No
Tl;Dr: Not anytime soon. It fails even at simple tasks.
Even if it didn’t, any middle manager who decides to replace their dev team with AI is going to realize pretty quickly that actually writing code is only a small part of the job.
Won’t stop 'em from trying, of course. But when the laid-off devs get frantic calls from management asking them to come back and fix everything, they’ll be in a good position to negotiate a raise.
If anything. AI could be used to replace managers 😆 I mean lots of management seems to be just pushing paper to me. Ideal to be handled by AI. But I think we still need people to do the real work for quite some time to come. Especially software architecture and coding (complex) stuff ain’t easy. Neither is project management. So I guess even some managers can stay.
Good management is almost all people skills. It needs to be influenced by domain knowledge for sure, but it’s almost all about people.
You can probably match trash managers, but you won’t replace remotely competent ones
Don’t even need an AI. Just teach a parrot to say “let’s circle back on this” and “how many story points is that?”
The rule of any article asking asking a question in its title is that the answer is always no.
AI is actually great at typing the code quickly. Once you know exactly what you want. But it’s already the case that if your engineers spend most of their time typing code, you’re doing something wrong. AI or no AI.
I don’t think so. I’ve had success letting it write boilerplate code. And simple stuff that I could have copied from stack overflow. Or a beginners programming book. With every task from my real life it failed miserably. I’m not sure if I did anything wrong. And it’s been half a year since I last tried. Maybe things have changed substantially in the last few months. But I don’t think so.
Last thing I tried was some hobby microcontroller code to do some robotics calculations. And ChatGPT didn’t really get what it was supposed to do. And additionally instead of doing the maths, it would just invent some library functions, call them with some input values and imagine the maths to be miraculously be done in the background, by that nonexistent library.
Yes actually, I can imagine it getting microcontroller code wrong. My niche is general backend services. I’ve been using Github copilot a lot and it served me well for generating unit tests. Write test description and it pops out the code with ~ 80% accuracy
Sure. There are lots of tedious tasks in a programmers life that don’t require a great amount of intelligence. I suppose writing some comments, docstrings, unit tests, “glue” and boilerplate code that connects things and probably several other things that now escape my mind are good tasks for an AI to assist a proper programmer and make them more effective and get things done faster.
I just wouldn’t call that programming software. I think assisting with some narrow tasks is more exact.
Maybe I should try doing some backend stuff. Or give it an API definition and see what it does 😅 Maybe I was a bit blinded by ChatGPT having read the Wikipedia and claiming it understands robotics concepts. But it really doesn’t seem to have any proper knowledge. Same probably applies to engineering and other nighboring fields that might need software.
Nope
