A lot of programmers are concerned about AI and how it will take our jobs. My outlook is a little more optimistic because I worked with AI and have seen its capabilities in terms of writing code. My quick prediction is that coders’ jobs may be destroyed, But they won’t be destroyed by the AI but by no code tools and advances in that direction.
Currently, customization is the biggest advantage of coding and creating custom software. The same cannot be achieved with no code builders like Wix or WordPress. There are other no-code tools That allows for more customization and but they still don’t come close to building a standalone application from scratch with a real programming language. As no code tools develop that may change But even that doesn’t mean the end of a programming profession.
Generally, people always overestimated new technologies. Cryptocurrency and blockchain was the perfect example of that. People thought it would do revolutionize the world and nothing would ever be the same again. However, that didn’t happen. Blockchain does have its uses but those are very limited and much smaller than anticipated. I believe The effects of AI are similarly exaggerated and it doesn’t pose a threat to programmer’s job at all.
It’s more likely that a programmer’s job will be transformed. It will become a little easier, and more people will be using these tools to build software. Probably quality control will be streamlined as well. Since people won’t be writing as much code the maintenance of large applications should become easier which is good news for large organizations. maintenance is very expensive but necessary for running a website or software.
The reason I’m pessimistic about AI written code is that AI simply makes a lot of mistakes and doesn’t understand nuance the way human programmers do. For example, I tried to implement a feature so users are redirected after users submit the form. The process is described here:
https://simplefrontend.com/redirect-to-another-page-in-react/.
AI output was disappointing, and it was easier to write code yourself.
You don’t have as much control over the output of AI as you do with human programmers. You can instruct human developers to take a certain approach or to consider various factors specific to this use case. AI doesn’t have that option to customize code depending on specific circumstances of the project.
In general, AI doesn’t consider specific circumstances of the task at hand. It might provide a pretty good code for general patterns It can also automate some of the boilerplate code that programmers have to frequently write. But that doesn’t mean that AI is going to replace programmers. It’s more likely that it will become a tool for writing code. The analogy is pretty similar to calculator. Calculators didn’t replace mathematicians but it allowed them to perform operations faster, make less mistakes, and increase their productivity overall.
So as of right now human developers even junior developers do a much better job of writing code to build web apps, design them or release software and games.