This is pretty low level stuff but every dev I’ve showed this to found it surprising (I hang out on a slack community for designers and devs so it wasn’t just like 2 people)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y7GRYaYYQg
It’s just a matter of time.
I didn’t find it surprising, because I do stuff like it every day (except I’m using Copilot integrated into my IDE, not ChatGPT).
What he did was very cool. But he’s a game developer who already knows all the parts he needs and what to ask for, and he still has to do a lot of work by hand. He glossed over it quickly, but there are parts where he had to add code to specific, already-existing blocks of code in his program, and in order to do that, he had to know and understand what the current code was doing.
And throughout the video, he had to know not only what to ask for, but how to ask for it. That takes experience and understanding.
It’s possible that eventually, programming for a lot of people will mean expertise in interacting with large language models + lesser expertise in the actual programming language, but I don’t see that as likely to end programming as we know it. In fact, it might cause a surge in developer demand as the bar to entry lowers again, much like it did in the 2000’s. And there will always be demand for people with a deep understanding of the actual code, because they’ll be necessary for things like performance improvement, bug fixing… and writing the next generation of large language models.
