For the many programmers asking questions like this… if your programming skills can’t compete with a supercharged auto-complete (call it “AI” if you prefer), then you won’t stay relevant or employed for long. Until SkyNet nukes us all I will continue doing what I do. None of my customers imagine replacing me or anyone else developing software with a really good chatbot.
Who knows, maybe we'll see new programming jobs emerge for cleaning up all the shitty LLM code finding its way into systems as we speak. Lazy programmers have provided me a lot of job security in the past.
No doubt. There’s more money in maintenance programming than green field development. But there's no startup stock option lottery ticket in maintenance work, just a steady income.
As a developer I feel that understanding business requirements, translating them into code, liaising with product owners, designers, managing deadlines, expectations, making decisions on when to push back, having a mental map of the codebase, managing infrastructure, knowing which dependencies to use and when, these are the most difficult parts of the job.
Writing the actual code once it gets to it is usually not the hard part, unless you work on particularly difficult problems. LLMs help but don't replace us just yet.
I’ve said a thousand times that learning a programming language and writing code are just a small part of successful software development. Necessary but not sufficient.
Programmers who focus all their efforts on skills that can get automated will eventually get automated away. When a chatbot can replace me in terms of understanding customers and business domain expertise, and translate requirements into code, I’ll retire.
Web application development and system admin, which mostly means cloud infrastructure. A lot of that is already automated in some sense, but not enough for my customers to tell Alexa to set up a VPC and write some useful code for them.
I think this person is concerned with AI as it will evolve not as it currently exists today. This person may be young and will need to stay in the market dealing with that evolution longer. Everybody starts as a junior before they become elite programmer but if the bottom is removed people won't be able to skill up.
You sound a bit like an old man not adapting to technology progress. As an example, if I would make a logo today I would perhaps before used Fiverr or similar services but not I will use an AI and then edit it in some photo editor.
It has become much easier to do stuff like that even if you suck at photo editing.
I’m an old man with 40 years in software development. I’m still working, and not on COBOL. Tell me how I have not adapted. My career predates Unix, relational databases, the internet.
In my career I’ve heard about one thing after another that was going to make programmers obsolete. It may happen but I doubt it, because coding isn’t the hard part of software development.
True true, most likely I agree, that programmers will still be needed for the time being at least. We will most likely just make use of the tool to make us more productive and easier programming may disappear.
Perhaps people who nowadays make a living on making small websites for small mom- and pop-shops will replace themselves with an AI and they will mostly care about design instead. They will have more time on other stuff, increasing the quality all over.
That said, it's hard to tell either way. The future is hard to predict, I wouldn't have guessed I could generate the amount we now can just one year ago. It's hard to imagine many years of progress and what that could potentially lead to.
People who make web sites for mom and pop businesses got obsoleted a long time ago by WordPress and Shopify and numerous other out-of-the-box solutions.
Why does anyone doing that kind of work still get jobs? Ignorance plays some part, of course. In my experience a lot of business owners believe they are unique and special and need something “custom.” It’s a status thing as best I can tell.
Back in the ‘90s I started refusing to write custom accounting systems for customers because QuickBooks could do everything they needed until they graduated to the big leagues, where enterprise software solutions dominate. They never listened, always sure they were too different to use something as pedestrian as accounting software in a box.
Programmers aren’t immune. Look at all of the functionally equivalent languages and tools we argue about. Notice programmers writing that they can’t use an IDE or web site that doesn’t have dark mode. How many more “to do list” apps will we endure? Freud called it “the narcissism of small differences.”
The same human tendency explains why we have many more cars available than Toyota Camrys and Ford F-150s.
Certainly an applicable analogy - all the people whose standards are low enough to use a doctored-up JPEG as a logo now have a free solution. The rest of us who'd prefer a vector graphic, or maybe a .ai or .psd, will continue paying for quality output and the ability to have a rapport about aesthetics.
When you pay a person, you're paying for more than the output. Maybe they'll use a GPT/LLM model behind the scenes, but I also use bucket-loads of coffee behind the scenes. That doesn't mean a bag of Stumptown can build your analytics architecture.
Well if you already have an image you're satisfied with, it's really easy to make it into vector graphics. Either you can map it yourself or just use a tool for it.
As an example of this I generated an image of a dog with an AI and then I put it in the vectormagic.com's tool. The result is very good since the image is not a logo style but an advanced image with a lot of detail.
Yes, many image editors support converting a raster image to a vector, even high-fidelity images like the one you've shown. But creating a usable vector is more than just dropping an image into vectorizer and cleaning up the results. Every angle and point in a vector is handled like a unique object, and thus, the image you've shown would be a nightmare to work with. Often times, there will be numerous duplicate points and hidden angles that can be impossible to sniff out. That's why Illustrator is distinct from Photoshop - creating vectors from scratch is not the same process as converting a raster, and the result is typically far more clean.
So yeah, still stands. If you can stomach messy, unpredictable outputs, use an automated solution. If you want something lean and usable, use a human-being.
