“Computer programming” describes a pretty wide range of cognitive work. Stack Overflow has already reduced the training and knowledge required for many tasks, and LLMs push this a lot further. The next level of abstraction, understanding program flow and correctness of results hasn’t seen much evidence that LLMs can plan or understand things well enough to do. And the elements of understanding user and business needs and deciding what to build in the first place hasn’t really had a start.
As far as timelines, I suspect it’ll transform some amount of coding into being focused on prompt generation and testing, speeding devs up by a lot, but the work will expand to fill the space rather than putting very many out of work. As we figure out how to bolt on planning, modeling, and strategic modules coordinated with LLMs, it’ll move up the stack, but this is probably decades in the making.
Note that some of this coincides with “when does GPT become self-improving”?
“Computer programming” describes a pretty wide range of cognitive work. Stack Overflow has already reduced the training and knowledge required for many tasks, and LLMs push this a lot further. The next level of abstraction, understanding program flow and correctness of results hasn’t seen much evidence that LLMs can plan or understand things well enough to do. And the elements of understanding user and business needs and deciding what to build in the first place hasn’t really had a start.
As far as timelines, I suspect it’ll transform some amount of coding into being focused on prompt generation and testing, speeding devs up by a lot, but the work will expand to fill the space rather than putting very many out of work. As we figure out how to bolt on planning, modeling, and strategic modules coordinated with LLMs, it’ll move up the stack, but this is probably decades in the making.
Note that some of this coincides with “when does GPT become self-improving”?
Note gpt (or any other AI model) can become self improving while still lacking the skill to write a large and complex software package from spec.