My impression is that AI has done more for the accessibility of coding than the efficiency of coding.
Sure, it's much more possible for bob from accounting to throw together some trivial python script than it was a few years ago, but it seems the main benefit more skilled programmers get from it seems to be helping with syntax and pumping out boilerplate. Which is quite a bit of programming work but well less than 70% of it.
When a problem is tricky, it seems people turn off the autopilot.
I'm well aware of this and in those sorts of jobs, most of the work isn't programming, it's sitting in meetings and communicating. While AI might help with this simply by shrinking the amount of people needed to do a job, I'm very dubious about a 70% efficiency gain when you look at the entire scope of what these workers do.
The entire concept that if you make coding 70% more efficient that you'll make coders 70% more efficient is simply wrong.
I spoke to a CTO of a firm doing relatively cookie-cutter work (custom software for things like waste management). They were able to lay off a significant portion of their workforce due to AI. I think it's eating in more at the bottom-end of coding right now.
It definitely makes me more productive in high-end, by more than what I'd call marginal, but not by enough that it's risking jobs.
However, the article, and my comment, were more general than coding. The impact is different industry-by-industry, from zero to very high.
Strong disagree. Look at the crunchiest of people who are doing very low level work. I wouldn't say they are really making more than anyone else. In a lot of ways they are at a disadvantage because their skills are very niche and very specific. If they find work it can be good. But it can be a frustrating exercise to find that work.
People pay for productivity, making a product of some sort that has value. These AI tools will increase productivity. And they will only get better with time. That translates into the productivity of people who have mastered these tools as more valuable. They just get more done.
Will syntax issues and other problems be an issue with early AI? Sure, but it will get better. The AI will start to catch more issues and move farther up the stack. We still need to know enough to guide it, but the details required will be fewer.
Like all other tech it will paradoxically make people more productive and somehow less efficient. For programmers, we're all going to write more code with AI but somehow get as much done as the programmers pre-internet.
One way to think about ai programming is that it's another step on the continual ladder up from writing machine code to writing more in more 'human readable' programming languages. It's essentially a non-deterministic compiler from natural language to an intermediate representation like python. Even assuming it was able to near perfectly translate intent to code, that doesn't mean it will replace programmers, necessarily.
The way to think about the impact on employment is comparative advantage. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/comparativeadvantage.as... Even if AIs are better than humans at every programming task, there is still a limited amount of compute in the world and unlimited amount of potential work to do, so there will always be tasks available for humans to work on. If the cost of writing code becomes cheaper, there will be tasks to automate that aren't worth the effort to automate now, that will _become_ worth the effort to automate in the future.
By AI programming I mean the AI doing programming, not programming the AI. Though soon enough the first will be doing the second and that's where the loop really closes...
That sounds like a good thing. There are many people paid to write software who absolutely cannot write original code and have no idea how things actually work. A lot of that can be, and probably should be, eliminated by AI.
I think you're describing the difference of AI creating code vs developing _with_ AI which firmly keeps humans in charge but enabling them to be many times more efficient.
This is what I've been predicting for over a year: AI-assisted programming will increase demand for programmers.
It may well change how they do their work though, just like spreadsheets did for accountants and compilers did for the earliest generation of hand-code-in-ASM developers. I can imagine a future where we do most of our coding at an even higher level than today and only dive down into the minutia when the AI isn't good enough or we need to fix/optimize something. The same is true for ASM today-- people rarely touch it unless they need to debug a compiler or (more often) to write something extremely optimized or using some CPU-specific feature.
Programming may become more about higher level reasoning than coding lower level algorithms, unless you're doing something really hard or demanding.
Actually your post suggests that AI may increase the use of low-level languages because of its ability to generate code. I think auto-generation of code, especially C, long predates LLMs.
My view is that even if AI can program really well, it can't architect full solutions, you still need to tell it specifics and test/debug its output (at least for now). It's like if you're a farmer and you got tractors, you don't need to till and harvest anymore but you still gotta drive it and press buttons and even if tractors drove themselves and pressed their own buttons you gotta supervise them and maintain them.
I think people being less eager to be programmers will only help with increasing wages lol
They make the (common) mistake of equating “programming” to implementing some algorithms, sure AI probably has down sooner than later. This is a small part of what “programming” has come to be though.
Counterpoint: one thing I think AI will be able to do really well early on is refactoring.
Code is often ugly because humans just don't have the time to make it look nice. But if I had a good AI tool, I could make my code beautiful.
This is hardly the first time humans have invented a tool to make complicated tasks easy. The sweet spot has always been knowing how to use the tools to maximize your productivity, but also knowing how to do it the hard way too in case something breaks.
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