Does AI take away meaning from programmers?

I’ve been programming for many years, starting way back when I used to work at an ISP (Internet Service Provider) in my early twenties until recently doing freelance jobs for all sorts of different companies. I remember a few years ago, all of a sudden one day I started seeing a bunch of videos on YouTube about how OpenAI had a new version of ChatGPT that was a huge jump in intelligence from the previous version. I didn’t follow AI that closely but I decided to give it a try after I heard that it can write high-quality code. This was very pertinent to my interests, being a programmer, I had to know what I was up again.

I was amazed at how well it could code. I told it to make a website with some random features and it just spit out some pretty high-quality code very quickly. It wasn’t perfect. The site didn’t look that great but the AI could actually use logic to determine which code to create and how to tie it into the rest of the code it wrote. This was unlike anything I had seen before.

There have been a few moments in my life where I felt like there was a huge jump in technology that would change things forever. The first one of these was when I first saw the Nintendo Entertainment System after playing Atari for my whole life. The release of Wolfenstein 3D was another big jump, and seeing artificial intelligence in action was one of the biggest jumps out of all of them.

Over the past few years, the code AI can write has gotten better and better to the point where you can write some pretty complex high-quality software.

We still need people to prompt the AI to get the code out. So the job of a programmer isn’t eliminated, however, what it means to be a programmer is starting to change. The word vibe coding gets passed around a lot and there’s two versions of this. One is people that don’t know how to code at all and learn how to use an AI and get to play around with it and create some pretty interesting stuff but it’s generally limited and there usually comes a point where they get stuck and can’t get any further in a project because of a lack of general knowledge. But then there’s the way a programmer uses AI which is more nuanced and specific because you have to get programs to integrate with existing codebases, existing database structures, so as a programmer you interact with the AI a lot different than just a vibe coder.

So the question, which is the name of this article, is has being a programmer lost its meaning? Programming used to mean sitting at your computer, writing away code line by line, fixing bugs as they appeared and a lot of times sitting down and planning out a really clever way of getting your program to do something. With a few loops and variables, you can sometimes write just a few lines of code that accomplish a very robust task. After you create such a program, there’s a sense of pride of how efficient your code was or how novel you were able to attack a certain problem.

Anybody that is coding everything by hand today is not going to have a job very long because the amount of time it takes them to accomplish their tasks are going to be way longer than someone who’s assisted with AI. So I think there’s a certain programmer out there that probably is getting hit pretty hard with this AI intrusion into the workplace of programming. The people that loved the coding process and coming up with clever ways to do things probably have no appreciation for AI and those are usually the ones that always complain that it’s not as good as a human writing code, even though that may have been the case in the past. But today AI has become extraordinarily good at coding.

Now I myself always appreciated writing the code and coming up with good ideas, the sense of accomplishment of a clever way to solve an issue or that feeling of being stuck in a problem for hours and then finally having an epiphany on the perfect way to solve the problem. But most of all for me programming was always a means to an end. I would have an idea for something that I wanted to exist and needed to program to make it exist. When I was working at the internet provider, there’d be some sort of function that would make my life easier if it existed with our interface in billing or user management or whatever it was. So the reason I learned how to program was to be able to create these features that I wanted.

So AI for me has been a very welcome addition to the toolset for creating things. Now instead of focusing on the code I can focus on the functionality, the robustness of features of whatever I’m creating.

So for me being a programmer was always about making stuff and now I’m just way faster at making stuff than I used to be. For people who loved the actual process of programming, I feel like there might be a loss of identity.