With AI looming, is there still space for new coders?
With AI looming, is there still space for new coders?
For some background, I originally wanted to break into programming back when I was in college but drifted more into desktop tech support and now systems administration. SysAdmin work is draining me, though, and I want to pick back up programming and see if I can make a career out of it, but industry seems like it could be moving in a direction to rely on AI for coding. Everything I've heard has said AI is not there yet, but if it's looking like it hits a point where it reaches an ability to fully automate coding, should I even bother? Am I going to be obsolete after a year? Five years?
Other than maybe a few very rote, boilerplate types of development, all this shit about replacing coders is almost entirely noise made by either the wishful thinking of oligarchs or credulous repetition of that wishful thinking by clueless journalists.
But it's still a pretty rough time to be just getting into tech, just because of the state of the job market.
The real question here is: how much "coding work" is there left to do?
Currently, the bottleneck is available developers (barring short term problems). Even if AI would make every developer 30% more efficient, there would still be work to do. But there will be a point, where this tipps over. At some point, there's no additional demand anymore. We just don't know, when this will happen. 50%, 100%, maybe 700%?
One thing to keep in mind is, that AI code doesn't have to be good, just good enough. Many nerds seem to think that efficiency, beauty or elegance have value. But to a business, that's just a collateral benefit. Software can be buggy, slow, hard to update. That all doesn't matter, if the results and costs are in a good-enough ratio.
How much coding work is left to be done? Infinity. There will always be more needed. Always. And while there is a certain truth to the idea that software just needs to be good enough, it will very quickly become nearly impossible to maintain and add new features.
AI doesn't make us 30% more efficient. There are certain tasks that's it's really helpful for, but they are really limited. I can see issues with junior developers being replaced with AI when they are in the takes more work to train them then just do their job stage. Beyond that, a good developer has skills and experience that AI will never be able to replace, especially since the code has to be maintained.
Currently, the bottleneck is available developers
The bottleneck is developers competent to code in each specific domain. We have nowhere near enough, even for the most popular subject - writing an eCommerce store.
Source: Let's all play a quick round of "think of every eCommerce site you don't hate." Okay, now let's all try to think of a second one. Anyone still trying for three?
The specific domain list is, I suspect, currently uncountable.
Twenty five years from now, I suspect we can get a ballpark approximate count of developer specializations by starting at the top of the popular WordPress plugins list, and stopping when we start hitting obvious duplicates.
After that, we can compare that count to the known number of tailored-to-purpose AIs available.
Subtract the two, and that's the remaining runway on "AI is taking all of our jobs". (If feeling generous, add a bit of leeway for each AI also needing some time to stop sucking.)
Source: I'm part of the AI problem/solution. It's fun times, but y'all excited folks are going to be disappointed for a long while, unless you're incredibly satisfied with what you already have.
Even when we reach true sentient AI (which may still be impossible), there will be an uphill road to teach it each domain we want it to work in.
Teaching humans is difficult. Teaching computers is difficult. Teaching a computer that thinks like a human might be much easier.
Perhaps it will teach itself at an incredible speed. Some humans do. But history suggests that getting each AI up to speed, in each domain we need it for, will still be...difficult.
The automobile didn't put cabbies out of jobs, it put horses out of work.
If anything it actually made demand for cabbies skyrocket, because now they could do the same job but way faster, so now they were more affordable abd not just a service reserved for wealthy.
In other words, expect that AI will increase demand for programmers exceptionally, as the bar for entry lowers.
An LLM still needs a "pilot" to "drive" it, and you need to still know code well enough to interpret the output and catch mistakes or hallucinations.
But typically when a field becomes more affordable, it goes up in demand, not down, because the target audience that can afford the service grows exponentially.
"But if it's so easy to become program now, what's to stop people from just using ChatGPT and never hiring a programmer?"
Same reason people still, today, hire cabs even if they can drive themselves.
Convenience. Time is money and just because 1 person can do all the jobs of a company, doesn't mean they physically have the time to do it.
But typically when a field becomes more affordable, it goes up in demand, not down, because the target audience that can afford the service grows exponentially.
I've always been very up front with the fact that I could not have made a career out of programming without tools like Delphi and Visual Basic. I'm simply not productive enough to have to also transcribe my mental images into text to get useful and productive UIs.
All of my employers and the vast majority of my clients were small businesses with fewer than 150 employees and most had fewer than a dozen employees. Not a one of them could afford a programmer who had to type everything out.
If that's what happens with AI tooling, then I'm all for it. There are still far too many small businesses, village administrators, and the like being left using general purpose office "productivity" software instead of something tailored to their actual needs.
There are still far too many small businesses, village administrators, and the like being left using general purpose office "productivity" software instead of something tailored to their actual needs.
Exactly. The "AI will do it all" crowd don't have this perspective. There's so much more work to be done, and I hope AI is hugely impactful to help. But I've been at this long enough to know that's still a long road.
expect that AI will increase demand for programmers exceptionally, as the bar for entry lowers.
Bingo! This also happened when web frameworks promised to take away our jobs. Also when code generators promised to take away our jobs.
It turns out that expertise in computers remains pretty useful in a society that uses computers for almost everything. Even after the exact previous computer skill is no longer relevant.
Source: Y'all can pry Commodore BASIC from my cold dead hands. I may not be getting paid for it, but I'll keep producing that beautiful line numbered code until my last breath.
Thank you for not being the rare rational outlook on AI and buying into the AI fear mongering, or the AI hype train.
AI is the new auto hammer, it can do things faster and sometimes better. Why you can build a house faster and with less effort! Or you can bash someone's skull in faster and with less effort! It's just a new tool we can use, for better or for worse, like every other new tool before it.
No. But not because of AI. There's currently hundreds of thousands of out of work people surrounding tech. You're competing with them for every job.
Even then, most of engineering isn't in the nuts and bolts of putting it together. It's in the endless discussions and decisions that lead to the nuts and bolts.
lol. Of course there is. Ai cannot code. it's a glorified autocomplete that mostly gets things subtly wrong. So you'll spend more time trying to understand the code you didn't write and look for any bugs, than if you had written and understood it yourself.
AI is a tool for coders to use and it will never make coders obsolete. As someone trying to enter the industry, my advice is lean into it and use AI as a learning tool.
Having said that - it is pretty hard to find a job in the industry right now, due to all the layoffs. Those layoffs are related to covid not AI, so it should be temporary... but in the mean time you're likely to be competing for jobs with people who have decades of experience.
I believe there is still a shortage of developers long term, but short term not so much.
I find it very difficult to recommend generative ai as a learning tool (specifically for juniors) as it often spits out terrible code (or even straight up not working) which could be mistaken as "good" code. I think the more experienced a dev is, the better it is to use more like a pair programmer.
The problem is it cannot go back and correct/improve already generated output unless prompted to. It is getting better and better, but it is still an overly glorified template generator, for the most part, that often includes import statements from packages that don't exist, one off functions that could have been inline (cannot go back and correct itself), and numerous garbage variables that are referenced only once and take up heap space for no seemingly no good reason.
Mainly speaking on GPT4, CoPilot is better, both have licensing concerns (of where did it get this code from) if you are creating something real and not for fun.
As a professional C# developer since 2012, I’d say a programmer needs four kinds of knowledge. As an organizational user of Github Copilot for a couple months, I’d say AI tools can help with one, maybe two of those.
Understanding language and syntax, so you can communicate the ideas in your head to the machine accurately: AI is fairly good at this, will certainly get a lot better.
Understanding algorithms and data structures, well enough to compare and contrast, and choose the most appropriate ones for each circumstance: AI can randomly select something, unless it’s a frequently solved problem. I don’t expect this to get better except for the most repetitive of coding tasks.
Understanding your execution environment and adapting your solutions to use it well: I don’t see the current generation of AI tools ever approaching this. I don’t think they have context for how a piece of code is used, when trying to learn from it. One size fits all is not a great approach.
Understanding your customer’s needs and specific problems, and creating products, not code. Problem domains and solutions are a business’s entire reason for existence. This is all kept confidential (and outside the reach of an AI training data set) for competitive reasons. As a human employee, you get to peek behind the curtain and learn these things yourself.
I'll add that one of the biggest hurdles/flaws to the fundamental architecture of the design of AI is their inability to reapply a specific use case in a slightly different scenario.
This was a flaw that came out of self driving development and, as far as I understand, plays a major role in why the hype on it died off really fast. Adding more to the model can't fix that flaw.
Well, look at 99% of business software. It's always the same.
"Tech" in the sense of FAANG and so on isn't that large of an employer worldwide and even within them, a significant portion is regular old business software. Billing hours in AWS and billing phone calls isn't that different.
I'd argue, if an AI could create a form and transform that data into a given schema to push somewhere, 20% of all developers will need a new job.
Sure, somebody has to keep an eye on AI. (Pun intended).
SysAdmin work is draining me, though, and I want to pick back up programming and see if I can make a career out of it
SysAdmin plus Dev skills makes a DevOps Specialist which is still in high demand. I suppose it might feel too much like the SysAdmin work.
Am I going to be obsolete after a year? Five years?
I was advised not to bother decades ago based on similar logic, but I'm still very much in demand.
I don't know what kind of sysadmin stuff you do but I don't think it has to be a complete shift from infrastructure to software. There are lots of tools out there to help automate provisioning and maintenance. Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, and Chef are a few, and to a certain extent they're really a language of their own. I find it scary how much infrastructure is managed by hand, by Bash scripts, or software engineers that don't really grasp infrastructure.
AI will trivialize the day to day work of programming, the really hard part of programming is being able to put together complex systems in a maintainable way. It's really more of a project structure problem than it is a programming problem. Best way to future proof yourself is to focus on the higher level architectural challenges and putting together complex infrastructure as opposed to learning things like sorting algorithms (although I don't think interviewing has caught up with that yet). LLM powered systems may eventually get to the point where it can even replace architectural tasks, but at that point almost all office jobs will be obsolete.
EDIT: Another thought, getting out of tech now is like getting out of tech right before the Internet took off. Yes AI will replace a ton of jobs and there's going to be a big reckoning, but there's a shit ton of work to get these systems in place in a reliable way. The next Gen of AI is super capable, but it's also pretty jank, and getting it to work to it's capability will require a ton of work which provides a ton of opportunity to get in on companies that will become big when they do it well.
Man this was a depressing post to read.
There’s hardly any work for programmers and there hasn’t been for years, I’d say over a decade.
There is a massive demand for professionals, scientists and engineers who are tech literate and know programming.
Go develop hard skills in some field and use programming to set yourself apart.