Hi, this is a question that popped into my mind when i saw an article about some AWS engineer talking about ai assistants taking over the job of programmers, this reminded me that it’s not the first time that something like this was said.
My software engineering teacher once told me that a few years ago people believed graphical tools like enterprise architect would make it so that a single engineer could just draw a pretty UML diagram and generate 90% of the project without touching any code,
And further back COBOL was supposed to replace programmers by letting accountants write their own programs.
Now i’m curious, were there many other technologies that were supposedly going to replace programmers that you remember?
i hope someone that’s been around much more than me knows something more or has some funny stories to share
“AI” is just another productivity tool, copilot let’s you remove some of the tedious patterned work you do, like writing all those asserts in Unit tests, it’s decent at guessing html structures too.
So basically it makes a developer faster, but then so do stuff like a good IDE, good plugins for your workflow, etc.
i saw somewhere an interesting take, even if AI could generate all the code for all the edge cases, you’d still need people to translate what business wants for the AI to understand properly.
Writing code is already a small part of a developers job, completely eliminating it won’t eliminate a developers job.
- can AI replace the job of a real programmer, or a team of software engineers? Probably not for a long time.
- can manager abuse the fantasy that they could get rid of those pesky engineers that dare telling them something is impossible? Yes totally. If they believe adding an AI tool to a team justifies a 200% increase in productivity. Some managers will fire people against all metrics and evidence. Calling that move a success. Same occurred when they try to outsource code to cheaper teams.
sometimes, it feels like managers hate engineers, and are constantly plotting their replacement. maybe its because it hurts their ego to know that the engineers they manage worked harder to get there and deserve a higher salary.
or else, it could be office politics. anyone who can claim to have removed an entire department from payroll is due a huge raise.
I don’t think it’s just managers saying hey we could automate such and such a thing away. It’s human nature to think “how could I improve this” which almost immediately leads to “if I get this right it could mean no work at all”
