Are you still going to have the skills to review it a year from now? Or 5 years from now when you’ve become accustomed to only writing <20% of the code? I’m already witnessing my coworkers skills degrading because of this, and it’s only going to get worse. Programming is a language, and when you don’t use it, it fades.
What will happen is that we as developers will move one layer up in the abstraction. In the future it would seem a bit nonsensical to focus on individual lines of code and syntax because AI can more or less deal with it.
We will be focusing more higher level design - which database, where the data flows, which service is used where and so on. So you will just need different skills. Coding as a skill won't be that important.
Anyone old enough to remember when UML promised the same thing? Never have to touch code again -- just draw boxes, charts, activity diagrams, etc. and right-click and generate code! Rational Rose is the future of programming!
It always turns out that when you have to make a computer execute a very precise set of operations, the absolute best way to communicate this is not English, not diagrams, but code.
It also turns out that the challenge is generally not writing that code, but figuring out that precise set of operations in the first place.
Yes, and in the enterprise space, many workflows are nowadays done with lowcode/no-code tooling, like PowerApps, Adobe Workfront Fusion, Outsystems, among others.
Many of these tools, have started to go one step further, and the traditional ways are supplanted with AI, reducing even further the amount of low code/no code scenarios that a human has to produce.
The only thing left are the few serverless deployments to call into some code that needs more complex integration logic, and that is about it.
I have seen enough of these projects, to realize it is going to happen, not everywhere maybe, but in specific industry sectors certainly, it already is.
It's almost as if we write code because it is a very precise language... a feature that natural languages don't have.
I'm just going to leave this here...
You still communicate in code and fix the errors.
> You still communicate in code and fix the errors.
But you just said
> Coding as a skill won't be that important.
So coding is only important if you need to make your software actually work, I guess?
I just said its not that important. Your time won't be spent coding but rather fixing stuff here and there.
... so how are you supposed to fix things without coding, given that you admitted you need to dive into the code to fix things?
Its not a binary - we will spend less time thinking about code and occasionally fix things and more time on higher level abstractions.
Just like I sometimes need to understand and dive into assembly but not always. Its a spectrum and the value in the spectrum changing has consequences for how we work.
That is wishful thinking. Every layer we added between humans and the machines (and even the ones in the machines themselves) take hordes of dedicated humans to maintain: IDEs, compilers/interpreters, linters, CI tools, assemblers, linkers, operating systems, firmware, microcode, circuitry, circuit elements (manufacturing processes).
Just about every time somebody on this site says “we developers”, you can assume they’re ignoring the (large majority of) developers that don’t work on the same things they do, in the same way.
Yes, all those ever-growing layers of intricate abstraction that you take for granted and “don’t have to worry about” are conceived of, designed, built, and maintained by developers. Who do you think wrote the compiler for that syntax you don’t want to learn?
The point of abstraction is that it doesn’t leak. Most developers don’t need to understand compiler theory or assembly to be productive.
No one in my company writes assembly. very few developers work at that level of abstraction - this means those who made the compilers are doing a good job.
Yes, and very few people working on compilers do OS kernels, and very few people working on databases do compilers, etc. etc. My point is, they're all developers, so when you say "we developers", you'd better be speaking for all of them.
I agree with you. But not many people work with or understand the abstraction at OS or circuitry level.
That’s kind of my point: most people will work on higher abstractions but there will be some who maintain lower ones.
I write C# but I barely care about memory, gc nor microcontrollers nor assembly. Vast majority of people work on higher abstractions.
I would challenge that it is really a vast majority working at these highest levels of abstractions. There are thousands of people working on C#, Java and JavaScript runtimes and basic libraries. There are thousands of people working on compilers and thousands more (morw likely tens of thousands) working on operating systems and drivers etc... I think that the amount of effort that goes into all of this is severely underestimated because it so far removed from the perspective of a high level application developer.
if this is true we will have to trust committing prompts not code.
I don’t worry about assembly because the abstraction layer is reliable. I don’t worry about ISAs, ucode, transistors, etc. the abstraction layer is reliable.
The same is not true for LLMs today. Circumstantial evidence: people commit the lower layer. That’s not an abstraction any more than an IDEs tab complete or “new project template” is an abstraction.
When someone stops reading the output entirely and has a codebase that is only prompts, I’ll hear them out on skill obsolescence.
(Edit: changed to hypothetical)
> individual lines of code and syntax because AI can more or less deal with it
Individual lines of code can bring down an entire system.
> and syntax
I’ve never seen this be a real issue even for lower performing devs.
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If that’s a real effect, the best programmers absolutely will. You could spend 10% of your working time doing exercises, and still have double the productivity you used to have.