Actually, Fortran and COBOL _did_ replace programmers, as far as I know. It was largely women at the beginning because it was quite tedious and the first computer languages were assembly or machine code. They were so far from the application or mathematical language and often had to be programmed in difficult processes like sometimes literally flipping switches, or input systems that were slow to set up.

But then came high level assembly languages and even higher level application languages. And easier to use input systems. Programmer used to literally be the person either translating some finished math into assembly language or actually encoding code into punch cards or both.

All of that went away with better tools. So when this article claims that this stuff didn't take jobs, they are wrong. It literally did.

The other thing the article gets wrong is that people are concerned that ChatGPT and the current generation of LLMs will literally replace software developers today in equivalent fully general capacity. No one thinks that. No one whatsoever.

What is obvious, however, is that it is possible to use something like the existing ChatGPT API and models to do certain simple specific programming tasks. That means that _some_ things you might have previously hired a programmer for can now be done automatically.

The applications that I have got working are things like creating a chat interface for querying a specific database, where the system generates the SQL and then formats or summarizes the output. Or creating a web page from a template with just a little bit of custom functionality.

So the current version of GPT cannot replace the actual abilities of a programmer, but these AI-powered app or analysis generator are definitely chipping away at the amount of basic but custom tasks that you need to hire a programmer for.

The main concept though which the author seems to not get is that these systems will continue to improve year in and year out. And the pace we are on, even assuming it slows down a bit, means that we can expect the complexity of programming tasks that LLMs can handle to continue to improve.

There is no reason to believe that it won't pretty shortly end up being better than any human. Especially when you can narrow down the task to a specific popular type of application.

As soon as I saw ChatGPT last year, I realized that this was eventually going to impact jobs for software development. To what degree and how soon was not determined, but it is obvious it will have a very large impact at some point.

So within two days I started working on my own code generation startup leveraging GPT. Within 1-3 years I expect the competition in this area will be very intense. Within five years it will be very obviously competing directly with freelance programmers for small contracts. You will literally see articles like "Use this ChatGPT Plugin instead of spending $10000 on a Freelance Programmer" and it will work.

Actually right now I know there is someone who always advertises on HN for building a GPT-powered chatbot for $10000. There are websites that will make the same thing for under $100 per month. At least one that can generate code for custom chatbots. And I am planning to add chatbot capability to my platform which my code generating AI system can easily hook into. So my system will be able to build custom chatbots also within a few months. As a ChatGPT plugin with hosting for $15/month. Directly competing with that guy charging $10000.