Yup. The folks here who think this is not coming for them are delusional.
It really doesn't take that much time to teach the CS fundamentals needed to help you figure out where to put the generated code. Or even to know how to prompt it.
Our careers as high earners are collectively doomed. I really didn't expect LLMs to get this good until 2025 minimum. Pretty sad that "learn to code" is gonna be dead. It was the only place where the American dream was still alive.
Until there is a truly General Artificial Intelligence for coding*, there will still be a role for humans with engineering brains to think through system design, error conditions, mapping requirements to software components, and so on. The LLMs are on the same continuum as our existing tools.
Right now we don't punch cards or write asm; we write in higher-level languages with lots of existing libraries and autocomplete suggestions. These current AIs are just moving our work up another level. Instead of writing the function with the for loop directly, which turns into the appropriate machine code, we write a natural-language-ish instruction that turns into the function with the for loop.
As the coding help becomes more sophisticated, we'll just do more design and architect-ing and less typing individual lines of C# or whatever. I suspect there will be fewer "programming" jobs available eventually, but they will be just as important to business, if not more so.
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*If the AGI can even be convinced to spend its time making chat apps for dimwitted meatbags...
It’s not about learning AI so much as learning how to manage, delegate, and ask for exactly what you want. The last skill is basically what you already do as a programmer, but you need to be able to precisely ask for bigger things.
Well I think eventually humans won’t have any role, but it does seem like a pretty robust prediction that until then, the role of the human programmer will slowly morph into what looks like a manager of 1000x engineers with perfect communication skills. What other paths could there be? (Genuine q)
The six figure salaries won't last another decade. For some of us, maybe, but certainly not most of us.
Learn AI now.
Good luck, everyone.