this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
198 points (83.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43811 readers
1001 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think the need for programmers will always be there, but there might be a transition towards higher abstraction levels. This has actually always been happening: we started with much focus on assembly languages where we put in machine code, but nowadays a much less portion of programmers are involved in those and do stuff in python, java or whatever. It is not essential to know stuff about garbage collection when you are writing an application, because the compiler already does that for you.
Programmers are there to tell a computer what to do. That includes telling a computer how to construct its own commands accordingly. So, giving instructions to an AI is also programming.
Yeah that's what I was just thinking. Once we somehow synthesize this LLM into a new type of programming language it gets interesting. Maybe a more natural language that gets the gist of what you are trying to do. And then a unit test to see if it works. And then you verify. Not sure if that can work.
TBH I'm a bit shocked that programmers are already using AI to generate programming, I only program as a hobby any more. But it sounds interesting. If I can get more of my ideas done with less work I'd love it.
I think fundamentally, philosophically there are limits. Ultimately you need language to describe what you want to do. You need to understand the problem the "customer" has and formulate a solution and then break it down into solvable steps. AI could help with that but fundamentally it's a question of describing and the limits of language.
Or maybe we'll see brain interfaces that can capture some of the subtleties of intend from the programmer.
So maybe we'll see the productivity of programmers rise by like 500% or something. But something tellse me (Jevons paradox) the economy would just use that increased productivity for more apps or more features. But maybe the needed qualifications for programmers will be reduced.
Or maybe we'll see AI generating programming libraries and development suits that are more generalized libraries. Or like existing crusty libraries rewritten to be more versatile and easier to use by AI powered programmers. Maybe AI could help us create a vast library of more abstract / standard problem+solutions.