millions of programmers writing code especially designed to run in current OS, PLs and frameworks and that basecode writen by people understanding the idea behind the framework, PLs, etc, is what's currently "feeding" the AIs. So, the question is, how would AIs be able to write code in Javascript if there wasn't billions of programs already written by javascript developers to use as a basecode to train the AI in the first place? I could imagine some genius non-AI programmer creating something awesome and innovative, game changer style (let's say a new incredible game engine, better than any other engine the AI was trained to develope for), as it happens literally every year... How will companies adapt and compete with innovation if there's no training data to teach the AI how to catch up, because there are not programmers out there anymore?

For all the people that are worried about their job / graduation: It's very likely that in the near future we are going to give to IA a part of our work, but keep in consideration that Computer Science is not only coding.

RIP to the people wanting to become a programmer as of today. We use chatGTP at work and our boss has put a lot of entry level people out of jobs already...

As a software developer apprentice who wants to become an entrepreneur in the field of bioinformatics in the future that's great news. In my opinion software development is just a tool to solve problems efficiently. Now that solving problems efficiently is becoming waaay more efficient, it means that I'll be able to save thousands of hours in learning programming and especially programming itself and invest that time into learning about biology and designing solutions. Additionally it will make starting a company in that field and especially scaling it more accessible than I could have ever dreamed about, because I won't need to hire many people (which would cost a lot), as in just a few years or months one person will be able to do the job of 10 or 100 people from today. My goal is not to secure my job. My goal is to solve problems and provide value in a market that's able and willing to pay for it so that I can solve more problems and provide more value to more people. And all I see are opportunities. 😊

I feel terrible for those of you who are being affected by this. If any of you would like to come over to the skilled trades, blue collar, then look into being and industrial electrician. I do electrical maintenance at Brown Forman in Louisville and make around 120k a year. The entire country is needing these jobs filled. I know the pay isn't as lucrative but that may change. I work on automation and robotics. It is a very easy job.

First of all, it's important to recognize that AI is still evolving. Ten years ago, people were predicting that self-driving cars would replace taxi drivers, but this hasn't happened yet. While AI can write code based on its training, it's unlikely that it will replace programmers in the future. Programming is a complex job that requires skills that can't be simulated, such as creativity and problem solving. Let's imagine that by 2050, AI has developed the ability to perform these complex tasks. However, this kind of technology will not be free, and only some companies will be able to afford it. Companies that can't afford AI will still need to hire real developers. It's important to remember that just because there are tools on the internet that can remove the background of a photo and make it ready for use as a thumbnail, this doesn't mean that thumbnail designers are obsolete. Creative and skilled designers will always be in demand. we shouldn't be afraid of AI taking over our jobs, including the jobs of developers. Instead, we should focus on adapting to new technologies and changing our skill sets as needed. If AI does become more prevalent in the software development industry, we can transition into AI-related fields such as machine learning, natural language processing, or data science. Furthermore, the development of AI technology will create new job opportunities that don't exist yet. For example, we may need AI developers to create and maintain these systems, as well as AI trainers to ensure that the AI is properly trained and working as intended. As long as we continue to learn and evolve alongside new technologies, we can continue to thrive in the workforce.

With the new release of GPT-4 and seeing how chatGPT is now on steroids, I find the line “software engineers won't become obsolete (yet) but heavily reduced” to be thought provoking (in a scary way) and kinda comforting at the same time

Here’s some advice, someone who understands computer science, coding, etc is going to be a better “prompter” than someone who doesn’t understand what a string or function is. Don’t quit computer science, if anything generative ai should light a fire under you.

I don't know what is sadder, the immediate future destruction of peoples lives or the death of an era. This is like the invention of the gun in the era of the Samurai.

I'm in the middle of a CS degree and it feels like exactly like you say in the video. Eventually the boring and repetitive tasks of programming will be replaced by AI, so in a few years time, there will be almost no need for junior devs. BUT, people with decent software development knowledge willing to develop their soft skills, are going to take up positions that require more of a human touch than a programming/analytical touch. Scrum Master positions, project management positions, and any position that also deals with the client side.

yeah, with GPT-4 already rolled out and turned to be much, much more precise and reliable, I just think this would happen quicker than many have thought. I am no-cs engineer, but I used to write simulation for my research and write code for my daily job, and imagined to switch my career to the IT industry. Now with the generative AI announcing the new era, I am also worried how I can get an entry-level job in the industry. Nevertheless, I think there must be a place for me. My goal is to learn how to build software to solve problems. It never says I need to learn how to write every function. We just need to solve the problem, perhaps, I can do that now without really going into the tech industry.

2015: Programmer is a professional googler 2025: Programmer is a professional ChatGPT Prompts

Interesting point you made about AI making coding more accessible, like how languages like Python made programming more accessible. I think it is worth pointing out that this lowering of the barrier-to-entry has historically created more programming jobs, not reduce them. The amount of “programming jobs” available has more to do with demands for computing in the overall economy, and I only see that keep exploding at speeds perhaps even AI can’t match.

Switch to CS major because there were no jobs in previous one. AI kills CS jobs. What do I even do now? I can't even work at McDonald's anymore because those are going to be fully automated as well.

damn, i was about to start learning web development, but when i watched a lot of videos like this I had doubts about this. I'm like really stuck, i have no idea what i want to do, what profession to choose, i don't even know what i like

Once AGI is developed, it's game over for everyone. Some estimate that will occur in a mere six years. I wish it were not the case, but I would not bet against it.

I think the next question is now what do we do? How can we get ahead of this change? I’m seeing a lot of people speculate on the end of software engineering but not many predicting how to get in front of it.

As a first year CS student this concern and even unknown over job potential is very scary. I currently have a minor in entrepreneurship, but am strongly considering changing it to a double major in case there is a major shift in the market upon graduating.

Here are some of my thoughts about this matter that I just wanted to share. It's lengthy -- you've been warned. I believe that there is an overlooked difference between the case of scribes being replaced by the printing press or weavers by the machinery and the prospect of programmers (or any people doing creative work, for that matter) being replaced by the AI. The former was possible due to the finite nature of the machinery. Once designed, it was possible to prove (not necessarily in the strict sense) that those machines are indeed going to work properly. The blueprints could be analyzed by the engineers, and the prototypes tested. It's important to note that in the case of machinery, extensive testing enables us to say with great confidence that it will perform well since the number of actions it performs is finite (even though the environment may vary). The same doesn't apply to AI at all. Even though the algorithms used for training are known, the final product (the model) is impossible to be tested properly given that the set of operations it performs is infinite (think of the number of possible user queries). I also believe that giving a strict mathematical proof of the correctness of the model (i.e. that it will always yield the correct answers) is impossible as well; I don't have a compelling argument for that right now. So, my main point is that whenever we need the confidence that the system will work properly, human insight is unavoidable. This means that we will still need people to be able to exhaustively analyze the AI's output. The knowledge of programming languages, system design and everything that we associate with programing is not going to lose in value.

I've been working with AI for years, and I'm sure that AI in programming will not replace software devs in the near future: 1. "AI does not have a creativity": AI only generalizes examples from a training data, it cannot come up with creative solutions. There will be always a need for a talanted dev, that can create more optimized solutions for the existing problem and thus make a product faster and convenient for a user than a one from competitors; 2. "Garbage in - garbage out": AI was trained on a huge amount of public data. Some samples of code may not be optimized, some may contain a CVE, and other does not work at all. If an AI was trained on a bad code - it will write a bad solution. And so if a dev just copy-paste a code from AI, without knowing how it works, there will be a bad consequences for both programmer and a company. I believe AI will automate boring stuff like writing a boilerplate code, but it will not replace programmers completely

I've spent about 17 years in software development and information technology, and another 10 ish teaching computer science in college. Not only will this significantly reduce the number of developers soon, I also see many teachers (including myself). However, the ability to SOLVE problems will always have value. All STEM fields that develop your critical thinking skills will differentiate you in a culture where many don't seem to want to think for themselves anymore.

I'm literally about to start a CS degree, and I already feel so unmotivated because my skills won't be useful in 5 years. Damn it.

As someone who got into programming through unconventional means (Environmental Science major, got into programming through GIS), and was hoping to use programming as a leg up for my job search, I'm genuinely very considered if this newfound interest and skill I have will even be worth it in the end.

I agree that automation of all kinds is not going to replace all workers, at least not anytime soon. But problems arise way before we get anywhere close to that. The first issue is just disruption. When disruption occurs over very long periods of time, people have the ability to adjust. When disruption occurs rapidly, not so easy. It is not possible for people to "retool" and decide to get into completely new fields and that assumes that there are jobs available in other fields. The second issue is that people will be replaced and I believe rapidly. How do you think the US would function when you have a real unemployment of 20%,30% or 50%. We have seen recessions and depressions come and go. But those were due to economic issues that eventually resolve over time. They were not due to jobs that are gone and are never going to come back. It has been true in the past that as jobs were lost, other jobs "popped" up in their place. I think it is a mistake to believe that just because something always corrected itself, it will continue to do so in the future. And I think there is plenty of evidence that many of the jobs that were lost in the past, were not replaced by jobs that were equal in compensation.

I can see the ai replacing very entry-level programmers but I doubt AI will have the problem-solving and creative capabilities needed to actually design a program anytime soon

To summarize my painfully long comment: Any time the mechanics of supply and demand change too rapidly for an economy system to adjust to, the result is people dropping lower down the economic ladder. If too many people drop too far in too short a time, the instability caused becomes irreconcilable and cannot be corrected without extreme authoritative controls, or a rebirth from the ashes of its demise. At this moment, AI threatens to cause exactly that, and at a moment when economies already appear to be tremendously unstable for a plethora of other factors I'm sure you're aware of. I explain further why I think this below. Many economies will not survive the swift change in job demand that the productivity gains of AI will create. Its impact will be proportional to the percent of employment a given country has in jobs whose purpose is to create a digital product. For countries that lead the digital goods economy of the world, this will be devastating. For countries that struggle to compete in this respect, it will be a massive boon. AI will crash the market value of digital goods, just as has happened with any commodity that has experienced rapid decline of scarcity (due to likewise rapid gains in efficiency), and there will be a jobs crisis as a result just like there was during the industrial revolution. The value will crash because AI will facilitate the rapid and cheap creation of quality products. AI doesn't actually have to replace a single job. If supply outpaces demand, then companies will cut the number of jobs. This is nothing new. Additional automation and gains in efficiency have always been decreasing the cost of goods, but it is usually gradual enough that the economic demand for quantity and quality keeps pace. The sudden and drastic productivity gains soon to be caused by AI will utterly drown the value of so many jobs, that it will cause a widespread employment crisis. There simply will not be enough jobs available for the number of people who will need to entirely change sector and have little to no skills outside of computer tasks. This is not just a 'them' problem either. It will be everyone's problem who lives in a country with a large percentage workforce creating digital goods. Remember this includes all media, software, logistics, communications, design, anything that scales with multiple people doing the same intellectual job to create a non-physical product. That can be a lot of people in a very short time creating huge demand for jobs in sectors they are under-skilled in. Now we have the opposite problem of suddenly too much demand and not enough supply, and this is the much more potentially dangerous half of the scenario because it sets the scene for people falling out of the economy all together. When this happens, you end up in a chicken and egg kind of situation. When demand is high, supply must rise to meet it. If the demand is for jobs, then the supply is actually also demand: demand for the products resulting from any given job. How does that demand increase? If it's demand for a necessity, it comes from an increase in working population. If it's demand for a luxury, it comes from an increase in working population with disposable income. See the conundrum? Unfortunately there is no great solution for this. Either the government steps in and takes an extreme amount of control over the economy (control which might end up being permanent), or the economy can be let to crash and stabilize naturally (at the whims of basic rational self-interest). Arguing which is better is futile, both cause great loss, and we are not in control of which happens. If you don't think this could happen, you need only look at history. Same song, different instruments. You can protect yourself from the most negative of the effects that could come of this. 1) Learn practical skills such as how to cook, garden, and maintain the things you rely upon. 2) Make close friends with people who have practical skills that you dont have and bond with them over the things you can do that combine those skills. What I've outlined in this post is not destined to come true; I do not claim to know the future. However, given the initial conditions I outlined are reached, I have confidence in the logic of my arguments and it would have a high probability of unfolding unless things began to drive in the other direction in very short order. Suffice to say I believe we will see very soon what direction this all will go.

It's really worrying. For now it's a fun hobby I enjoy and I think it's more a productive way for me to spend my time. It IS depressing though because it's already hard to get a foot in the door in the industry let alone trying to learn (with the elitism of stack overflow) so it seems I just got into it too late. WELP back to playing video games and waiting for the sweet release that only death can bring I guess.

The more I see how AI is _already_ being used in its current released state, the more I agree; the skills needed are already becoming much more high-level & will continue in that trend at an ever-increasing rate

I mean, it will be reduced, but you'll always need juniors in order to have new seniors, at least in the beginning, colleges will need to adapt before the industry can fully erase the junior stage. But I also believe 10 years is what it takes.

It's actually funny why people concentrate on AI taking coding jobs. AI will first take simpler jobs, jobs which don't require a lot of thinking processes. Programming itself is about solving problems, complex problems to be clear. Other jobs like accounting etc. doesn't require a lot of problem solving. As far as I believe we AI is far from being that smart.

Ironically a lot of manual and blue collar jobs are hard to automate as the precise movements are hard to configure accurately and in a cost efficient manner

What about companies with sensitive user data? Any concerns regarding privacy ? I think there are more things there to think regarding AI. I do understand and agree in a lot of points but I think there is always something people haven't think yet. I've noticed that people were saying that developers job will reduced because of Shopify, Wordpress, Magento etc.. But I think there is still more thought into that. Furthermore, one thing I do believe is that the thing that will make massive difference in that industry now is, how much deep your knowledge goes. People with deep knowledge of software engineer concepts are more likely to survive

I have been a software developer for 15+ years...I really miss the days at the start of the millennium when developing software was...having to build stuff from scratch. There was no Github, Stack overflow and no SCRUM. It was a challenge which made it fun. What was the question again? Oh yes, coding in 5 years...with the rate of progress it gets harder and harder to make any meaningful predictions about the future, but I think that writing code will completely be done by AI and that even a lot of the design/architecture stuff including selecting the best languages/frameworks is left to AI.

I believe we are shifting into Assisted Software Engineering now. Sure, there will most likely be changes to staffing on some of the tech companies. But anyone who now learns how to effectively utilize these new set of tools to their advantage, will become sought after in these next years. It don't matter wether you are a "junior" dev or "senior" dev, your ability to adapt is everything.

What tools can actually deal with real codebases? I mean yeah GPT can write blocks of code, but it doesn't know your entire codebase to tie all that together. Every AI programming video I've seen involves "program something from scratch" which just isn't what most developers are doing. Programming from scratch is pretty easy using basic examples. Most programs and websites are a lot more complicated than "draw X and Y with a Z background." Is there a tool right now that you can just read in something like the entire Linux kernel source code and the AI can understand all the functions that it uses and utilize those to add extra code? Will it know what file to put the extra code in?

you missing the big puzzle here how AI can catch up with the latest tech that moves rapidly e,g best practices and so on

I suspect you're spot on, I'm a PhD student doing simulation software development in c++, I didn't even know how to code when I started, I only just about understand the basics and can just barely handle & and * references with some guesswork. But already with GPT3.5 I started to be able to code at a decent level as I understand the over all thing I'm trying to do, that basically let me work 10+ times faster (not an exaggeration), now GPT4 is speeding that up even further. And most importantly I always have someone (gpt) to ask when I run in to issues, and that's invaluable.

I'm currently working with poor database (as an intern) which makes me wonder if the age of AI will not introduce really flawed design as well as security risks. One of my "database" class was honestly closer to a math class and I'm really hoping to learn more in the future as there's probably a lot I don't see yet. Though it really opened my eyes. For that reason I am not too scared. The truth is anyone can code these days. AI or not, WYSIWYG tools have been developing steadily. Frameworks and serverless are already abstracring all the details. To me, coding was already long dead. We are simply lowering the barrier to entry even more which means there's gonna so many more people not knowing the heck they're doing. Clearly that means there's gonna be so many opportunities when it comes to assessing designs as well as mitigating vulnerabilities left by a lack of knowledge of the nitty gritty. I consider AI is the opportunity to focus on modeling more.

I think your synopsis is mostly correct. Programmers won't disappear but what it will do is create 10x devs and phase out those who are slow to learn. That being said there are some serious issues standing in the way of ai. One of them is computing power. chatgpt 3 was estimated to use about 100x the computing resources for a single query compared to a google search, I can only imagine that numbers goes up as the models become more advanced and their 'page context' grows (gpt4 is 50 pages or something). Right now it's just not scalable for every worker to be using it constantly, we literally don't have the compute power. Next is the models, no matter how hard we try we can't stop baking bias and quite frankly errors into these models. After all they are trained on human generated data. While these early errors are amusing, and will surely get better over time, they will never be eliminated. Ai will be confidently and strikingly wrong at times, so having the basic understanding of what should be happening will still be important. Last is reiterating on one of your points. There's no way with how ai presently works for it to be a hands off thing because software development isn't repetitive in the same way items coming down a conveyer belt is. Someone will need to drive it, so you better go learn how to drive stick haha.

There are many trends. And we can investigate this question from different aspects. I have watched 3 youtube video and read 4 article about this topic. I believe your point of view was the closest to the possible realization. The trends that I mentioned are the automation, the crypto currencies, the aging society, and the world with a growing China pole. These are all have great effects on several kind of labor markets. What do you think?

The reason why I'm not really worried about things like this is because most companies operate like dinosaurs. I feel like AI will only invade huge tech companies (which I don't care to work for anyways) but a ton of the smaller/mid-sized companies are either not going to have the resources or even know how to integrate something like this...I work for a billion dollar company that still relies heavily on Excel lol. The job is still decent, though

Packages, frameworks, and programming languages all evolve over time, meaning the dataset AI is trained on would become outdated often. It needs software engineers to continuously give new answers for the latest packages, libraries and languages so that it can be trained on a good dataset. Unless all of this shit stagnates and we’ve developed the ultimate programming language/library/framework or whatever, GPT isn’t doing anything but facilitating our productivity. Try asking it to generate a program that uses a library that’s been renovated recently, hell even copy and paste to it the README of that library. Watch how half the code it ends up generating is just plain wrong. This is why software engineers are needed, and the paradigm shift in soft eng in terms of how we’re currently using chatGPT to enhance our productivity is how it’ll be used until AGI is produced I believe.

This sentiment has been repeated throughout history. I agree with you. The part that people are missing is that it means that companies are going to be able to produce more software faster. That also has the benefit of lowering the cost barrier for startups for new software companies. The jobs will still be there, and perhaps developers may not be able to demand the high salaries,but it also will create another industry. Gotta adapt.

I agree. AI will gradually replace every junior's task always aiming to higher tasks

maybe a future where programming becomes like a niche skill that everyone is taught in school , pretty much the same skill that you have to write an essay on a topic, now you can just ask the ai to make the code and ask it to change it in any way you want. Like you said, basic knowledge is enough and no need to understand the complex processes behind it. a team of 20 programmer would be reduced to like 2 or 3. Same goes to any other sectors as well. Seeing some posts on my fb feed about how chat gpt4 made and launched an amazing marketing where it did all content writing and boosting. So a lot of other sectors are gonna change too. Sucks since I am in college studying IT :(

What happens in a world where humans have little to contribute. Robotic advancement and AI seem to be on track to surpass everything we can do. How does an economy operate when most people have nothing of value to trade. The only valuable resources will be natural resources and physical space. Any ideas on how this works?

My question is...what the fuck would be there left to do after we reach technological singularity?