Who needs programmers?
Just get the computer to write your code.
I was always first among my colleagues to learn new tech—first in my company to learn HTTP, HTML and CSS. I was the first to learn a 4GL, then Java, JavaScript and C#. I had a go at building my own AI 20 years ago, but I have been completely uninterested in using LLMs. I use it to generate pictures for my blog here, but I’ve never used it for anything else.
I retired 18 months ago and made a promise to myself to never code again. I’ll spend my retirement reading, painting and playing my guitar.
A friend told me to give vibe coding a try. Vibe coding is where you tell the AI to generate some code for you. Then you look at the code and tell the AI to fix any mistakes, then move on to the next thing. I didn’t believe him that it would be any good — programming is pretty difficult once you get past the basic stuff, and I thought it would be too complex for ChatGPT to build anything useful. But, Oh! My! God! I managed to rewrite the Spotify application in a weekend.
I’ve always hated the Spotify application and wanted something that better suited the way I play music. Apparently, the kids of today are all about playlists, but I still like artists and albums.
Here’s Spotify’s version.
Spotify seems to hide all the controls that I want to use, too — how do I get from a track to the album or the artist? How do I find the lyrics? They are all in there somewhere, but I can never find them.
Anyway, their API is pretty good. It only took me a weekend, but now I have my own application. Ragged Tunes has everything I want and hides all the junk that I don’t use.
There are about forty-seven million programmers in the world. Forty-six million will be unemployed before too long. And 90% of the lawyers, and 90% of the architects and 90% of the graphic artists.
I’ve read several journalists saying, “Well, OK. All the crap journalists will lose their jobs. But I am very good. I won’t lose my job.” Now, imagine you own a magazine, and you want an article on renewable energy or the Second World War. You can pay a few thousand for that very good journalist to write a very good article, or you can have the AI write a good-enough article for free. Which do you choose?
If you have a white-collar job, you’d better start learning gardening or bricklaying before the robots come along and take those jobs away, too.
Who needs programmers?
It's interesting times. I think that AI is very very good at simple applications. What it is not good at (yet) is architecting big systems. And that is not just considering the interactions between your database, your middleware, your services, and the front end, but also taking into account trade offs at each point, future-proofing for user enhancements, code/test maintainability and so on. But it will get there. I've joined the retiree team!
Incredible and unsettling