🤖 Some believe this will happen soon. Jensen Huang (NVidia) recently said that coding is not a viable career and at FTI Supernova former president Barak Obama stated: “unless you are at the top 1% of coding, if you’re just doing regular stuff, AI is going to replace you pretty quick.”
Their assumption seems that we will soon describe our business needs in human language. The AI will then create a working application by generating the necessary software. No software engineers needed.
❌ This nonsense has to stop. It is not innocent. Our economy will be in deep trouble if we keep discouraging young people from becoming software engineers.
🎬 A recent demo labelled as “AI Software Engineer” marked a new low in pushing this misconception. The demo video shows an AI system that picks up a random programming job from a website, downloads the code, analyses it, fixes the bugs, and takes the money.
Except… it wasn’t. I will put the video to the deep analysis by Carl Brown in the comments but here are the main points:
➡️ it didn’t answer the job request; it did something else entirely
➡️ it unnecessarily created new, buggy source files that it then fixed (zero value)
➡️ it wrote bad code
🤔 So ok, you say, that’s painful, but surely the next version of ChatGPT will do this!
🚫 No, it won’t. Software development requires a broad set of skills, most importantly the ability to reason, which large language models cannot reliably do. It will not just be a matter of adding more training data or making the model larger. Reasoning is the holy grail of AI and has proven elusive so far. It will require nothing less than a major scientific breakthrough.
🔧 Don’t get me wrong, AI is helpful and for sure part of a professional software engineer’s toolbox. It can help writing code snippets, debugging, documenting, etc. It will help, not replace.
Also because on top of reasoning we need your passion, your problem solving, your curiosity, your understanding of user needs, your collaboration in a team and your brilliant mind.
Learn to code, then use an AI assistant to speed up your work!
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