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?
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.
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.