An article in The New Yorker about feeling a little sad about the inevitable replacement of coding with AI really hit home for me.
I’ve not used AI for coding yet professionally, but I’ve done a couple of experiments that indicate how useful it might be in replacing not only the boilerplate and drudgery but also some of the thinking that goes into it.
I don’t think it will eliminate the role of people in creating software, but it will change it dramatically by potentially devaluing all of the deep techy things it was really fun to learn (e.g., which sort algorithm is better under which condition, etc.) and replacing them with being able to be precise in your understanding of the requirements and translate those into something that the AI can work from.
One thing is for sure, software development is going to be very different in five years.