Coding Jobs and GPT-4

A few thoughts based on my experience with GPT4 so far.

1. For now, not by much. It will make us more productive but the world is not short of projects with endless backlogs so huge nobody can ever drain them. Maybe some of those tickets are low value or obsolete, but a lot of them represent real bugs or ideas for improvement that the cost of software development makes prohibitive to reach.

2. It may change the nature of the job a lot. It could hurt developers who are very heads down and ideas constrained. If what you love most about coding is the thrill of finding the perfect algorithmic implementation, then, well, AI may reduce the enjoyment of the job. If what you love about coding is seeing your ideas come alive, then AI can increase your enjoyment of the job.

3. Whilst some people claim they ideate and get inspired by talking to AI, my own experience has been that GPT4 is a rather conservative and predictable sort of personality. Perhaps it's the training and maybe via the API you can ramp up the temperature and get more creativity out of it, but whenever I've asked it for ideas or tried to bounce ideas around, I tend to get milquetoast yes-man type results, or the ideas it comes up with are generic and obvious. Also with each day that passes it's getting easier to notice the lack of "AI invents/solves something new" type stories. There was the one where it came up with a word game, which was pretty cool, and we know it can invent stories. But it doesn't yet seem to be producing an abundance of new ideas for things like new features, business innovations, etc. Maybe it does for other people. Maybe it will start doing it for me soon. But for now, it doesn't seem able to do that.

So - programmers who just want to play code golf, be ready for that to become more of a hobby than a job. But for programmers who always wished they had more hours in the day to get through all their ideas, it will enable them to create a lot more value and that value will in turn create demand for yet more value-add on top of that. So it should be a virtuous circle, in theory.

Yes it absolutely decimate demand for junior coders. My firm has basically frozen hiring, and all existing devs are expected to boost their productivity using one of the all the various AI's or get fired.

We expect the economy to get way worse as de-dollarization seems to be looming on the horizon, and preparing now.

It will be make it quicker, cheaper and more efficient to do a bad job and fill a codebase with boilerplate.

Actually I've found the "React monkeys" you dismiss to be the people who work with product & UX on what the actually product being developed should do. The "backend people" who write API plumbing and DB tables are the ones I'd worry about.

Not for a while. They seem decent at generating scaffolding or algorithms, but like for any of the projects I've done recently, it's "figure out what this big piece of mangled code does, take some requirements or high-level idea that's not fully complete and probably has some contradictions, work with people to flesh those out, figure out a way to cram that in, which layer of the code it should be in, or which layers, with some implicit tribal understanding what is allowed to change and what isn't." AI may be able to help with some of that, but it won't be a complete replacement for quite some time.

Also the quarterly planning process is "figure out the ten things you want to get done out of the hundred in your backlog", and the quarterly execution process is "land the one thing you can get done of the ten commitments you made." So there's no lack additional work to be done even if AI takes over some chunk of it.