HACKER Q&A
📣 MichaelRo

ChatGPT (LLMs) replacing programmers? Ridiculous


I keep seeing these articles and people confirming and re-enforcing as a fact that LLMs are practically replacing programmers. Including on HN, where I would have expected more common sense.

So I have a question, ruling out stupidity, what crack have these people smoked? So I'm not talking designers and journalists and business school types who don't know any better and perceive programming pretty much as fairy tale magic: just get a "magic ring", rotate it on your finger and say you want "a castle" and poof there it is. Not even a "genie in a bottle", who are renown for their predisposition to misinterpret your wish (in fact they are closer to how programming really works when taking the customer's wish and turning it into code).

So again, what sort of programming do these programmers program? The "ChatGPT is awesome cuz it writes code" type. Have they ever worked on a serious, large, enterprise code base? I get the feeling it's mainly fresh college grads who think "programming" is about writing sort algorithms.

Here's a thing: the main problem in an existing, large code base is reasoning. 99% of the time in spent in prostration trying to figure out what the fuck are you even supposed to do, why the fuck the existing system where you have to plug your addition is working like that and how the fuck are you going to acomplish integrating new stuff it if it's even at all possible.

So one word people: REASONING. It's ridiculous to even discuss ChatGPT "replacing" programmers or having anything but a minimal impact on the whole programming domain. Think of LLMs as a form of Google + Stack Overflow. Useful to fill some edge cases? Definitely? Replacing programmers? You'd have to be crazy to have claimed that about Stack Overflowback back in the day and yet it's exactly what people proclaim on ChatGPT.

So lemme disambiguate how hopelessly retarded it sounds when you say "ChatGPT will soon replace programmers coze all it takes is some 'prompt engineer' telling it to build the castle". It's precisely what in the old days would be phrased as "Stack Overflow will soon replace programmers coze all it takes is some drooling idiot posting 'can I haz teh codez?' on it, then copy-paste the answer".

  👤 cheevly Accepted Answer ✓
The reason AI will quickly replace programmers is because of one major reason that many do not consider: AI allows you to build entirely new types of applications which will not require the same software patterns we use today. In fact, using AI, you can create software without 'code' (in the traditional sense). Until you start building genai apps and see the new paradigms at work, it will be difficult to perceive.
👤 oldandtired
Over 40 years, I have seen many "programmers" who should never been in the business. Some of these were marketed as "guru" programmers. I suppose such idiotic systems like ChatGPT and its ilk could replace some of these.

However, anyone who has had to build the required skills to actively get real work done will probably find that they will not be replaced by such systems in terms of skill replacement.

What is more likely to happen is that the pointy heads in upper management will replace them because of the usual lack of foresight and intelligence on the part of the pointy heads.

So, yes, all sorts of programmers will be replaced by these systems and we shall see the systems produced become more garbage faster than we have already seen.