by monch1962 | 2025-10-27 09:42:28+00:00
Old fart here...

I started coding in the 70s, loved it then, still love it now and LOVING the emergence of Gen AI tools.

For perspective, the IT industry went through a similar change with the emergence of search engines ~30 years ago. At that time, a big part of the value of a software "expert" was in their ability to remember and recall lots of info (most of it of dubious value, to be fair). These experts usually had shelves of well-thumbed books on all sorts of topics, and could recall obscure info from these books seemingly at will. With the emergence of AskJeeves, AltaVista and eventually Google, suddenly nobody needed to remember anything OR even know where to find it - with a simple search, you could get nearly all the info you needed.

I can still remember the panicked response to this brutal change from the senior IT people I worked with at the time...

Did the demand for skilled developers dry up? No

Nor did it end with

- introduction of COBOL (designed so that non-coders could write code),

- PCs (surely leading to the end of systems programming as a career),

- spreadsheets (so accountants no longer needed programmers),

- 4GLs (designed to greatly simplify coding; report writing in particular),

- Visual BASIC (so the world would no longer need C programmers; anyone could learn to write BASIC),

- Microsoft SQL Server (nobody would need mainframe databases any more, so all those mainframe jobs would disappear)

- object oriented coding (all those code reuse possibilities! Very quickly programming should devolve to just glueing together other peoples' code),

- open source (because inevitably any tool of value would soon have a competitor that was free, destroying the value proposition of companies that wrote software to sell),

- Linux (how could Windows compete with free? Shed a tear for all those soon-to-be-unemployed Windows experts)

- NoSQL (because the need for "legacy" databases like Oracle, DB2, Postgres, MySQL etc. would surely go away) - etc., etc., etc.

The reality is that you still need a grounding in software development to do coding well, even with AIs. I'm absolutely loving how quickly I can create solid code with the assistance of Gen AI - lots of tasks that used to take me a week I can now knock over in a few hours.

I also notice how many people are struggling with how to use Gen AI tools for coding tasks - my take is there's 2 distinct skills you need: knowledge of how to do software development well, and knowledge of how to use Gen AI tools for coding. Having the first doesn't automatically lead to the 2nd - you have to put in the time to learn about Gen AI, THEN work out how to fit Gen AI tools around your current workflow, THEN work out how to optimise the way you work with your new idiot savant buddy that has perfect recall.

That whole process (new tool appears -> learn about it -> work out how to fit it into my current workflow -> optimise my workflow) has basically been my entire career in a nutshell.

People have been predicting the demise of programmers for my entire career (40+ years now), and so far they've been wrong every time. For each new disruption that appears, the key has been to embrace it and adapt how you work accordingly.

Gen AI may indeed be different and kill off all programming careers overnight, but so far I'm not seeing it