A couple of videos for you about the changing face of programming as a career with the advent of AI. The truth is probably somewhere between these two videos. Having used Copilot in Visual Studio, I can see the advantages it can bring in terms of productivity...but you still need to be a programmer to even use it effectively and understand how (or if) to the modify suggested code. It integrates really well into Visual Studio Code and is far superior to my results from other AIs. Still, it's not going to replace programmers anytime soon and can only be as useful as its training data, and just like other aspects of AI, it often gets things wrong.
This first video from Harvard's CS50 (their Intro to Computer Science Programming Course series), features Matt Welsh who gives us his perspective of where AI is and where it may be going career-wise in terms of programming. This is an older interview and it's interesting to note, his whole company's product was made obsolete a few weeks after airing with another introduction from OpenAI in their own product offerings. So, even those who think they are prepared can get caught off-guard with the rapid rate of advancement.
You may also want to get the reactions from this CS Professor, who I think captures many of my feelings about the situation right now. He offers some practical strategies of how programmers can stay relevant in this changing world. In fact, he believes as I do, that our skills are still relevant. After all, we can't just turn things over to a black box to generate code and not understand what it's trying to do -- that's a huge business gamble (although some businesses are jumping into this blindly). Remember, there are also security issues that non-coders won't take into account or understand the risks with some algorithms they might use.
AI generated image from Fotor.com
Prompt: A derelict office with a bunch of desks with computers all of which look like they've been through the apocalypse, except one desk where a humanoid robot works happy at a pristine workstation typing away.
Note that it didn't include the second part of my prompt.
