Will AI replace humans?

It's been 24 months since the release of ChatGPT.

And don't get me wrong: AI has been a gamechanger. I use it daily to help me design solutions, autocomplete code and fix bugs.

But I'm also incredibly tired of the "in 6 months we won't need developers, AI can just do everything". We've been hearing that for 2 years, and yet here we are.

The idea that AI will replace developers assume that the amount of software we need in the world is fixed - and so if AI can help us get there twice as fast, we'll only need half as many devs.

But that premise is wrong. As technology keeps getting more advanced, there's an endless stream of software that will need to be built. And no matter how good AI gets, there will always be someone who needs to instruct it and know when it's going off track or runs into a problem it can't solve on its own.

The better way to look at is that if AI can speed up a single developer by 100%, the same amount of devs will just be able to produce twice as much software in the same amount of time. That's a net win for everybody!

My point is, I wouldn't be scared if you're currently learning to code. It's true that AI will (and already is) capable of building a lot of useful stuff almost entirely on its own. But that "almost" is key, and I don't foresee that changing any time soon

Manba: linkedin