IBL News | New York
In the era of AI agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming.
Computer programming has undergone many changes over its 80-year history. Now, coding itself is being automated, and Silicon Valley got hit first.
The New York Times posted an analysis examining this phenomenon.
Coding is perhaps the first form of industrialized human labor that AI can actually replace. AI-generated code, if it passes its tests and works, is worth as much as what humans get paid $200,000 or more a year to compose.
Now, coding is becoming a conversation, a back-and-forth talk fest between software developers and their bots. The work of a developer is now more about judgment than creation. Nobody is doing code by hand anymore.
A coder is becoming more like an architect than a construction worker. Developers using AI focus on the overall shape of the software, how its features and facets work together.
Because the agents can produce functioning code so quickly, their human overseers can experiment, trying things out to see what works and discarding what doesn’t.
For most of the coders, working with AI means constantly talking and chatting, in a complex and highly technical way, with AI, a kind of alien life form, or agents that are tweaking the codebase. An amateur can’t do it for now.
For now, it’s a delusion to imagine that your AI agent will generate a whole project at once.
Developers are mostly weirdly enthusiastic about their new powers and increased productivity, although they can’t figure out what it means for the future of their profession.
The reason is that software developers say their training and expertise are still needed: knowing how a big codebase ought to be structured and how to design the system. Several developers, in fact, suggested that the number of software jobs might grow.
However, how things will shake out for professional coders themselves isn’t yet clear.