Hi, this is a question that popped into my mind when i saw an article about some AWS engineer talking about ai assistants taking over the job of programmers, this reminded me that it’s not the first time that something like this was said.

My software engineering teacher once told me that a few years ago people believed graphical tools like enterprise architect would make it so that a single engineer could just draw a pretty UML diagram and generate 90% of the project without touching any code,
And further back COBOL was supposed to replace programmers by letting accountants write their own programs.

Now i’m curious, were there many other technologies that were supposedly going to replace programmers that you remember?

i hope someone that’s been around much more than me knows something more or has some funny stories to share

  • HubertManne
    5•16 days ago

    So far my experience with ai is it cannot evaluate the quality of the data it uses to any significant degree. As such it can summarize which is convenient for searching and give examples but ultimately you have to correct its mistakes and know enough to do so. There is some savings for a programmer in the sense you might be able to get some rough scaffolding and its a bit eaiser to identify relevant search links but I don’t see it replacing developers. It definitely allows one to do more though or even increase the quality. One really great thing it can do is auto commenting of the code which does not need as much improvement as actual code and makes it more likely for you to do the task (both because it does it and because it causes you to go. no don’t explain it like that). Is similarly helps with documentation. I doubt it could more than double productivity though. At least as how it stands now. Im not sure it can do much better without becoming general ai.

    • Ephera
      2•15 days ago

      One really great thing it can do is auto commenting of the code

      But then it only comments the ‘what’, it cannot possibly know the ‘why’. I know, some devs disagree on that, but personally, I would rather not have what-comments in my code.

      • HubertManne
        1•15 days ago

        I almost never put why. this cycles though hostnames and parses out blah blah blah. I guess I assume the why is self evident.