They always said learn to code. Now is it bullshit because of AI?

[Anonymous]

For the last 5 years everyone wanted to learn to code... But now they say AI is already doing the 90% of the job... And it is being improved exponentially, so very soon it will kill all the coding jobs... What do you think?

For example in my country, a receptionist makes $600 per month where a mid level software engineer makes $1600 a month.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

That's actually one of the top jobs I think NLP (natural language processing) can ultimately replace.

We learn how to write in programming languages and often in lower-level languages because compilers and interpreters in high-level languages generally don't utilize hardware resources very effectively. We have to effectively learn to talk to the computer close to its native language and very precisely and mathematically.

Yet when we can communicate our design requirements to machines in natural human languages like English, and have back-and-forth conversations to resolve and ambiguities that natural languages possess, then the AI can just generate very efficient code that satisfies those design requirements. If not, we can iteratively work back and forth just as we do when a human designer interacts with a human programmer, only it can generate the resulting executable binaries without taking weeks, months, or years.

So it doesn't exactly make me the happiest since I'm a software developer by trade who spent a massive portion of my life studying programming languages, computer architectures, learning tools like profilers and debuggers, version control systems, data structures, algorithms, etc, yet I do think we're working towards obsolescence in the not-so-distant future.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

[*] [...] and have back-and-forth conversations to resolve [any] ambiguities that natural languages possess

That's actually what AI is doing right now. Before if we wanted our computer to do something brand new, we had to program it in a programming language that gets assembled or compiled into machine code or interpreted on the fly. NLP ultimately replaces the need for computer languages. It's the ultimate high-level dream; to be able to talk to a computer in a natural human language.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

So I suspect it won't be too far away when we can give an AI a design spec and ask it like, "Can you make a video game according to these design specifications?" and see it satisfy our request vastly quicker and even better than human programmers. And at that point, we can even ask it things like, "Can you make a better version of yourself?" and it should be able to do that too and bootstrap a superior version of itself.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

The possibilities are kind of exciting to me despite being a programmer. One of the reasons compilers of high-level languages tend to be so inefficient is that optimization beyond just things like generally efficient instruction selection and register allocation require understanding human intentions. Without the human to tell the machine which branch of code is more likely to be taken than another at runtime based on common user inputs, for example, it has no idea to optimize for that branch. That's why esoteric knowledge of computer architecture and low-level languages is still so important along with profiler-guided optimizations and so forth.

Yet human intent is something easily communicated in a back and forth fashion if the machine is capable of understanding it through natural languages.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

So that is, above all else, what NLP is working towards replacing as I see it is computer languages (programming languages, query languages and other domain-specific languages, markup languages, etc).

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

When computer languages are made obsolete, so too do programmers become obsolete who communicate through them. And we're not *that *far away from this as I see it. It's an exciting time to be alive!

[AlexEfron]

AI is doing well, but I still don't see it replacing everyone. Sure, if you're incompetent, you'll be replaced.

I had a test yesterday. One question to solve. A few of my friends tried the paid subscriptions of the AI tools. Those failed miserably. 😂 They were scratching their heads to solve that question. ChatGPT (free) failed. ChatGPT 4 (paid) failed. Gemini (paid) failed. And then finally one of my friends took 10-15 mins to do a thorough search and found the exact same question with slightly different wording on Geeksforgeeks.

[purplepoppy]

Coders are 10 a penny. It's going to be a McJob in a few years.

[laly520]

u can learn it

its never bullshit n I get paid well for it

[Asker]

What do you code?

[laly520]

I build websites n apps plus some games

[Asker]

Which languages? And do you work for a company

[Astarlessnightsky]

Sure, learning anything is still worth it.

AI just makes things easier and faster.

Before coding was 90% googling, and now its 90% AI doing the "googling".

But you still need to know what you are doing.

[strateguy632]

Not yet, we still need the human to ask the a. i. which program is desired for it to write.