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question, When were programmers supposed to be obsolete? (poliverso.org)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, this is a question that popped into my mind when i saw an article about some AWS engineer talking about ai assistants taking over the job of programmers, this reminded me that it's not the first time that something like this was said.

My software engineering teacher once told me that a few years ago people believed graphical tools like enterprise architect would make it so that a single engineer could just draw a pretty UML diagram and generate 90% of the project without touching any code,
And further back COBOL was supposed to replace programmers by letting accountants write their own programs.

Now i'm curious, were there many other technologies that were supposedly going to replace programmers that you remember?

i hope someone that's been around much more than me knows something more or has some funny stories to share

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

If a tool were created that properly converted an UML diagram into a project without any need for code, all the programmers that lost their job to this tool would then be hired by the company that offered it, in order to give maintenance and support to everything the customers want in their programs.

It would be removing programmers from they payroll of some companies but they would still be working for them, just further down in the chain.

The same is true for AI. If AI could completely replace programmers in some area, it would need a lot of programmers itself to keep dealing with all the edge cases that would show up from being used everywhere that a programmer was needed before.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Besides. Somebody has to convert customer needs into the diagram. Account for what they’re not saying, etc.

That’s the real essential skill in software dev, not spitting out lines of code.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Yup. Business logic for things that cost millions or billions should not be run by an approximation machine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Thanks. I'm remembering the relevant scene from Office Space. ;-)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS!!!!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

To be fair, a lot of roles simply disappeared over the years.

Developers today are much more productive than 30 years ago, mostly because someone automated the boring parts away.

A modern developer can spin up a simple crud app including infrastructure in a day or so. That's much much more productive than 1995. We just cram a lot more of the world into software, so we need 20x the amount of developers we needed back then.