The problem is this view continues to view software engineers as people that write code, that's not what my job is, it is figuring out how to solve a business problem using technology, and getting people on board with that solution and updating and refining it.
This viewpoint seems to me to be very similar to the idea of 3rd generation languages replacing developers because programming will be so easy, it isn't about how easy it is to write code, I function as a limited mentat taking all the possible requirements, tradeoffs constraints, analyzing them and then building the model, then I write out the code, the code artifact is not the value I add. The artifact is how I communicate the value to the world.
This doesn't make programmers redundant anymore than Ruby, PHP, or Java made developers redundant because it freed them from having to manually remember and track memory usage and pointers, it is at most a tool to reduce the friction of getting what is in my head into the world.
I control the code and whoever controls the code controls the business. I posses the ability to make out the strands of flow control and see the future state of the application. For I am the Sr. Software engineer and I have seen where no Project Manager can see.
Apologies to Frank Herbet I just finished listening to Dune.
EDIT:
I got off track at the end but my point is that no matter how good the tools for developing the code are, they will never replace a software engineer anymore than electric drills and power saws replace home builders. It merely elevates our work.
I actually agree with you on that. I had another comment further down the thread where I said that software engineering can’t be fully automated by anything short of artificial general intelligence.
As humans we have a coherent world model that current AI systems are nowhere near close to having.
That coherent world model is a necessary precondition for both understanding a business goal and implementing a program to solve it.
AlphaCode can do the second part but not the first.
AlphaCode doesn’t have that world model and even if it did it still wouldn’t autonomously act on it, just follow orders from humans.
Competitive programming is going to be solved much earlier than programming in a business context will, because it’s completely independent of business requirements. It’s at most half as hard of a problem .
If I am given the ability to produce a program by formalizing the fuzzy requirements I am given, I will not hesitate to abuse this option. I can see a future where there is be a "market" for specifications to be composed together.
Analyzing the requirements is a hard problem when we do it with our brain. But our job would be very different if all we had to do it to write down the constraints, and press a button to see an error: invalid requirements, can't support this and that at the same time.
This viewpoint seems to me to be very similar to the idea of 3rd generation languages replacing developers because programming will be so easy, it isn't about how easy it is to write code, I function as a limited mentat taking all the possible requirements, tradeoffs constraints, analyzing them and then building the model, then I write out the code, the code artifact is not the value I add. The artifact is how I communicate the value to the world.
This doesn't make programmers redundant anymore than Ruby, PHP, or Java made developers redundant because it freed them from having to manually remember and track memory usage and pointers, it is at most a tool to reduce the friction of getting what is in my head into the world.
I control the code and whoever controls the code controls the business. I posses the ability to make out the strands of flow control and see the future state of the application. For I am the Sr. Software engineer and I have seen where no Project Manager can see.
Apologies to Frank Herbet I just finished listening to Dune.
EDIT:
I got off track at the end but my point is that no matter how good the tools for developing the code are, they will never replace a software engineer anymore than electric drills and power saws replace home builders. It merely elevates our work.