[CommieBobDole]

I don't think ChatGPT or its successors will be able to do large-scale software development, defined as 'translating complex business requirements into code', but the actual act of programming will become more one of using ML tools to create functions, and writing code to link them together with business logic. It'll still be programming, but it will just start at a higher level, and a single programmer will be vastly more productive.

Which, of course, is what we've always done; modern programming, with its full-featured IDEs, high level languages, and feature-rich third-party libraries is mostly about gluing together things that already exist. We've already abstracted away 99% of programming over the last 40 years or so, allowing a single programmer today to build something in a weekend that would have taken a building full of programmers years to build in the 1980s. The difference is, of course, this is going to happen fairly quickly and bring about an upheaval in the software industry to the detriment of a lot of people.

And of course, this doesn't include the possibility of AGI; I think we're a very long way from that, but once it happens, any job doing anything with information is instantly obsolete forever.

[SketchySeaBeast]

That's my assumption as well - the human programmers will far more productive, but they'll still be required because there's no way we can take the guard rails off and let the AI build - it'll build wrong unit tests for wrong functions which create wrong programs and will require humans to get it back on track.

[epistemer]

I think it is really hard to say where all this goes right now when we currently don't even have good quantitative reasoning.

10 years ago we were still working on MNIST prediction accuracy. 10 years forward from here all bets are off. If the model has super human quantitative reasoning and a mastery of language I am not sure how much programming we will be doing compared to moving to a higher level of abstraction.

On the other hand, I think there will be so many new software jobs because of the volume of software built over the next 20 years. The volume of software built over the next 20 years is probably unimaginable sitting where we are.

[brookst]

Is your opinion time bounded to 5 years? 20 years? 100 years? Forever?

[SketchySeaBeast]

I don't think anyone can say what's going to happen in 10 years, but what I do know is if you look back people have been saying programmers will be obsolete in 10 years for way longer than a decade.

[cmehdy]

I could see IDEs for AI, where you manipulate ways to input prompts (natural Landis language, weighted keywords, audio..) and selection of methods (chatgpt, whatever model will come for diagrams, visual models, audio ones..). Then basically visually program outputs, add tests you want to use to validate and feed back, multimodal output views..