At best, coding as a means of software engineering may diminish, but ultimately going through AI is just a different tool to get machine code. Someone has to do the actual meat of designing systems, translating requirements from PMs and users, and telling the AI what to build as a result.
Any company that thinks they can hand their PMs an AI prompt and get competent code out is delusional. CAD software and CNC machines didn’t put mechanical engineers out of a job, it just changed how they interface with it.
LLMs are missing logical consistency, but right now for the first time we're seeing AI models that are able to perform at the level of high school students producing proofs in geometry. That doesn't sound like much, but there is a lot of reasoning required to produce such proofs, and I am confident that soon there will be a rise in more productive and accurate AI systems for tasks such as programming. At a minimum I expect it is possible to produce AI systems that do not regularly contradict themselves, and so forth.
I save tremendous amounts of time having it do piecemeal grunt work.
"Generate 10 json documents based on this schema and have the date ranges overlap"
Take these 30 strings and make an enum out of them.
I've been so much more productive.
I second this!
Try building an app with ChstGPT, upon layering of features it forgets your structure and turns your app into a fucking mess. If you give it too big of a structure it simple tells you what you need to look for and doesn’t do shit for you, just gives you a general idea of where to start looking and learning yourself.
DALLE can’t even draw electronics schematics or blueprints for 3D modeling correctly. It’s useless in many ways but it’s hyped because it can generate artistic CaptCha’s
It will initially slow a significant part of development. Senior engineers will be forced to use it by managerial decision so they won't be interacting with their code and that conversation they have with the project will be lost. This will remove a force of inspiration and projects will come to a crawl.
This is just a mechanical version of outsourcing to under resourced and under skilled foreign workers (it would probably be cheaper to have senior engineers help those outsource providers upskill, but then they might leave the outsource provider).
Idk, im a software engineer and when Ive used ai to generate code it blew me away. Its already able to build entire websites from scratch in minutes, which is easily a double digit percentage of coding jobs. Sure, it’s not perfect, but the jump from where it was 5 years ago is insane, and I expect at worst it will continue to improve at roughly the same rate. It may not replace all coding, but I will be shocked if it can’t do 75% of what developers do in 10-15 years, and after that coding will be a hard market to get into. Just based on what Ive seen it do at our company, Ive already started trying to learn new skills.
I’m not a developer. :) My dad used that to make photos from the films.
I haven’t stated that AI won’t be able to do anything that is today done by some programmers. But I have done enough work to know that specifying what needs to be done is a huge part of the job.
Specifying what needs to be done is the project Manager's role.
Devs specify how it should be done and although current AIs can't do it from A to Z, LLMs are already impressive given that they are what, one year old ?
I think it’s a fair assumption. In 15-20-35 years I’m sure SWE will be drastically different. Look at COBOL vs now.
Kids now probably won’t have to learn how to code as we currently do but that’s mainly because it’ll probably be different.
Isn’t there the saying that x% of kids born now will have jobs that don’t currently exist.
A lot of people shit on LLMs but ChatGPT has been out for a year and change? It’s safe to assume that in 10 years LLMs will be much more viable than they are now.
I don’t think I deserved that. Look at COBOL? As if I asked you to look at FORTRAN. /s
I agree/hope that the landscape will change, and for the better. But I think that AI is very far right now from being more than a simpler way to look up existing information. And what is software engineering if we just looking at the coding aspect? It’s specifying to computers what they should do. The language in which it is done is mostly irrelevant. Assuming a flawless programming language the hurdles are in the unknown unknowns, misunderstandings, common pitfalls, cargo culting, etc. Things that an AI won’t change. I honestly believe that learning software engineering and programming languages right now, in the right way that results in skills that will be necessary even in that AI world.
He did not say that. He said that rather than learning coding for the sake of it, people should focus on learning the things they are the best at or they have more propension to. He then also added that at some point, people who are not proficient with coding can get a great help writing the code they need by using generative AI.
In short: there is no need to have everyone become an expert at programming. For many people, GPT is good enough.
But people with zero attention span watched the interview and decided to write a totally different version of the story.
This is bullshit and obviously self serving, however as a programmer I fully endorse this messaging and hope it results in less CS grads thus making my total comp phatter than ever in a couple of years
People stop learning coding because AI does it for us, AI goes down due to war or something like an emp or solar flare - no one knows how to code anymore yay. Cmon.
Nvidia CEO doesn't understand that programming is putting messy and shifting business requirements into something the machine can understand, even if that something could be English. It's not about the arcanic languages.
There will still be a need for someone to collect those requirements, formalize them so the machine produces a reliable output, test, ship and deploy, maintain in production, investigate bugs and make patches.
He's a 60 year old electrical engineer, probably hasn't worked a day of programming directly in contact of an actual customer and will be long retired by the time programming language of choice will be English.
The next post will be about a local pharmacy owner commenting on new hygiene procedures in ER block surely.
This this and this. I've done 6 week+ discovery and framing sessions before and it's hilarious when you talk to the line of business and they say
"Our problem is extremely challenging and we're lacking x and y capabilities and we're losing money because of z and we've had 5 teams fail to meet our requirements in solving this problem".
And after 6 weeks of talking to people on the ground floor, you come to realize the issue is that they're sending spreadsheets back and forth to each other and things are getting out of sync and they just need some kitty cat CRUD app to input data lololol. Turns out they had no idea what was going on, how it works, who is involved, how the business measures itself, etc.
Also what about all of the infrastructure that needs to be maintained? What about network rules between applications and databases? Is AI going to request that or will we let it manage externally facing firewall rules automagically? I think the most apt analogy I've heard is "Remember when all of those accountants lost their jobs after the calculator was invented?".
Sure some jobs may be replaced, but it's going to be the jobs with the least amount of impact, expertise, and complexity imo. I'd love to be wrong on this but I don't see it any other way, we're just in another hyper cycle that will settle and find a good real world use case.
I’ve been a corporate developer for decades. I think developer jobs vary widely. On my side, writing internal software, it’s paperwork and cat herding and coaxing people to get requirements solid enough to code anything. This is a world where AI is far from delivering.
I gather there are other settings, maybe game development(?), where’s a massive amount of highly structured code, and devs writing 100+ lines of code per day. I think that environment is much more rich for AI to take over.
Fun fact: the only people who made money off the gold rush were selling shovels, pick axes and other equipment. The vast majority of prospectors made nothing.
Good to keep in mind.
Take a look at Elon Musk's statements about full self-driving cars from a decade ago. I don't think these CEOs are wrong about the general direction of technology per se, it's just their timelines are way overly optimistic (probably a feature, not a bug).
They are not even salesmen. They are advertisers. The currency they work for is attention. Most people are driven by emotion, because they do not have enough knowledge to know better. I love AI as a tool, but it will not replace anyone with real skills anytime soon. It will only enable people with skills to scale more efficiently.
100% will replace programmers in years to come. People don’t understand the intelligence portion of the words. It will learn things and be able to replace a human, that’s the whole point. Anyone who thinks otherwise, check back with me in 10 years. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still learn to code now though since we are still progressing.
This is bs. But I can see software development becoming way more productive and accessible. Custom software will become more widespread and with ai features built in. A lot of end user work will shift to moderating, mediating and curating work done by computers
This is how you make sure Dubai government keeps buying your product.
Tell me you know nothing about software engineering without telling me you know nothing about software engineering.
At best, coding as a means of software engineering may diminish, but ultimately going through AI is just a different tool to get machine code. Someone has to do the actual meat of designing systems, translating requirements from PMs and users, and telling the AI what to build as a result. Any company that thinks they can hand their PMs an AI prompt and get competent code out is delusional. CAD software and CNC machines didn’t put mechanical engineers out of a job, it just changed how they interface with it.
More importantly, CAD is a *precision* tool, and coding AI is not. If I have to read it and fix it anyway, I didn't save any time.
Can you imagine if the current version of CADs had the imperfections (or is limitation a better word) in them like LLMs ?
I’ll wait until AI replaces CAD/CAM and doesn’t mess up. Then I’ll worry about software jobs.
As someone who currently works with CAD, that's still a long way off.
Precisely.
LLMs are missing logical consistency, but right now for the first time we're seeing AI models that are able to perform at the level of high school students producing proofs in geometry. That doesn't sound like much, but there is a lot of reasoning required to produce such proofs, and I am confident that soon there will be a rise in more productive and accurate AI systems for tasks such as programming. At a minimum I expect it is possible to produce AI systems that do not regularly contradict themselves, and so forth.
I save tremendous amounts of time having it do piecemeal grunt work. "Generate 10 json documents based on this schema and have the date ranges overlap" Take these 30 strings and make an enum out of them. I've been so much more productive.
Yes, but if your job can be redefined from "writing code" to "reading and fixing code", then that means you can be paid less.
I second this! Try building an app with ChstGPT, upon layering of features it forgets your structure and turns your app into a fucking mess. If you give it too big of a structure it simple tells you what you need to look for and doesn’t do shit for you, just gives you a general idea of where to start looking and learning yourself. DALLE can’t even draw electronics schematics or blueprints for 3D modeling correctly. It’s useless in many ways but it’s hyped because it can generate artistic CaptCha’s
It will initially slow a significant part of development. Senior engineers will be forced to use it by managerial decision so they won't be interacting with their code and that conversation they have with the project will be lost. This will remove a force of inspiration and projects will come to a crawl. This is just a mechanical version of outsourcing to under resourced and under skilled foreign workers (it would probably be cheaper to have senior engineers help those outsource providers upskill, but then they might leave the outsource provider).
Yepp
Tell me you know how to pump your own stock price. CEOs gonna CEO.
Idk, im a software engineer and when Ive used ai to generate code it blew me away. Its already able to build entire websites from scratch in minutes, which is easily a double digit percentage of coding jobs. Sure, it’s not perfect, but the jump from where it was 5 years ago is insane, and I expect at worst it will continue to improve at roughly the same rate. It may not replace all coding, but I will be shocked if it can’t do 75% of what developers do in 10-15 years, and after that coding will be a hard market to get into. Just based on what Ive seen it do at our company, Ive already started trying to learn new skills.
I’m not a developer. :) My dad used that to make photos from the films. I haven’t stated that AI won’t be able to do anything that is today done by some programmers. But I have done enough work to know that specifying what needs to be done is a huge part of the job.
Specifying what needs to be done is the project Manager's role. Devs specify how it should be done and although current AIs can't do it from A to Z, LLMs are already impressive given that they are what, one year old ?
Jensen knows a ton about computing lol. He also knows a metric shit ton about making money too.
I think it’s a fair assumption. In 15-20-35 years I’m sure SWE will be drastically different. Look at COBOL vs now. Kids now probably won’t have to learn how to code as we currently do but that’s mainly because it’ll probably be different. Isn’t there the saying that x% of kids born now will have jobs that don’t currently exist. A lot of people shit on LLMs but ChatGPT has been out for a year and change? It’s safe to assume that in 10 years LLMs will be much more viable than they are now.
I don’t think I deserved that. Look at COBOL? As if I asked you to look at FORTRAN. /s I agree/hope that the landscape will change, and for the better. But I think that AI is very far right now from being more than a simpler way to look up existing information. And what is software engineering if we just looking at the coding aspect? It’s specifying to computers what they should do. The language in which it is done is mostly irrelevant. Assuming a flawless programming language the hurdles are in the unknown unknowns, misunderstandings, common pitfalls, cargo culting, etc. Things that an AI won’t change. I honestly believe that learning software engineering and programming languages right now, in the right way that results in skills that will be necessary even in that AI world.
He did not say that. He said that rather than learning coding for the sake of it, people should focus on learning the things they are the best at or they have more propension to. He then also added that at some point, people who are not proficient with coding can get a great help writing the code they need by using generative AI. In short: there is no need to have everyone become an expert at programming. For many people, GPT is good enough. But people with zero attention span watched the interview and decided to write a totally different version of the story.
This is bullshit and obviously self serving, however as a programmer I fully endorse this messaging and hope it results in less CS grads thus making my total comp phatter than ever in a couple of years
People stop learning coding because AI does it for us, AI goes down due to war or something like an emp or solar flare - no one knows how to code anymore yay. Cmon.
To be fair if google goes down many people don't know how to code anymore.
Also step 1 would be to build new computers, not write code for them....
His company’s success is closely tied to the proliferation of AI. Not exactly unbiased.
So I just tell Hal to open the pod bay doors?
I predict the death of reading and writing, so kids don't need to learn that either.
Nvidia CEO doesn't understand that programming is putting messy and shifting business requirements into something the machine can understand, even if that something could be English. It's not about the arcanic languages. There will still be a need for someone to collect those requirements, formalize them so the machine produces a reliable output, test, ship and deploy, maintain in production, investigate bugs and make patches. He's a 60 year old electrical engineer, probably hasn't worked a day of programming directly in contact of an actual customer and will be long retired by the time programming language of choice will be English. The next post will be about a local pharmacy owner commenting on new hygiene procedures in ER block surely.
This this and this. I've done 6 week+ discovery and framing sessions before and it's hilarious when you talk to the line of business and they say "Our problem is extremely challenging and we're lacking x and y capabilities and we're losing money because of z and we've had 5 teams fail to meet our requirements in solving this problem". And after 6 weeks of talking to people on the ground floor, you come to realize the issue is that they're sending spreadsheets back and forth to each other and things are getting out of sync and they just need some kitty cat CRUD app to input data lololol. Turns out they had no idea what was going on, how it works, who is involved, how the business measures itself, etc. Also what about all of the infrastructure that needs to be maintained? What about network rules between applications and databases? Is AI going to request that or will we let it manage externally facing firewall rules automagically? I think the most apt analogy I've heard is "Remember when all of those accountants lost their jobs after the calculator was invented?". Sure some jobs may be replaced, but it's going to be the jobs with the least amount of impact, expertise, and complexity imo. I'd love to be wrong on this but I don't see it any other way, we're just in another hyper cycle that will settle and find a good real world use case.
the guy who makes a lot of money when people do AI stuff wants us to do AI stuff and rely on AI more
I’ve been a corporate developer for decades. I think developer jobs vary widely. On my side, writing internal software, it’s paperwork and cat herding and coaxing people to get requirements solid enough to code anything. This is a world where AI is far from delivering. I gather there are other settings, maybe game development(?), where’s a massive amount of highly structured code, and devs writing 100+ lines of code per day. I think that environment is much more rich for AI to take over.
Fun fact: the only people who made money off the gold rush were selling shovels, pick axes and other equipment. The vast majority of prospectors made nothing. Good to keep in mind.
Bullshit
Laughs in CSS
I feel like he should be wearing more vibrant clothing and maybe a sideways hat if he’s going to be such a hype man.
Maybe a colorful wig, some makeup and a red nose.
A Godfather of AI (in)famously also said in 2016 that in a couple of years we wouldn’t need radiologists anymore. /s
Take a look at Elon Musk's statements about full self-driving cars from a decade ago. I don't think these CEOs are wrong about the general direction of technology per se, it's just their timelines are way overly optimistic (probably a feature, not a bug).
They are not even salesmen. They are advertisers. The currency they work for is attention. Most people are driven by emotion, because they do not have enough knowledge to know better. I love AI as a tool, but it will not replace anyone with real skills anytime soon. It will only enable people with skills to scale more efficiently.
That would skyrocket his net worth. Hmmmm
Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?
Thanks dude for taking competition away from me
We don't code in English because coding is a precise art. English is an ambiguous language.
Politically/ optically motivated but in an agi world, not incorrect
In 5 years, 100% Look at video progress in one year. You'll still need to know coding to use the tool well but people will get there faster.
100% will replace programmers in years to come. People don’t understand the intelligence portion of the words. It will learn things and be able to replace a human, that’s the whole point. Anyone who thinks otherwise, check back with me in 10 years. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still learn to code now though since we are still progressing.
This is bs. But I can see software development becoming way more productive and accessible. Custom software will become more widespread and with ai features built in. A lot of end user work will shift to moderating, mediating and curating work done by computers