Do you honestly expect coding to exist as a profession in 5 years?

Definitely. It's possible that programming will reach its peak as a percentage of the population that's employed within 5 years as AI tools make people more productive, but I don't see things changing to "AI, write me an app that does this" and the AI getting it to build, run, and deploy perfectly in anything under 20 years. Programmers will be required until it can do that, because any tiny issue can cause the program to fail and the AI would need to find requirements from whoever is prompting it, which is the hard part.

Yes. Coding will be alive and well. Have a little bit of faith in the theory behind the Rice’s theorem. :)

https://busy-beavers.tigyog.app/rice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem

5 years: yes.

5 decades: probably not.

Coding as in "Look ma', my package.json has 8 different versions of leftpad" hopefully will die out in a year or two. It will clean up a few things. I expect that coding will stay here for a while where (technical and mathematical) creativity is required, especially in the field of low level coding.

My guess: coding will exist, but it will probably be more specialized. The number of jobs will steadily decrease, probably making it harder for entry-level programmers to find work.

Why do I think this? The same thing happened to the field of electrical engineering. There were 426,000 electrical engineering jobs in 1990 [1]. In 2002, there were 385,000 jobs. By 2012, the number was 300,000. [2]. And the numbers have continued to decline. (Note: all U.S. numbers)

So, aren’t EE grads still getting jobs? Yes, but they are doing more software now and less electrical/electronic things. They have specialized. ME’s have had a slightly more difficult road.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/mlr/1992/02/art3full.pdf

[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2487847/what-stem-shor...

What, specifically, makes you believe it won't? What's your 5 year timeline for eliminating coding?

To be pedantic, "coding" as a profession hardly exists in the US today. No one goes to work, types code for 8 hours, and walks out without doing anything else. In a typical SWE's day/week, they must competently perform all of the following activities:

- Determine business needs, translate those into requirements and design specs

- Plan upcoming work

- Develop testing strategies

- Integrate custom hardware/software with other custom hardware/software

- Create and maintain documentation

- Handle emergency situations

- Communicate intelligently with peers/managers about the state of their work

- Mentor new employees

Will some of these tasks be partially or fully automated? I hope so (looking at you documentation). But it's gonna take a while to automate every portion of every SWE job. And someone's gonna have to figure out how to automate those jobs anyway, and who better than another SWE?

One thing I am concerned about, is that current AI/LLMs are as good as a lot of junior developers. My pair programming sessions with ChatGPT at my side are as productive as any session I've had with a junior dev (sometimes more productive, sorry to say). It's possible that, contrary to popular belief, the demand for mid-level+ SWEs will go UP as a result of AI - because fewer junior devs can make it past the great AI filter.

You sound like someone talking about commercial trucking 5 years ago.

If you believe the demand for code is elastic (people want more if it's cheaper), then it looks set to explode as a profession.

Won't be doing exactly what you were doing last year, just as last year, you weren't rewiring plugboards for mainframe programs. It'll be more like systems analysis.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugboard#Early_computers

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_analysis

"AGI" is used in a very imprecise way and means different things depending on who you ask. In five or so years there will be a significant portion of the population which consider some AI systems to be AGI.

Who knows about "completely" but the actual code generation part of software engineering will likely be handled by AI in the majority of cases within five or so years.

There will still be _some_ humans doing actual programming probably, just not usually for common tasks. Because those will have plenty of data available to handle automatically.

As soon as I found out about ChatGPT last year, I immediately anticipated that I would be competing with AI for work. And the next day started trying to build code generation tools aimed at end users. I am on the third version of my attempt which is primarily a ChatGPT plugin.

My last version could generate, test and deploy some programs based on a chat conversation. But it wasn't very reliable and I didn't have money for marketing. So I am working on a version that has slightly more limited scope but also should be able to make a wide variety of simple applications more reliably through the ChatGPT interface.

I suspect that WWIII (powered by superintelligent killer AI swarms) might turn out be a much more pressing concern for people versus careers.

It is absurd to think that in five years there won’t be humans at Apple or Microsoft or Google coding up new features and products. Or even people just doing it for fun.

We need to stop with this obsession of X completely killing Y. It’s the mindset that leads people to argue “Google won’t exist in one year” after ChatGPT has been out for one month (I saw a version of that argument multiple times) or that the world’s financial system would have been replaced with Bitcoin by now. At best it’s detached from reality and devoid of critical thinking, but it’s just as likely to be a grift that people with a financial stake in the technology want you to believe.

The world isn’t static. Stop looking at it through the lens of a single element and fantasising about that thing continuing to develop as everything else in the world remains unchanged.

I think coding might still exist in 5 years, but I definitely foresee a future where AI has significant impact on this profession. Specifically, I'd guess that at some point, whether it's 5 years, 10 years, whatever, we'll see a measurable reduction in the number of coding jobs, especially the entry level / lower skilled positions. My guess is that some more senior / skilled people, and people with highly specialized skills, domain knowledge, etc. will be safe a little while longer. But if nothing else, I think competition for the remaining coding jobs will become more intense.

This analysis is, of course, ignoring the other side of the equation, which is "what new jobs will be created in turn by the advent of these AI platforms"?

I am not a developer so perhaps I have a very side-lined and jaded view from my past work experience. I don't think it's as simple as replacing x in y years, rather I think it's more about specific organizations and probably a big factor may be product managers in specific organizations. Some just want to get x working and out the door so they can check off a list and move onto the next thing. They might be fine with sub-standard code as that may be their exact standard. Not naming names but you are all thinking of some.

On the other hand I still see massive oceans of CVE's out there. So clearly LLMs/AGI's/Whatever have not fixed all of the human induced bugs and that should be the easiest things for super smart AI to fix I think. That suggests to me it has not caught up to humans. When I see all the CVE's closed out as [FIXED] or [FIXED FOREVER, HACK ME BRO, JUST TRY IT] then perhaps I might be concerned for developers. Yes I expect those theoretical AGI's to get snarky in git commit comments.