maybe you can argue the case that chatgpt is a programmer, but all the human is doing here is making requests and copying and pasting. is a manager a programmer?
or, to put it another way, if everyone is a programmer, the word is meaningless.
or, to put it another way, if everyone is a programmer, the word is meaningless.
We've been raising the level of abstraction in code for decades and it looks like LLMs might just be the next level up. Yes, using LLMs will put more complex code within reach of more people but I'm sure it won't be nearly everyone, and I bet that it'll raise the ceiling of what the best programmers can do at the same time.
Of course, we're free to redefine what "programmer" means at any time as well, if a new definition proves to be more useful.
To apply the same system to programming, one is a programmer if they dedicate themselves to the study and mastery over their computer, usually in a particular discipline. The disciplines of programming may be defined around the abstraction level. While everyone specializes, programmers also have general skills that the average person lacks. I would argue that the most important of those general skills is understanding the relationship between instructions, execution time, and memory usage as well using that knowledge to weigh different approaches. How do we separate a hobby programmer from someone who regurgitates AI responses with no understanding? I don't know. Maybe their ability to derive new answers if the AI didn't give them a correct answer.
Words do have meaning and we should be careful not to degrade the meaning down to anyone who is capable of asking an AI questions but I doubt we'll ever have a non-fuzzy definition of programmer