Uncle Bob’s response when asked if AI will takeover software engineering job.(1m)

You’re certainly not the only software developer worried about this. Many people across many fields are losing sleep thinking that machine learning is coming for their jobs. Realistically automation is going to eliminate the need for a ton of labor in the coming decades and software is included in that.

However, I am quite skeptical that neural nets are going to be reading and writing meaningful code at large scales in the near future. If they did they we would have much bigger fish to fry because that’s the type of thing that could very well lead to the singularity.

I think you should spend more time using AI programming tools. That would let you see how primitive they really are in their current state and learn how to leverage them for yourself. It’s reasonable to be concerned that employees will need to use these tools in the near future. That’s because these are new, useful tools and software developers are generally expected to use all tooling that improves their productivity.

There’s a massive amount of hype right now, much like everything was blockchains for a while.

AI/ML is not able to replace a programmer, especially not a senior engineer. Right now I’d advise you do your job well and hang tight for a couple of years to see how things shake out.

(me = ~50 years old DevOps person)

I think all jobs that are pure mental labor are under threat to a certain extent from AI.

It's not really certain when real AGI is going to start to become real, but it certainly seems possible that it'll be real soon, and if you can pay $20/month to replace a six figure software developer then a lot of people are in trouble yes. Like a lot of other revolutions like this that have happened, not all of it will be "AI replaces engineer"; some of it will be "engineer who can work with the AI and complement it to be produtive will replace engineer who can't."

Of course that's cold comfort once it reaches the point that AI can do it all. If it makes you feel any better, real engineering is much more difficult than a lot of other pure-mental-labor jobs. It'll probably be one of the last to fall, after marketing, accounting, law, business strategy, and a ton of other white-collar jobs. The world will change a lot. Again, I'm not saying this will happen real soon. But it certainly could.

I think we're right up against the cold reality that a lot of the systems that currently run the world don't really care if people are taken care of and have what they need in order to live. A lot of people who aren't blessed with education and the right setup in life have been struggling really badly for quite a long time no matter how hard they work. People like you and me who made it well into adulthood just being able to go to work and that be enough to be okay are, relatively speaking, lucky in the modern world.

I would say you're right to be concerned about this stuff. I think starting to agitate for a better, more just world for all concerned is probably the best thing you can do about it. Trying to hold back the tide of change that's coming doesn't seem real doable without that part changing.

Nobody knows if and when programming will be automated in a meaningful way. But once we have the tech to do it, we can automate pretty much all work. So I think this will not be a problem for programmers until it’s a problem for everyone.

If your job truly is in danger, then not touching AI tools isn’t going to change that. The best you can do for yourself is to explore what these tools can do for you and figure out if they can help you become more productive so that you’re not first on the chopping block. Maybe in doing so, you’ll find other aspects of programming that you enjoy just as much and don’t yet get automated away with these tools.

To answer your question directly: The debate has been going on in the broader public since ChatGPT 3 dropped

To answer how you’re feeling: that’s valid, because a lot of big pockets seem to not care at all about the ethical considerations.

Man, it’s a tool. It will change things for us, it is very powerful; but still a tool. It does not “know” anything, there’s no true intelligence in the things we now call “AI”. For now, is really useful as a rubber duck, it can make interesting suggestions, make you explore big code bases faster, and even be useful for creating boilerplate. But the code it generates usually is not very trustworthy and have lower quality.

The reality is not that we will lose our jobs to it, but that companies will expect more productivity from us using these tools. I recommend you to try ChatGPT (the best in class for now), and try to understand it’s strengths and limitations.

Remember: this is just an autocomplete on steroids, that do more the the regular version, but that get the same type of errors.

I’m both unenthusiastic about A.I. and unafraid of it.

Programming is a lot more than writing code. A programmer needs to setup a reliable deployment pipeline, or write a secure web-facing interface, or make a useable and accessible user interface, or correctly configure logging, or identity and access, or a million other nuanced, pain-in-the-ass tasks. I’ve heard some programmers occasionally decrypt what the hell the client actually wanted, but I think that’s a myth.

The history of automation is somebody finds a shortcut - we all embrace it - we all discover it doesn’t really work - someone works their ass off on a real solution - we all pay a premium for it - a bunch of us collaborate on an open shared solution - we all migrate and focus more on one of the 10,000 other remaining pain-in-the-ass challenges.

A.I. will get better, but it isn’t going to be a serious viable replacement for any of the real work in programming for a very long time. Once it is, Murphy’s law and history teaches us that there’ll be plenty of problems it still sucks at.

As an example:

Salesforce has been trying to replace developers with "easy to use tools" for a decade now.

They're no closer than when they started. Yes the new, improved flow builder and omni studio look great initially for the simple little preplanned demos they make. But theyre very slow, unsafe to use and generally are impossible to debug.

As an example: a common use case is: sales guy wants to create an opportunity with a product. They go on how omni studio let's an admin create a set of independently loading pages that let them:
• create the opportunity record, associating it with an existing account number.
• add a selection of products to it.

But what if the account number doesn't exist? It fails. It can't create the account for you, nor prompt you to do it in a modal. The opportunity page only works with the opportunity object.

Also, if the user tries to go back, it doesn't allow them to delete products already added to the opportunity.

Once we get actual AIs that can do context and planning, then our field is in danger. But so long as we're going down the glorified chatbot route, that's not in danger.

As an example:

Salesforce has been trying to replace developers with "easy to use tools" for a decade now.

They're no closer than when they started. Yes the new, improved flow builder and omni studio look great initially for the simple little preplanned demos they make. But theyre very slow, unsafe to use and generally are impossible to debug.

As an example: a common use case is: sales guy wants to create an opportunity with a product. They go on how omni studio let's an admin create a set of independently loading pages that let them:
• create the opportunity record, associating it with an existing account number.
• add a selection of products to it.

But what if the account number doesn't exist? It fails. It can't create the account for you, nor prompt you to do it in a modal. The opportunity page only works with the opportunity object.

Also, if the user tries to go back, it doesn't allow them to delete products already added to the opportunity.

Once we get actual AIs that can do context and planning, then our field is in danger. But so long as we're going down the glorified chatbot route, that's not in danger.

They haven’t replaced me with cheaper non-artifical intelligence yet and that’s leaps and bounds better than AI.

Your job is automating electrons, and now some automated electrons are threatening your job.

I have to imagine this is similar to how farmers felt when large-scale machinery became widely available.

Don’t worry, if you got even a quarter as much experience as you say, your job is safe or you can find another not working for an idiotic company that would invest into ai instead of engineers, let them fail.

Anyway have a look what ai can do for you and see just how secure your job is. Pointless worry

I'm in a similar place to you career-wise. Personally, I'm not concerned about becoming just a "debugger." What I'm expecting this job to look like in a few years is to be more like "the same as now, except I've got a completely free team of "interns" that do all the menial stuff for me. Every human programmer will become a lead programmer, deciding what stuff our AIs do for us and putting it all together into the finished product.

Maybe a few years further along the AI assistants will be good enough to handle that stuff better than we do as well. At that point we stop being lead programmers and we all become programming directors.

So think of it like a promotion, perhaps.

I don’t think you are disturbed by AI, but y Capitalism doing anything they can to pay you as little as possible. From a pure value* perspective assuming your niche skills in c++ are useful*, you have nothing to worry about. You should be paid the same regardless. But in our society, if you being replaced by someone “good enough”, will work for the business then yes you should be worried. But AI isn’t the thing you should be upset by.

*This is obviously subjective, but the existence of AI with you troubleshooting vs fully replacing you is out of scope here.

As a fellow C++ developer, I get the sense that ours is a community with a lot of specialization that may be a bit more difficult to automate out of existence than web designers or what have you? There’s just not as large a sample base to train AIs on. My C++ projects have ranged from scientific modelling to my current task of writing drivers for custom instrumentation we’re building at work. If an AI could interface with the OS I wrote from scratch for said instrumentation, I would be rather surprised? Of course, the flip side to job security through obscurity is that you may make yourself unemployable by becoming overly specialized? So there’s that.

It won’t replace coders as such. There will be devs who use AI to help them be more productive, and there will be unemployed devs.

I am om the product side of things and have created some basic proof of concept tools with AI that my bosses wanted to sell off. No way no how will I be able to sevrice or maintain them. It's incredibly impressive that I could even get this output.

I am not saying it won't become possible, but I lack the fundamental knowledge and understanding to make anything beyond the most minor adjustments and AI is still wuite bad at only addressing specific issues or, good forbid, expanding code, without fully rewriting the whole thing and breaking everything else.

For our devs I see it as a much improved and less snide stackoverflow and Google. The direct conversational nature really speeds things up with boilerplate code and since they actually know what they are doing, it's amazing. Not only that but we had devs copy paste from online searches withoout fully understanding the snippets. Now the AI can explain it in context.

AI is a really bad term for what we are all talking about. These sophisticated chatbots are just cool tools that make coding easier and faster, and for me, more enjoyable.

What the calculator is to math, LLM’s are to coding, nothing more. Actual sci-fi style AI, like self aware code, would be scary if it was ever demonstrated to even be possible, which it has not.

If you ever have a chance to use these programs to help you speed up writing code, you will see that they absolutely do not live up to the hype attributed to them. People shouting the end is nigh are seemingly exclusively people who don’t understand the technology.