I think the only reason vibe coding/prompt engineering seems to be taking over programmers' jobs is the fact that it currently enjoys the status of the latest investment craze/fashion such as blockchain did a few years ago and the dot-com boom did even earlier. In a few years projects based on AI generated code spaghetti will start to quietly fail one after another due to accumulation of technical debt and the necessity for manual, costly codebase rewrites and the whole AI coding train will come crashing down just like all other unrealistic, "new economy" fads before it. Companies will get desperate to hire decent programmers back and things will be back to normal.
If AI takes over in the predicted scale and timeline, I'll be one of the members of the last generation of developers who never felt even a single drop of impostor syndrome. People like me will be essentially walking legends.
If AI fails, then my skeptical predictions become true, and I'll be a visionary that saw through the bullshit while everyone was full of wool in their eyes.
Both of these scenarios provide people like me plenty of opportunity. If it doesn't pan out for _me specifically_, then it's just a statistical fluke, probably not related to the whole thing.
These concerns about employability are quite misguided. These are 2-3 years ahead, highly volatile unknowns. I try to think decades ahead, sometimes more, and quite more broadly.
This is more related to how little I think of the current crop of LLMs to how optimistic my worldviews are.
I've seen many waves of amazing new tech over the years. The good ones often form healthy communities. Sometimes there's competition, but always in good sport.
LLMs seems like a viper's nest. It's a bad one. Lots of people at each others throats.
Next few, no. Current and near future midels do a lot, but not expertly; while they have general skills, the level of those skills is jagged in inhuman ways, which leaves opportunities for us.
Next 7, stuff gets interesting. By the ten year anniversery of ChatGPT, likely to be bigger impact than smartphones on their tenth anniversery. Also, global electricity supply is only 250 W/capita (compare to you metabolic consumption of ~100 W and all the other stuff we want to use the electricity for besides compute), and even high %-year-on-year growth of renewables only gets global supply to double in the next 7 years (or, alternatively, we get ~100% green electricity).
I think the only reason vibe coding/prompt engineering seems to be taking over programmers' jobs is the fact that it currently enjoys the status of the latest investment craze/fashion such as blockchain did a few years ago and the dot-com boom did even earlier. In a few years projects based on AI generated code spaghetti will start to quietly fail one after another due to accumulation of technical debt and the necessity for manual, costly codebase rewrites and the whole AI coding train will come crashing down just like all other unrealistic, "new economy" fads before it. Companies will get desperate to hire decent programmers back and things will be back to normal.
I win either way.
If AI takes over in the predicted scale and timeline, I'll be one of the members of the last generation of developers who never felt even a single drop of impostor syndrome. People like me will be essentially walking legends.
If AI fails, then my skeptical predictions become true, and I'll be a visionary that saw through the bullshit while everyone was full of wool in their eyes.
Both of these scenarios provide people like me plenty of opportunity. If it doesn't pan out for _me specifically_, then it's just a statistical fluke, probably not related to the whole thing.
These concerns about employability are quite misguided. These are 2-3 years ahead, highly volatile unknowns. I try to think decades ahead, sometimes more, and quite more broadly.
I like your attitude. You are optimistic.
This is more related to how little I think of the current crop of LLMs to how optimistic my worldviews are.
I've seen many waves of amazing new tech over the years. The good ones often form healthy communities. Sometimes there's competition, but always in good sport.
LLMs seems like a viper's nest. It's a bad one. Lots of people at each others throats.
Next few, no. Current and near future midels do a lot, but not expertly; while they have general skills, the level of those skills is jagged in inhuman ways, which leaves opportunities for us.
Next 7, stuff gets interesting. By the ten year anniversery of ChatGPT, likely to be bigger impact than smartphones on their tenth anniversery. Also, global electricity supply is only 250 W/capita (compare to you metabolic consumption of ~100 W and all the other stuff we want to use the electricity for besides compute), and even high %-year-on-year growth of renewables only gets global supply to double in the next 7 years (or, alternatively, we get ~100% green electricity).
Next 17 years, utterly unpredictable.