Claude Moore wrote:Some colleagues of mine are quite afraid that AI in general will replace programmers.
For me, it isn't a fear I feel.
I agree with this myself. I've heard some manager types say they expect to be able to fire most developers in a few years and just pay someone to copy-paste from a GPT box. Yeah, right--I don't see that at all.
These so-called AI are okay at cranking out simple isolated code blocks fast, yes. But that's not even close to everything developers need to do. In fact that code monkey stuff is the EASY part of development. To "replace developers" they'll need to do LOTS more.
Let's see them take a large pre-existing project with one or two dozen subprojects, modify it to implement requirements from customers who don't even fully understand what they want the software to do, modify dependencies or update the build, and deploy that thing to a cloud environment with zero downtime without bankrupting the "employer". Oh, and also figure out what to do when random environmental stuff like the network breaks down temporarily (something which
never happens in IT, right?). Heck with a lot of these old projects, even getting the build to work correctly can be a challenge sometimes. Good luck, bots!
Maybe some day this stuff will become irrelevant and these ML tools will be able to do something that negates the need for most developers (not all), but I'm not convinced it's coming before I've retired.