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There are two schools of thought. Those with a background in business see developers as commodities and fully believe that programmers will program themselves out of a job field. The idea is that in some distant future, jobs like project manager, product manager, and marketing manager will still be critical but programmers themselves will be extinct as a result of the tools they created.
The other school of thought is hard to understand because the programmers are laughing so hard they can’t talk.
Source: Carey Aydelotte's answer to Will software engineers ever stop being in demand? - Quora[^]
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That makes me think of this old song (probably from before your time ):
Quote: Girls are dancing all around them just for me
And the party wouldn't swing if not for me
I've made you hearts jump, I've caused a heat
I'm in demand I am the beat Look - I am the beat 1981 - YouTube[^]
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Never heard of them, don't know the song either.
All I can say is their logo reminds me of Star Wars
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I'd forgotten about that track. Now I've got an earworm. It was released a couple of years after I left school.
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Who would introduce bugs if not software engineers?
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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Entomologists?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Assuming that AI writes the code flawlessly, then the writers of the "unambiguous" specifications.
Writing those specs would still be similar to coding, but in a natural language. It might be more like functional programming in that the flow wouldn't have to be linear. Details could appear in different paragraphs, with the AI referring to them as required.
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Greg Utas wrote: Assuming that AI writes the code flawlessly
According to ambiguous user specs?
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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Flawlessly if the spec is unambiguous. Otherwise you get...something, though you could argue that the AI should refuse to write the code in that case.
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Greg Utas wrote: though you could argue that the AI should refuse to write the code in that case
If real-life developers can't get away with that attitude today, why should an AI in the future?
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Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
(Attributed to Einstein)
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"I'm now telling the computer EXACTLY what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate."
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You don't see the contradiction in that assumption?
If we already knew exactly what to do in every case, we would not need an AI. If we don't know, we better leave the AI some room to learn, and don't hard code our incomplete ideas into it. The problem is that no AI up to now is aware enough to recognize insufficient results of this complexity, and much less is then able to decide on a reasonable course of action.
Natural stupidity is one thing, but artificial stupidity can be even more entertaining.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I didn't see a contradiction. I was assuming that the AI was for generating code from a natural language spec, not for helping with the spec itself. But because the AI has to understand the spec, it should complain if the spec is incomplete.
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And how do your train your AI to do that without already knowing how to do that?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I don't know how to train it. I was just assuming that it existed. Maybe it would be trained similar to Google Translate, which is constantly improving. But it would be even far more complex than that, so maybe it will never exist.
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Never say never, but it is not going to be so easy as some people would like it to be. And in the end it will be questionable if the whole effort is worth the results. It might be easier to use the original for a while longer than to create a machine in our own image.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I've been hearing similar since the late 80's. Does anyone here remember CASE tools, how they would allow a person to design software specs and them the code would be generated for you? That didn't seem to last too long....
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I'm not holding my breath either. If AI could write code from unambiguous specs, the specs would have to be debugged and fixed if the code didn't do what was actually intended. So in the end, software engineers would simply become "natural language" engineers. Plus ça change...
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Exactly, just another language for those of who design software. One to add to all the other languages learned along the way.
Software development isn't about language specs and such. It is more about having the right mindset, where a person can take a problem and break it down into logical units. Unless you can do that, it doesn't matter what language or tools are used.
I still remember way back to first year of university, sitting in a programing class. A lot of the other students just couldn't get their head around how to design their apps, and ended up switch majors or dropping out....
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Quote: Does anyone here remember CASE tools, how they would allow a person to design software specs and them the code would be generated for you? I do: 30 years ago, when I moved to Canada, a friend was raving about Rational Rose and suggested I should look for a different profession because pretty soon all software will be written by tools like that. I was rather sad as I liked coding and I wanted to keep doing that.
In the end I’m glad I didn’t listen to his advice
Mircea
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Thanks for dredging up unpleasant memories. That wasn't even coding with natural language, but coding with drawings. I had to argue against a very similar thing, developed in-house, that was promising the world. Snake oil, but senior management were lapping it up.
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And where's that friend today? Do you ever bring that conversation back up with him?
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We didn't keep in touch. He opened his own consultancy business and did quite well for himself.
Besides, he doesn't have a monopoly on bad ideas or shortsightedness: back in '94-'95 I thought Compuserve was the best network around and the future of Internet lies with them.
Mircea
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It isn't just the business people that see us that way. If you have ever worked with a recruiter, they all seem to see us a commodities, with very little to differentiate any of us. Not to mention that very few of them have any basic understanding of technology, thus are unable to see how best to place us.
I still get job offers to Java development because of a job I had over 10 years ago. Similar for embedded development, even though I haven't done anything like that since the 80's.
Nowadays when I am approached by a recruiter, I tell them I am looking for a management position, or at least as a team lead role. I have yet to be presented any such roles.
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