So far one of the best use cases for AI in software engineering has been identifying idiots and sociopaths.

Oracle has a product called Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) that it sells as "you can write the rules in plain English in MS Word documents, you don't need developers". I worked for an insurance organization where the business side bought OPA without consulting IT, hoping they wouldn't have to deal with developers. It totally failed because it doesn't matter that they get to write "plain English" in Word documents. They still lack the structured, formal thinking to deal with anything except the happiest of happy paths.

The important difference between a developer and a non-developer isn't the ability to understand the syntax of a programming language. It's the willingness and ability to formalize and crystallize requirements and think about all the edge cases. As an architect/programmer when I talk to the business side, they get bored and lose interest from all my questions about what they actually want.

It's happened a few times in my career where people tell me I'll be obsolete, but it's always been some company hyping their new product and suits frothing at the prospect of not having to pay me anymore.

So far they're like 0 for 8 or so.

Now I will say the goalposts move. What I'm doing now is for sure not what I was doing 10 years ago. I'm definitely heavier in devops and infra than where I was before (ironic because they said we'd never have to worry about that stuff again if we moved to the cloud). AI is still basically machine learning, just in a while loop, so I've spent time learning that. So, in a way, yes we're obsolete in the sense that if I was the same engineer I was 10 years ago I wouldn't be worth nearly this much, I had to grow and evolve with technology.

Salesforce advertised “No more developers” for awhile in the mid 2010s. It was great fun trying to clean up the mess all the “not programmers” made of those systems. I really hate Salesforce. They must have some of the best sales people on the planet.

Zero-code has been about to make us all redundant for about five decades running so far.

Programmers become obsolete when they stop evolving with technology

If a tool were created that properly converted an UML diagram into a project without any need for code, all the programmers that lost their job to this tool would then be hired by the company that offered it, in order to give maintenance and support to everything the customers want in their programs.

It would be removing programmers from they payroll of some companies but they would still be working for them, just further down in the chain.

The same is true for AI. If AI could completely replace programmers in some area, it would need a lot of programmers itself to keep dealing with all the edge cases that would show up from being used everywhere that a programmer was needed before.

Was before my time, but iirc C and other (then) high level languages were supposedly able to put programmers out of jobs.

sometimes, it feels like managers hate engineers, and are constantly plotting their replacement. maybe its because it hurts their ego to know that the engineers they manage worked harder to get there and deserve a higher salary.

or else, it could be office politics. anyone who can claim to have removed an entire department from payroll is due a huge raise.

"AI" is just another productivity tool, copilot let's you remove some of the tedious patterned work you do, like writing all those asserts in Unit tests, it's decent at guessing html structures too.

So basically it makes a developer faster, but then so do stuff like a good IDE, good plugins for your workflow, etc.

i saw somewhere an interesting take, even if AI could generate all the code for all the edge cases, you'd still need people to translate what business wants for the AI to understand properly.

Writing code is already a small part of a developers job, completely eliminating it won't eliminate a developers job.

Dude I WISH an AI would do all the dumb AWS crap for me so that I could just hang out and build React frontends all day

Fortran was supposed to replace computers (people). Then the computers became Fortran coders.

Rational Rose etc. could generate code from UML diagrams, then you "only" needed architects.

In reality it only gave a little help during the design phase, as soon as someone touches the generated code, you have to manually merge changes to UML.

If only we lived in a world so simple as to allow the whims of managers, customers and third parties to be completely definable in UML

It's not happening, ever. Someone has to build the AI after all

The earliest I can think of (from personal experience) is 4GL languages; the early low-code platforms that first started to get traction in the early 80s. They wouldn't have replaced programmers but some thought/hoped they would usher in an age of "low skill" programmers that companies could get away with paying minimum wage to.

The first time I heard about programming being obsolete was when I was taught UML in university. That was over almost 15 years ago and it didn't happen, if anything programmers now also had to know UML, which isn't all that bad but it definitely didn't replace anything, it's just useful for designing and documenting projects.

I also heard from colleagues that in the 80s and 90s people said that SQL was supposed to be used by users directly, making (some) programming obsolete.

Now AI bullshit claims to be making programming obsolete. I won't hold my breath.

So far my experience with ai is it cannot evaluate the quality of the data it uses to any significant degree. As such it can summarize which is convenient for searching and give examples but ultimately you have to correct its mistakes and know enough to do so. There is some savings for a programmer in the sense you might be able to get some rough scaffolding and its a bit eaiser to identify relevant search links but I don't see it replacing developers. It definitely allows one to do more though or even increase the quality. One really great thing it can do is auto commenting of the code which does not need as much improvement as actual code and makes it more likely for you to do the task (both because it does it and because it causes you to go. no don't explain it like that). Is similarly helps with documentation. I doubt it could more than double productivity though. At least as how it stands now. Im not sure it can do much better without becoming general ai.

I know this is c/programmerhumor but I'll take a stab at the question. If I may broaden the question to include collectively the set of software engineers, programmers, and (from a mainframe era) operators -- but will still use "programmers" for brevity -- then we can find examples of all sorts of other roles being taken over by computers or subsumed as part of a different worker's job description. So it shouldn't really be surprising that the job of programmer would also be partially offloaded.

The classic example of computer-induced obsolescence is the job of typist, where a large organization would employ staff to operate typewriters to convert hand-written memos into typed documents. Helped by the availability of word processors -- no, not the software but a standalone appliance -- and then the personal computer, the expectation moved to where knowledge workers have to type their own documents.

If we look to some of the earliest analog computers, built to compute differential equations such as for weather and flow analysis, a small team of people would be needed to operate and interpret the results for the research staff. But nowadays, researchers are expected to crunch their own numbers, possibly aided by a statistics or data analyst expert, but they're still working in R or Python, as opposed to a dedicated person or team that sets up the analysis program.

In that sense, the job of setting up tasks to run on a computer -- that is, the old definition of "programming" the machine -- has moved to the users. But alleviating the burden on programmers isn't always going to be viewed as obsolescence. Otherwise, we'd say that tab-complete is making human-typing obsolete lol

• can AI replace the job of a real programmer, or a team of software engineers? Probably not for a long time.
• can manager abuse the fantasy that they could get rid of those pesky engineers that dare telling them something is impossible? Yes totally. If they believe adding an AI tool to a team justifies a 200% increase in productivity. Some managers will fire people against all metrics and evidence. Calling that move a success. Same occurred when they try to outsource code to cheaper teams.

In Neolithic era I guess?