Coding academies are nonsense

I recently published an extensive article about the current state of these 'code machines', if developers might lose their job to them and what our options are. If you're interested, you can read it here: https://medium.com/design-and-develop/code-machines-29b066b6...

Bottom line is that I don't think that developers should feel intimidated by machines right now, but not be surprised by their rise either. Not your coding skills, but your business will define if you’re still needed. If you’re coding basic low-cost websites at a high pace, you might run out of business faster than you might expect. If you can do it by repetition, a machine certainly can do that too. If you’re building crucial online services with a lot of custom functionality, the machines will have a harder time to keep up. Don’t worry about the need for your skills, worry about the need for your current business.

Sure if you're coming up with cutting edge machine algorithms or coming up with the product features or designs that you're then going to implement, there might be a great deal of creativity involved. But most programmers are simply solving technical problems assigned to them by a product manager. There is nothing "creative" about fixing a bug, adding a new feature to a website (that you didn't design yourself), streamlining your deployment process, or reducing the latency on your server.

As a software engineer, the one thing I dislike about my job is the lack of creativity, which is why I find myself pursuing arts in my free time (eg. video game design, music).

I'd rather worry about higher and higher level programming tools that make programmers more productive. Hobo comes to mind (http://www.hobocentral.net/) and Meteor, both making roughly orthogonal aspects of web programming easier and faster.

All functionality required to build old apps, that is.

This is nothing new: most people can build a website these days without understanding anything about HTML. I suppose Graham's Viaweb was similar in its user experience. You can probably write simple games without writing code by weaving together parts, objects and modules graphically and wiring up some logical connections between them from a pool of supported interactions.

But the thing is that all those are just using the machine. Programming is, by definition, creating and writing something that is new. If it wasn't new, it would've been written already and could be reused with minimal effort. Programming is about building that machine.

Thus, programming is at the edge of new, and you can never automate that. However, the edge of new might certainly change, and also change bias.

In the future, there might be less of the "new" that we do now (figuring out how to load and store data to physical devices) and more of the "new" that only a few people do now (for example, programming a deep neural network to do new things).

Yet as long as humans and computers are inherently physical, someone has to care about the lowest level of new (where the bits go) and about all the intermediate levels up to the highest level of new (someone dumping his brain into a cloud computer). You can not free a human from having to deal with bits――or qubits, or whatever we will have――as much as you can not free a human from his physical existence.