Is coding dead?

"The Illuminati doesn't run the world. C programmers do" - from Daniel Munoz, "After All These Years, the World is Still Powered by C Programming"

Coding is to collective ideas what money is to collective production. The coding is not the main commodity, but the ideas that are expressed in it. It's only if ai starts to compete with humans in a Darwinian sense in the areas of both innovation and physical production that people will have fundamental problems, because we will then have created our successors. As far as I can see, automating code generation is not the same as generating the ideas and meeting the human value that is expressed in the code. This is a long way off - all that happens is that we just push the people contribution to a higher level of abstraction. One example of this is the metastructure in which computer languages are created.

philostam said:

Fair enough, but what happens when generative AI can generate code?

For example, this "chatGPT " is attracting some interest. You can even use it yourself here: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

One example of what it can do (just a very early, beta version):

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Lol. The example also seems to not be what the guy was looking for, given the structural elements that the AI used (or rather, didn't use). Forms are easy, they could have done that themselves easily - unless they are a beginner that is both too lazy to look up basic HTML tags and too stupid to find basic information about React. Alas, in this case the person didn't know what to ask for, or they would have found it themselves.

The current state over here is a growing industry with not enough workforce. Especially in the industries that can't afford their own teams: they are either assembling ad hoc teams for a single project, or looking for commissions by a single contractor.

There are standards due to laws and regulations that need to be met by applications which cannot be upheld by AI - it's just not that evolved yet. People are creating the means to create code, which is written by people in a structured fashion according to the requirements made by laws, customers and not to forget the consumers of the product.

In the coming years, the need for application developers will still rise, and it may take another whole decade to saturate the market. Given the work and collab that goes into creating a whole application, and having it meet all the standards and needs it should fulfill, that won't change. For sure, the job is becoming more economically driven as well, as this is a highly competetive field regardless of the lasting oversaturation of jobs being occupied by few people. At the same time, the knowledge base has been raised to accomodate the changing market, even though the job has mostly stayed the same. That makes it harder for those who want to get a job in the industry and love coding but don't give a s*** about economics.

The needs of the employers that need to be met by developer employees in the future are more focussed on big picture thinking rather than monkey work, but we are far from there yet.

I didn't just see a video reference to a tech lead clip.

*Turns away and moves along

No.

• Everything you to need learn to fix technological problems, if the the technology is running software, will require some sort of technician or engineer to research it and come up with a fix.
• AI's don't have an imagination of their own, a sense of humor of their own, or a will of their own.
• The operating systems that run the internet that a lot of AI's and other "smart" technologies utilize, is still, and for the forseeable future, based in and heavily run on Unix/Linux based servers. These operating systems and a trememdous amount of their software are based in C or C++. An AI could problably do a lot to speed up data analysis for these systems, but it would, ironically, require a programmer to it.
• You can't rely on AI for everything, just as you cannot rely on the internet, or any other technology, for everything in every situation.
• If you want to understand AI or find a part to play in it's developmental future, you will need to know how to code(and C and C++ is a great place to start, imo):

AI Tutorials
Learn about AI, including how to make game AI using the minimax algorithm.

• Perceptrons, a simple neuron simulator
• MiniMax Game Trees
• Chess Board Representation
• Solving problems with genetic algorithms

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Here's an Introduction to Computer Science, from a great blog cprogramming.com by Alex Allain.

Something I forgot to mention when it comes to Artificial Intelligence and programming(languages): LISP. It's the second oldest programming language, developed in the 1950s, with AI in mind at the time of it's birth. It's still used, to some extent, today - it's one of the most powerful computer languages ever invented.(sometimes referred to as the "Classical Latin or Greek" among computer languages.)

"...the Lisp language first conceived by John McCarthy in 1956. Lisp circa 1956 was designed for 'symbolic data processing' and derived its name from one of the things it was quite good at: LISt Processing...Well, McCarthy was (and still is) an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, and many of the features he built into his initial version of the language made it an excellent language for AI programming. During the AI boom of the 1980s, Lisp remained a favorite tool for programmers writing software to solve hard problems such as automated theorem proving, planning and scheduling, and computer vision. These were problems that required a lot of hard-to-write software; to make a dent in them, AI programmers needed a powerful language, and they grew Lisp into the language they needed. And the Cold War helped--as the Pentagon poured money into the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a lot of it went to folks working on problems such as large-scale battlefield simulations, automated planning, and natural language interfaces. These folks also used Lisp and continued pushing it to do what they needed..."

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from article"Why LIsp?"

What is AI? John McCarthy, the AI researcher who coined the phrase “artificial intelligence,” is: “Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world.”

This is a significant difference in perspective compared to popular peddlers of "AI" ideas and marketing slogans these days(aka. Elon Musk)


Lol