I don't really agree. The writing is on the wall, if not now then in 2 years or 4 years. I arrive at this view not so much based on the capabilities of the tools right now, but based on the property of software being verifiable, which like mathematics, makes it amenable to synthetic data pipelines, with only relatively small remaining details needing to be worked out (such as how to endow architectural taste). This is not nearly the first industry where 'artisans' have been initially augmented by innovation, only to be eventually replaced by it, which in my view will occur likely within my own career-span.
Software is verifiable, but not by other programs. Also software is a soution to a problem, but the problem and the solution properties often don’t exist in the code.
Software and data is a bit soup whre the only thing you truly need is the Turing machine. Programming languages, File format, protocols, and encoding are constructs that are useful because of their general applicability, not because of their intrinsic aspects.
The domain expertise is still, what’s important, and code craftsmanship was the ability to create something that matches it closely enough that the cost of changes was minimal.
Software is verifiable given a specific test oracle. There are however many problems where providing a correct test oracle is at least as hard as solving the problem itself.
If you’ve ever worked on projects with “Model Based Systems Engineering” you’ll have felt this pain.
While afraid that we developers will eventually be automated away — as I have bills to pay —, I only need to ask the JetBrains AI assistant for help to understand why that won't happen in my ‘career-span’.
It's not a diss on JetBrains, their assistant is good enough that I've paid for it for a few months; but ask of it anything a tad more complex and it becomes a code review for a PR that you begin to question in its entirety. I'm not familiar with CSS Grid, as I've stopped doing CSS when flex was becoming popular, but I have to say none of the models managed what I wanted. They kept proposing solutions with an arrogant confidence that this must work. When I pointed out this didn't work, they'd look at the codebase and find something else that was the problem. When I asked for help with a script for an Alpine box, it was very assertive that systemd-based solutions should work. How can you get that wrong?
I imagine the code laundering will eventually get far enough that you can copy-paste someone else's project fully baked, and then the LLM will truly shine. But for building something piece by piece, I haven't gotten good results yet. The Assistant so far has been most useful for writing unit tests, HTML, or getting a decent web search within the IDE.
I wonder if paying for Kagi wouldn't make for better search, and then I'd find some tool that writes unit tests based on your code. It really does feel like some people are being very generous about how magical these things are, because I'm not getting the magic at all.
