The tail end of programming will be the last thing to be replaced, maybe. I don’t see why CRUD apps get to hide under the umbrella of programming ultra-advanced AI.
Let me know when you can speak English to a computer and have it generate CRUD code that satisfies all engineering and design constraints. The AI will need to be dynamic enough to understand nuance, missing gaps in the requirements spec, have context on the application being built, able to suggest improvements on product design, know how to make changes through the same conversational interface, etc.
Accomplishing that is achieving general AI.
In the meantime, there are plenty of boilerplate ORMs and simplistic API template tools that make production of bog standard CRUD apps dead simple. Of course, they all have their drawbacks and trade-offs, and aren't always suitable. But I don't see the amount of software engineering work reducing as a result of these no-code, low-code tools, do you?
Probably not. People tend to think that tasks that make us think hard require general intelligence just because that's the tool we use to solve that problem. The AI doesn't have to be very good to be able to replace CRUD web app developers (that is, most of us).
As I see, the real challenge to solve is for it to be able to hold context and be able to communicate iteratively. Also, as you say find missing gaps. That's important. Other than that, you tell it what you want, it creates something and then you tell it to change things around. Which is, BTW, pretty similar to how it works with biological life based developers. Though as we're lazy, we like to clarify a lot of things up front (and either drive customers crazy or teach them that this is the way it works). If you have an AI that spits out code in a few minutes, it may not matter a lot.
Most of the programming jobs are indeed about making relatively simple stuff from standard components.
Let me know when you can speak English to a computer and have it generate CRUD code that satisfies all engineering and design constraints. The AI will need to be dynamic enough to understand nuance, missing gaps in the requirements spec, have context on the application being built, able to suggest improvements on product design, know how to make changes through the same conversational interface, etc.
Let me know when you find a single programmer who can do that reliably.
Is it that hard to do? Just design a solution that uses Alexa voice services to parse the vocal input via NLP and then invoke a lambda function to call a sagemaker or gpt-3 model to generate code. Granted it will take a little while to be perfect but are we really far from it?
