My perspective on this as a developer who's been using these systems on a daily basis for a couple of years now is that I find that they enhance my value. I am so much more competent and capable as a developer because I've got these tools assisting me. I can write code in dozens of new programming languages that I never learned before.
But I still get to benefit from my 20 years of experience.
Take somebody off the street who's never written any code before and ask them to build an iPhone app with ChatGPT. They are going to run into so many pitfalls, because programming isn't just about can you write code - it's about thinking through the problems, understanding what's possible and what's not, understanding how to QA, what good code is, having good taste.
There's so much depth to what we do as software engineers.
I've said before that generative AI probably gives me like two to five times productivity boost on the part of my job that involves typing code into a laptop. But that's only 10 percent of what I do. As a software engineer, most of my time isn't actually spent with the typing of the code. It's all of those other activities.
The AI systems help with those other activities, too. They can help me think through architectural decisions and research library options and so on. But I still have to have that agency to understand what I'm doing.
So as a software engineer, I don't feel threatened. My most optimistic view of this is that the cost of developing software goes down because an engineer like myself can be more ambitious, can take on more things. As a result, demand for software goes up - because if you're a company that previously would never have dreamed of building a custom CRM for your industry because it would have taken 20 engineers a year before you got any results... If it now takes four engineers three months to get results, maybe you're in the market for software engineers now that you weren't before.
Accessibility and Gen AI Ep 6 - Simon Willison - Creator, Datasette