I think that's a big part of what makes this era so much fun - the interactivity tailored to my capability. I feel like I'm 13 again discovering I can write HTML and feeling that giddy delight when I try something and it just works.
>> I haven’t had great luck with winding it up and setting it loose on a task
Yeah there is real labor involved with trying to set up the right context and explain your goals and ensure it has the right tools, etc. etc. Sometimes the payoff is massive, other times it's like "I could have done this myself faster". It takes time to build an intuition for which is which, and I'm constantly having to tune that heuristic as new models and tools come out.
Yeah in fact I think we are going through some major upheaval in development practices because we haven't yet figured out what constraints to put in our use of AI, and so plastering it everywhere we trip ourselves up. It took a while to figure out that private members were useful and GOTO is harmful despite how tempting it might be.
I think similarly we will find that using AI to take shortcuts around design is mostly harmful, but using it to fulfill interfaces is brilliant. Eventually a set of best practices will evolve.
Reduced costs does not necessarily equal reduced wages, but I see what you're saying. As others have pointed out, making cameras more accessible made photography more competitive.
It may be in the end that software developers make less money even as more jobs become available.
And worrying. LLMs don't fed themselves, we need people to continue sharing solutions. I've contributed some popular answers on SO myself and am happy that an LLM can use that in its training, but rarely go to SO myself anymore.
Regardless of the true number, you're right that no amount of reasoning on paper "why" we should be employed matters if the reality is different; which it clearly is for a lot of people. Reality decides in the end.
A more accurate title might have been "Why AI is a reason to become a software developer" - since the topic I discuss is entirely AI and its effects on the field, and there might be entirely non-AI reasons for not going into software.
I think I will have good while in security. That is pointing all the mistakes and faults... And telling why something AI came up might not fully solve the problem.
So much room left. As I doubt every developer will double check things every time by asking.
Yes, if you built your career on FrontPage you have probably had a bad time. Many such cases.
That said, even if the specific products like Cursor or ChatGPT are not here in 5 years, I am confident we are not going to collectively dismiss the utility of LLMs.
I'm... slightly dubious, honestly, just because, historically, confident predictions of "this is the future of programming!" are almost always wrong. Throughout the 90s and into the early noughties, say, there was a very, very strong idea that things like VB and Delphi and Frontpage and Flash, where code was essentially intermingled with the UI, were The Future. And then all of that just died, to such an extent that there's really nothing like it at all today. Then there was the whole UML thing, and the "everything will run on XML" thing in the mid to late noughties...
Well, arguably in programming nothing ever does happen; we're still using mostly imperative programming languages on mostly UNIX-y systems which are not dramatically different from those in the 1970s, with filesystems rather similar to those in the 70s...
Some stuff does happen, of course, but most prophesied things do not happen.
All tools I mentioned before were useful for programming. They didn't got worse. Still not enough to keep them relevant over time.
I chose those tools as an example precisely because, for a while, they achieve widespread success. People made awesome things with them. Until they stopped doing it.
What brought their demise was their inherent limitations. Code by humans on plain text was slower, harder, but didn't had those inherent limits. Code by humans on plain text got better, those tools didn't.
