The Beginning of Programming as We'll Know It

Summary

In the wake of AI coding assistants like Claude and Codex, which can seemingly perform the equivalent of a day’s work in a matter of minutes, many of us are wondering if the human role of “computer programmer” is coming to an end. Will the AI bots one day do all the programming for us?Maybe so, but not yet. At this particular moment, human developers are especially valuable, because of the transitional period we’re living through. Just a few years ago, AI essentially could not program at all. In the future, a given AI instance may “program better” than any single human in history. But for now, real programmers will always win. Why? Because we are uniquely positioned to harness most of the power of AI while augmenting it with human taste, wisdom, and caution, among other qualities that an AI is thus far incapable of possessing.There are many examples of stunned programmers who describe how they asked an AI to create an app from scratch and it “just did it.” They wrote a few paragraphs clearly defining the functionality and user interface, and let the AI run with it. A few minutes, hours, or days later, and tada! The app is complete. It runs, it performs the tasks required, and the interface “isn’t even that bad.”If you interpret these examples to mean that any person can write down any list of requirements along with any user interface specs, and the AI will consistently produce a satisfactory product, then I’d agree programmers are toast. But in my experience that is not what’s happening.There is a confirmation bias at work here: every developer who has experienced such a remarkable outcome is delighted to share it. It helps to contribute to a mass (human) hallucination that computers really are capable of anything, and really are taking over the world. It’s exciting! But people are less likely to share all the times the AI failed in some ridiculous way. When it produced thousands of lines of inscrutable code, betrayed a complete lack of knowledge in some field, or ...