When programming is gone, will we like what’s left?

If we get to the point where these models can reliably produces the correct thing on the first (few) tries -- and given the current rate of advancement, I believe that this could be possible -- we've effectively removed the process of creation entirely. Sure you can do things the long way, and I'm sure some people will, but people trend towards instant gratification. For a slightly-flawed analogy, it's like playing a video game with cheats. It becomes boring very quickly because oops! suddenly everything is instant and there's no more reward for getting there.

It starts to feel worse when I see things like brain implants start to be researched as viable consumer products, VR / "metaverse," ... It feels like we as a species are optimising towards a terrible future when you start putting all the bad uses of these technologies together, because legislation won't catch up fast enough. The Matrix was supposed to be a movie, not an instruction manual.

I am indeed using ChatGPT for programming using a plugin, and it’s super helpful, but I’m still coding. Still have to know what’s going on. This is a brave new world for sure but my problems can’t currently be solved by firing all my devs and replacing them with AI (yet).

First, this is an annoyingly unnuanced way to start an essay. Second, if at some point AI takes all the pain out of producing stuff (it does all the low level work in all sectors), the only valuable activity that’s left is art.

What I love most is creating stuff. I have little interest in algorithms, o-notation, and other minutiae. I’d love a world where I could just tell the computer what I want to create and it takes care of the minutiae for me. Though, I’m mostly thinking about personal projects. When it comes to writing code for work… well, that is not really in the ven diagram circle of things I love about programming. Maybe I’ll have to do something else for work, though I’m about 10-15 years away from retirement. It will be interesting to see how much things change by then.

AI Maniacs: "Ah all the jobs are gone, humans are useless!"

On the other hand, I can see in the future we will build complex programs we don't understand via AI as black boxes, and then use tonnes of tests, probably in a similar spirit to aviation industry, to ensure they do the right thing.

Currently, commence a multi-month design cycle, create the migration path, perform the migration in a slow and safe way, soft logging, feature flagging, gradual release, etc., and finally once everything is migrated, remembering to remove the old code. All the meanwhile turning down a bunch of other ideas for improvements you had because you need to get this one thing done. Or worse, interrupting a bunch of half-finished refactorings and leaving them half-finished and having to work around those things until some time that may never come.

Imagine if you could just tell an AI to do this, be reasonably certain it would do the right thing, and it's done and provably correct and manages your deployments and migrations for you. And you could be free to look into the next batch of new things you want to do.

I love coding, but really I love thinking about the ways to do things more than the processes of getting those things done. If there was an AI that could automate that work, that would be incredible.

In fact, ChatGPT and other AI developments will probably enable people like me to create things I couldn't before - like video games and software that I have dreamed up but weren't skilled enough to do.

Now apply that to society as a whole, and we'll be able to be more creative with our computers than ever before - leading to a whole slew of new opportunities.

Knowledge workers will need to learn how to play with this new tool and use it to augment their work.

This is not the doomsday you are looking for. hand waves

His use of the term "shape rotator" kind of helps me articulate my thoughts on the matter. My theory is that attempts to democratize software authorship focus too much on the writing code part, but ultimately do nothing to address the "shape rotator" part, i.e. imagining the problem(s) you're trying to solve as abstract shapes. When I imagine the problem at hand, I construct a kind of mental model of it without really thinking about it all that much.

With that in mind, could our current approach to AI ultimately scale to the point where non-shape-rotators can finally write software as capably, or will it reach a plateau where shape rotators still retain their monopoly on software authorship?

If it's the latter case, then AI might not prove that much of a threat to programming simply because shape rotators seem to really like their text-editors, and really like to program

EDIT: some quick follow-up remarks, but despite feeling that AI art generators are unethical, I also feel at the same time that we're overestimating their potential damage because I think they democratize the wrong thing, which in this case is skill with a paintbrush or similar equivalent, yet they don't really democratize creativity and imagination. I think a lot of AI art is ugly, but I think that's largely due to the fact that the people using AI art generators simply aren't that creative or imaginative. By contrast, people who are creative and imaginative will understand that it's easier to get what they're looking for simply by a more direct, hands-on approach, rather than trying to find "good enough" through a prompt. Sure, people will get good-enough for free in lieu of paying someone more for better, but that's been an issue in the creative industry well before the advent of AI, and often with predictable results. Namely, good-enough doesn't typically create value so much as serve as a placeholder for something deemed essential, i.e. it's good-enough. A restaurant with good-enough branding, or a book with a good-enough book cover, is the same as a restaurant with no-branding or a book with no cover.

No code solutions have existed for years (e.g. Excel) and yet data scientists are still getting paid in the six figures.

When the printing press removed the manual tedium from producing a book, and reduced the cost by orders of magnitude. Literacy went up, and science and the arts flourished. Instead of manually copying texts, authors could write for millions.

When the Thread Cutting Lathe made it possible to make screws accurately and cheaply enough to standardize, the use of them went up, and the industrial revolution happened. Instead of making a screw in a day, a machinist could make thousands.

Once it became possible to store data automatically, the need for file clerks and others manually managing data went down. The management of information by computer made all manner of new business possible. Real time management of inventory and booking of reservations because possible on a vast scale.

GPT and other AI based tools will change the nature of our jobs, but we'll all have new things to do. It'll be less tedious, and a bit more creative, as it always tended to be before.

Project management, architects, business Analysts, on-premises devops/infrastructure.

This really depends on how you look at code.

Do you write code because it's fun? Good, because you'll have a lot more flexibility around that in the future.

Are there parts of coding you don't like? Great, you will probably enjoy what's next.

If you answered no to those questions, you are slinging code in the worst way possible, in terms of feelings, per the author's choice of perspectives on coding.

Feelings about coding are by nature--and ought to be--ephemeral, deep, and nuanced. I wouldn't spend too much time asking what the feel of coding will be in the future, in terms of some single feel...unless feeling just really isn't interesting to you.

What I'd ask is:

- Will "what's left" really only resolve to one thing we'll "feel about"? Has that ever happened?

- Do we really think coding is just this "syntax, oft highlighted" experience? To me, it's far more symbolic and psychological than that. If you make yourself a schedule for the day, you are coding. You don't like that? OK, you probably code in some other way--maybe manipulating the boss is more your thing, which is also a form of coding.

- What if we view coders as an interface between humans and code (or even coded results), rather than simple code-typers? As people who have energy to think in a certain way at length, in depth, over time?

To me this is an extremely powerful lens on what will likely happen. Some subjective probability in use here maybe, but maybe that's OK since we've really only discussed subjective feeling thus far...?

I don't think prompt typing will even be the most of it. But I do harbor a stubborn intuition that higher-level logic will be massively involved in what's next. Those places above the current coder's heads where business strategies decide what code is or isn't written will likely need more of the same kind of coder who will have to shift roles a bit, and still sling logic in rigorous ways.

(Oh and speaking of stubborn ideas, I think any boss who feels like it will still figure out ways to let their favorite coder use VB6. It's always important to separate a fear of what may amount to impending nostalgia from the actual question of whether one will still be able to arrange for access to N-years-ago's way of doing things...)

P.S. The physical labor discussion is pretty amusing to me, because here you have people who, by their own indication in career tests, etc. don't even like to use conceptual perspective-taking as a tool on the job, compared with say the sensory experience of physical work.

Anyone who can even string together a couple of LLM-style prompts in a logical manner toward some business-logic goal is going to want to think twice about whether they really understand the ground-floor operations over at the tech worker's hobby-fantasy-phenomenon-zone that is physical labor.

Can you effectively create, and work to, a plan? If so, uh oh--careful what side of yourself you present as career-facing. Planning and conceptualization is not at all a sensory pursuit or any kind of physical labor, and is a common topic for jokes in that world.

Plus, it's not only possible to have a blind spot that conceals from an individual the big-picture, career-scoped value of their own innate talent--it actually happens all the time. A genius of a planner may think, "planning is no big deal, but now...hard labor! Now we are talking." Kaboom, a classic quarterlife or midlife-crisis career issue is formed.

It's one of the biggest traps this career coach has ever heard of, and heard experiences with, again and again...