this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
160 points (97.1% liked)

Programmer Humor

32455 readers
761 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hi, this is a question that popped into my mind when i saw an article about some AWS engineer talking about ai assistants taking over the job of programmers, this reminded me that it's not the first time that something like this was said.

My software engineering teacher once told me that a few years ago people believed graphical tools like enterprise architect would make it so that a single engineer could just draw a pretty UML diagram and generate 90% of the project without touching any code,
And further back COBOL was supposed to replace programmers by letting accountants write their own programs.

Now i'm curious, were there many other technologies that were supposedly going to replace programmers that you remember?

i hope someone that's been around much more than me knows something more or has some funny stories to share

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] kameecoding@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"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.

[–] JakenVeina@lemm.ee 27 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Even better quote, I love using this one.

"So, with AI writing code for us, all we need is an unambiguous way to define, what all our business requirements are for the software, what all the edge cases are, and how it should handle them."

"We in the industry call that 'code.'"

[–] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 5 points 2 months ago

That's fun, I'm stealing that

[–] kameecoding@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yep, that's the one I was paraphrasing, thanks for the exact quote

[–] JakenVeina@lemm.ee 1 points 2 months ago

I mean, I'm paraphrasing, too.