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It feels like this article was not written by a programmer, and it feels like a number of the commenters are not professional engineers. What part of a programm
by ken47 3y ago
It feels like this article was not written by a programmer, and it feels like a number of the commenters are not professional engineers. What part of a programmer jobs can AI realistically replace in the near term?
For the sake of argument, let’s say it could replace the coding part cost effectively. Can it still do all the other parts? Take ambiguous requirements and seek clarity from design, product, etc. (instructing an AI to a sufficient degree to build a complex feature could almost be a coding task itself). Code reviews. Deal with random build failures. Properly document the functionality so that other programmers and stakeholders can understand. Debug and fix production issues. And that’s just a subset.
Realistically, in the future there will be a long phase of programmers leveraging AI to be more efficient before there’s any chance that AI can effectively replace a decent programmer.
This will be an advantage to engineers who think on the more abstract side of the spectrum. The “lower level” programming tasks will be consumed first.
- FeepingCreature 3y agoThe thing about GPT is that it has approximate knowledge of nearly everything. It makes errors, but the errors are seemingly uncorrelated with human errors. And it knows stuff that I could take hours to search for, especially as Google becomes more and more useless. Personally, I use it for scripting and as an executive function aid.
- Closi 3y agoI suspect automated code reviews and doing high-quality automatic documentation (i.e. better than current standards in most projects) will be fully within the capabilities of LLMs soon. Fixing random build failures will probably follow... So then the question is what % of a programmers job might be taken by this, and does the remaining % require a different skillset. There are programmers that are great at coding, but complain loudly when the business gives slightly ambiguous requirements because they see their job as coding, not clarifying business rules. This group are more likely to be impacted than the programmers who will happily work in ambiguous situations to understand the business requirements.
- ken47 3y agoBoth code review and documentation require architectural knowledge to execute properly for a large app. This is not within the reach of current AI, and won’t be for a long time.
- pacomerh 3y agothat's right, but at some degree it could actually help code review in a slightly higher level. Maybe detecting bad patterns and practices that are not in reach for a linting utility.
- padjo 3y agoI haven’t seen an AI tool that can take a Figma mock up and some fuzzy requirements and turn that into real code in an existing codebase unaided by humans. Given what I’ve seen of current AI tools that still seems a long way away.
- dieselgate 3y agoIndeed. It's one thing to implement a UI as defined in a mock, for example, but the UX can be totally undefined and open to interpretation.
- aerhardt 3y agoThe article was totally written by a programmer though, what would make you say that?
- disqard 3y agoLike many other communities, programming has historically had its share of gatekeeping, and it's often easy to forget that "programming" spans a wide range of abilities and skill levels. So, while GP might be technically correct in some narrow sense, I would be less quick to judge the OP article author. Some years hence, anyone who is not actively building (as opposed to using) one of these LLMs might be dismissed as "not a real programmer" (because by then, that will be the only form of programming in existence).
- aerhardt 3y agoThe article’s author is a professional programmer, I don’t think anyone in their right mind would ever say that that’s not a programmer. I think the comment OP just screwed up and either merely skimmed the article or confused the author with the author’s friend who is not a programmer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]