Obs.: I’m using “[REDACTED]” to not look like I’m doing some advertising.
Sorry to bring AI subject here, but I’m terrified by how efficient AI generation code became in the past few years.
Last year I was seeing a designer community with desperate people because of AI generative images, many people hopeless because how more convenient it is, way more than paying for a freelance to do something reasonable.
Now I’m with the same feeling as a programmer. I just decided to take a look into AI a little deeper, as I don’t use it very often. So I tried the recent [REDACTED] editor, which is just [REDACTED] with AI agent features (an AI that does more than just generate text, it create files, make decisions etc…). And I must say, programming jobs will be reduced a lot.
The app was able to do a entire module of a side project, integrating with another API and following the same conventions I did. It worked in the first try. It created all the files and everything.
Many people bring this argument: AI won’t replace devs, we’ll always need devs to check code etc. Ok, I agree with that, but if before we needed 5 devs to do a job, now we just need 1 to revise all the job an AI did alone equivalent to 5 devs programming.
So, there’s no way it won’t impact the devs market. I’m being optimistic here, because the future is still unclear, but if it keeps the same rate we can reduce the dev jobs to near zero.
This is what every executive always wanted, get rid of devs, and now they can. Devs were always an inconvenience to executives, but they couldn’t get the job done without devs.
Now they can focus all money on AI research until it gets nearly perfect, reduce the skill needed to deal with code and build projects without too much knowledge, and get rid of many devs too.
It’s undeniable that AI jobs WILL be affected in a negative way. I’m seriously considering leaving this area and use programming just as a hobby, nothing more.
There will always be stuff to code. Even if the task of coding itself were completely removed, being able to use AI for coding will require knowledge of the subject matter and an ability to express one’s needs.
If you go onto any bug list, most people are unable to express the most basic information to dill in a bug report form. “What are you using”, “What did you do”, “What did you expect to happen”, “What happened instead”. Just that. It doesn’t require any technical knowledge, just the rudimentary ability to describe events and desires and yet they still fail.
AI assisted coding requires the ability to understand ambiguity too. “Solve world hunger” can be solved by killing all of humanity so that nobody is hungry anymore, putting porridge in front of evey human being until the end of time, hooking up every human to a feeding tube and harnessing energy from it, modifying human genes to not know what hunger is, or rebuilding society to give everybody equal access to nutrition that they enjoy.