ChatGPT Isn't Coming for Your Coding Job

Software engineers have joined the ranks of copy editors, translators, and others who fear that they’re about to be replaced by generative AI. New technologies have long promised to “disrupt” engineering, and these innovations have always failed to get rid of the need for human software developers. To the computer scientist John Backus, for instance, calling coders “programmers” or “engineers” was akin to relabeling janitors “custodians,” an attempt at pretending that their menial work was more important than it was. The computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once observed, “As long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming had become an equally gigantic problem.” We’ve introduced more and more complexity to computers in the hopes of making them so simple that they don’t need to be programmed at all. Unsurprisingly, throwing complexity at complexity has only made it worse, and we’re no closer to letting managers cut out the software engineers.