this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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Programming
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The automobile didn't put cabbies out of jobs, it put horses out of work.
If anything it actually made demand for cabbies skyrocket, because now they could do the same job but way faster, so now they were more affordable abd not just a service reserved for wealthy.
In other words, expect that AI will increase demand for programmers exceptionally, as the bar for entry lowers.
An LLM still needs a "pilot" to "drive" it, and you need to still know code well enough to interpret the output and catch mistakes or hallucinations.
But typically when a field becomes more affordable, it goes up in demand, not down, because the target audience that can afford the service grows exponentially.
"But if it's so easy to become program now, what's to stop people from just using ChatGPT and never hiring a programmer?"
Same reason people still, today, hire cabs even if they can drive themselves.
Convenience. Time is money and just because 1 person can do all the jobs of a company, doesn't mean they physically have the time to do it.
I've always been very up front with the fact that I could not have made a career out of programming without tools like Delphi and Visual Basic. I'm simply not productive enough to have to also transcribe my mental images into text to get useful and productive UIs.
All of my employers and the vast majority of my clients were small businesses with fewer than 150 employees and most had fewer than a dozen employees. Not a one of them could afford a programmer who had to type everything out.
If that's what happens with AI tooling, then I'm all for it. There are still far too many small businesses, village administrators, and the like being left using general purpose office "productivity" software instead of something tailored to their actual needs.
Exactly. The "AI will do it all" crowd don't have this perspective. There's so much more work to be done, and I hope AI is hugely impactful to help. But I've been at this long enough to know that's still a long road.