Offtopia — nothing personal

Nothing bad is happening to programmer jobs. there was a programming job bubble, and that bubble popped. That that the needle to pop the bubble was chatgpt and friends does not turn them into artificial intelligence.

I used to work with programmers of roughly my level, for years. a programmer of my level

1. spends much less than half of the time in the editor, and uses batch programming tools instead: memory and running time profilers, race verifiers, random memory initializers, call tracers etc.
2. prototypes a lot: first several versions of working code are thrown away and fully rewritten.
3. maintains projects so that they are packageable and deliverable with a single command — if a program, complicated as it can be, cannot be installed on a new computer within the time required to run an automatic script, it is not a program.
4. writes programs that can be picked up by others after a brief walkthrough.
5. picks up others’ code after a brief walkthrough, with full ownership.
6. routinely memorizes and can debug in the head the code he has been writing during the last couple weeks at least.

Programmers that have been losing their jobs recently are of a different breed. they are university CS graduates (sorry), they think that what they learned from homework assignments they did in Python or Java is what programming is. They can only work in so called IDEs (integrated development environments) which automates dumb things and prevent using advanced professional skills. They debug their programs in interactive debuggers (professional programmers do not do that for the last 30 years) and test them by re-running them manually until they work (professional programmers automate regression testing — I usually have at least as many lines of automatic testing code as the program code). So on so forth.

The code that such programmers have been producing during the last decade filled up the bubble. ChatGPT and friends learned to produce code of the same very poor quality automatically. The bubble collapsed. Good news for me. This is job security for me due to my programming skills.

But it does not make ChatGPT or Claude good programmers. The code they produce does not contribute to building quality software. It just demonstrates that most software of such a poor quality because the programmers who have been writing the software could be replaced by a big enough autoregressive model.