ChatGpt will replace jobs soon- Software Development jobs soon will be deprecated (for mindless, boring, and repetitive programming jobs)
Is anyone else being spammed with clickbait titles like this?
I have countless headlines like this put in my face. It’s just clickbait that’s trying to prey on people’s anxiety.
The above image is a “very productive company” according to all the clickbait circulating around the internet. Without a person behind the keyboard (i.e. PEBKAC), a humanless development team is going to SUCK.
I have made this little acronym SUCK to describe the limitations of AI in software development.
SUCK: Subpar Understanding & Creative Knowledge gap
Subpar Understanding — AI/Automation tools have limited understanding and problems understanding the full context of complex problems.
Creative Knowledge gap — AI lacks imagination, intuition, and innovative thinking.
Chatgpt is a helpful tool to quickly type out code for ideas that I have. I just see it as a faster way of typing.
However, typing words is never going to be a problem with programming. It’s the creativity and problem-solving aspects that matter. How many times have you worked on a problem that took days but with only a few lines of code? If it were just the lines of code that would be easy to type in 10 minutes.
Places that AI language models SUCK:
- Lack of deep understanding of concepts and problem-solving skills that can only be gained through practice and study.
- AI can’t replace the creativity and critical thinking that are required to solve complex problems in programming.
So, while ChatGPT can be a useful tool for programming, it’s important to continue learning and practicing the craft of programming to improve your skills. Machines can not replicate problem-solving, creativity, and critical thinking, at least not in the near future.
It’s important to keep in mind that relying solely on a language model may not always result in the most efficient or optimal code. It’s still important to have a solid understanding of programming concepts and to write clean and maintainable code.
By solid understanding I mean SOLID- single responsibility principle, open-closed principle, Liskov substitution principle, interface seg…. okay you get it.
Places that AI technology does NOT catastrophically and completely SUCK:
- Automate certain repetitive and low-level tasks, such as writing boilerplate code.
I don’t think anyone has a problem with losing a mindless and repetitive job. We were always trying to replace those in the first place. See this chapter on eliminating toil in the Google SRE handbook for more reading:
https://sre.google/workbook/eliminating-toil/
Moreover, AI technology is still in its infancy, and there are many areas where humans continue to outperform machines, such as in developing complex software architectures, designing intuitive user interfaces, and understanding the broader context in which software operates.
So while AI and automation can certainly change the nature of programming jobs, it is unlikely that they will make them completely irrelevant anytime soon. Instead, they may simply shift the focus of programmers towards higher-level tasks that require more creativity and strategic thinking.
