Software engineers may have to develop other skills soon as artificial intelligence takes over many coding tasks.
That’s according to Amazon Web Services’ CEO, Matt Garman, who shared his thoughts on the topic during an internal fireside chat held in June, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Business Insider.
“If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can’t exactly predict where it is — it’s possible that most developers are not coding,” said Garman, who became AWS’s CEO in June.
“Coding is just kind of like the language that we talk to computers. It’s not necessarily the skill in and of itself,” the executive said. “The skill in and of itself is like, how do I innovate? How do I go build something that’s interesting for my end users to use?”
This means the job of a software developer will change, Garman said.
“It just means that each of us has to get more in tune with what our customers need and what the actual end thing is that we’re going to try to go build, because that’s going to be more and more of what the work is as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code,” he said.
I was skeptical going into this article. And then I read this:
Yeah, this guy doesn’t know shit about software development. He thinks he does. But in reality he doesn’t. He’s yet another C-level guy who’s been huffing on his own farts for too long, and is giving off real strong “the Internet is a series of tubes!” vibes.
First of all, I’ve been hearing this same argument about how the role of software developer is imminently doomed for 10-15 years now. “AI is going to make software developers obsolete within a year!” It’s never happened, and for good reason. While generative AI has evolved at a staggering rate over the last 2-3 years, its still not at the point of being able to envision and implement complex, scalable code bases.
Second, I and others I know have tried using Chat GPT and similar to generate working code - even recently, and it’s a lot more ‘miss’ than ‘hit’. It’s good for spinning up unit test templates and some very basic coding examples. It’s decent for getting new perspectives on specific micro code problems. But a lot of nuance is lost in translation, and that means you end up either with as much crap code as good code, or you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to finagle something that’s workable. And often it’s outright detrimental. Too many times I’ve seen or heard about less experienced developers trying to use AI and copy-and-pasting AI generated code here there and everywhere and the resulting wider code base becomes like bloated spaghetti shit. You try to blindly cut corners in software development at your own risk.
And this brings me to my final point: there’s a very big difference between ‘coding’ and software development. Coding is coming up with a few lines of code to do one very specific thing. Software development is a holistic process that requires knowledge, experience, intuition, anticipating problems, and seeing the bigger picture.
Eventually I could see AI being heavily used in software development. Maybe even in the next 3-5 years. But even at that point there will need to be a knowledgeable human to collaborate with, verify the output, make sure it’s being pieced together in a meaningful and workable way, and keep the AI’s work in check.
And as black box machine learning ability to take what we say to be closer to what we mean gets better, we eventually just end up with … a software developer.
Even at that point, who does he think is going to explain to the AI software developer what is actually needed? Him? He doesn’t know how to do that any better than he already does to human software developers.
Edit: OMG I just read this part:
You idiot. Do you think devs want to have to redo their work five times before the client is satisfied? If you’re not already “more in tune with what our customers need and what the actual end thing is that we’re going to try to go build,” fuck man, just do that. You can do that right now, you walnut.