[eloff]

History is full of inventions that changed the game for the people in a specific industry. Sometimes they allowed one person managing the machines to replace a team previously doing manual labor. I don’t think that’s the right metaphor here, because programming is not manual labor. The parts of programming that are like manual labor will disappear, you’ll instruct the AI to do it for you. But you need to know what to prompt it with and how to verify its output and plumb it into your code. Speed of writing code is rarely the bottleneck, so speeding that part up doesn’t double your productivity. Still, it helps.

I’ve been programming with the assistance of copilot for a year now, and using ChatGPT as well since 3.5. These tools are amazing, I’m never going back. But to me they’ve only increased the value of the senior engineer with deep domain knowledge. It makes me more productive. But I have to come up with the requirements, correct the AIs code, do all the plumbing that it can’t do efficiently. A lot of the code it comes up with is pure garbage, I have to know enough to know the difference. It does kind of replace a junior developer a little, if you were giving them grunt work tasks, which could be an issue when starting out in this field.

There is so much more that software engineers do than just writing code. That’s really a minority of the time each day for me. If you’re familiar with Amdahl’s law, then you know there’s a mathematical limit to the productivity improvement here.

[ilaksh]

Have you tried GPT4?

[spion]

I have. I'm impressed in terms of how incredibly helpful it is, but its clear its far from being a replacement yet.

One example its ability to do problem-solving when diagnosing a complex issue:

1. It repeatedly ignores described constraints and offers suggestions that logically cannot be solutions.

2. When I give it the explanation, it appologizes and... what do you know, two messages later its back to the same suggestion.

3. When I sigh try the suggestion anyway, then go back to it telling it it didn't work, it will suggest something else, and when that doesn't work either, suggest the first thing again!

I'm not saying its never going to happen... but its really not there, yet.

[eloff]

Yes, I’ve been using it at work and on my side project. It’s better, but it’s still just a tool that improves my productivity. It’s not going to replace me.

[nikau]

I'm holding out for the GPT5 Max Pro.