Software engineers may have to develop other skills soon as artificial intelligence takes over many coding tasks.
That’s according to Amazon Web Services’ CEO, Matt Garman, who shared his thoughts on the topic during an internal fireside chat held in June, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Business Insider.
“If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can’t exactly predict where it is — it’s possible that most developers are not coding,” said Garman, who became AWS’s CEO in June.
“Coding is just kind of like the language that we talk to computers. It’s not necessarily the skill in and of itself,” the executive said. “The skill in and of itself is like, how do I innovate? How do I go build something that’s interesting for my end users to use?”
This means the job of a software developer will change, Garman said.
“It just means that each of us has to get more in tune with what our customers need and what the actual end thing is that we’re going to try to go build, because that’s going to be more and more of what the work is as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code,” he said.
You can easily see the market is now hiring more engineers to put up with the shortcomings of LLMs. The best AI models cannot be left to code and be right more than ~10% of the time. That’s an unacceptable rate that is not likely to increase as they feed llm data to llms.
If you ask copilot to write something like quicksort, it will get it wrong most of the time, because most people misunderstand quicksort/ have bad implementations for it, and the models don’t know the difference.
Anytime I see a CEO CTO warning about AI taking SWE jobs on linkedin, i make a note to never work near those people, they fundamentally misunderstand the problem, and follow the hype. The other thing they like to ignore is the cost of these models, that are essentially subsidized by our tax payer funded energy infrastructures. That is an equivalently absurd amount of money compared to SWE.