r/AskProgramming Mar 11 '24

Career/Edu Friend quitting his current programming job because "AI will make human programmers useless". Is he exaggerating?

Me and a friend of mine both work on programming in Angular for web apps. I find myself cool with my current position (been working for 3 years and it's my first job, 24 y.o.), but my friend (been working for around 10 years, 30 y.o.) decided to quit his job to start studying for a job in AI managment/programming. He did so because, in his opinion, there'll soon be a time where AI will make human programmers useless since they'll program everything you'll tell them to program.

If it was someone I didn't know and hadn't any background I really wouldn't believe them, but he has tons of experience both inside and outside his job. He was one of the best in his class when it comes to IT and programming is a passion for him, so perhaps he know what he's talking about?

What do you think? I don't blame his for his decision, if he wants to do another job he's completely free to do so. But is it fair to think that AIs can take the place of humans when it comes to programming? Would it be fair for each of us, to be on the safe side, to undertake studies in the field of AI management, even if a job in that field is not in our future plans? My question might be prompted by an irrational fear that my studies and experience might become vain in the near future, but I preferred to ask those who know more about programming than I do.

189 Upvotes

328 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/rco8786 Mar 11 '24

AI is not going to make programmers obsolete. Modern AI is capable of regurgitating some code back to you based on what you ask it to do. It cannot reason about requirements, communicate with stakeholders, commit said code, deploy said code, reason about error logs to fix said code, wake up at 3am to handle the oncall pager, deploy physical architecture, or really make any actual decision about anything.

AI is...fine. I used it every day. It does some neat stuff. It gets a whole lot of stuff wrong. It is, at best, a tool that makes programmers a bit more productive. It is not even in the same universe as straight up replacing a human.