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question, When were programmers supposed to be obsolete? (poliverso.org)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Even better quote, I love using this one.

"So, with AI writing code for us, all we need is an unambiguous way to define, what all our business requirements are for the software, what all the edge cases are, and how it should handle them."

"We in the industry call that 'code.'"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

That's fun, I'm stealing that

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yep, that's the one I was paraphrasing, thanks for the exact quote

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I mean, I'm paraphrasing, too.