I used to be deeply in love with programming and IT, I keep teaching myself language and tricks and I’m always enthusiastic of new challenges but since I saw a video of GitHub Copilot this Saturday I feel stuck in a rut. I used to find programming and IT skills which differentiated me from many of my peers but now it doesn’t feel special anymore, just glorified typing which can be replaced by a robot anytime in the future, my motivation is destroyed.

Is just a higher level language, higher level of abstraction

https://commitstrip.com/en/2016/...?

We've had code generation tools for ages. More and more tools are about automating the boilerplate.

10 years ago there's a good chance most companies used on prem servers, databases. Now? AWS.

Like above, we will need humans to program these robots or make new programs.
It will still be IT related and most can learn new things very fast.
Just keep learning and keep updated with the technology.

Does the specific of some for loop really matter? No. Does the operation in the for loop matter? Yes.

We're a long way from being replaceable.

But there is a lot of boilerplate in our jobs. Our value is in the differentiated work.

If you thought writing some CRUD app made you irreplaceable, then yes you were wrong. But that's just coz no-code solutions have existed for ages.

If you're working on something new, something that isn't some other product or site modified a bit, that's irreplaceable.

@atheist that’s my hope, developers have looked on how to automate parts of their job basically since the dawn of software development (the first compilers dates back to the 50s and then came linkers, graphical programming languages, convention over configuration tools, no code tools, Docker, K9S and how you said AWS). Despite that the job market remained solid and that will just be another iteration of this cycle.
I never found myself irreplaceable just because I can make CRUD since Rails or ASP.NET can automate that with ease (but not always, the last year I had to made a CRUD app for a local company which needed enough customization and integration to make life very difficult for code generators/no code) and I keep working on myself to have skills which are far beyond CRUD.

@Grumm well, I’m not sure which everyone in future will be able to work in AI since the companies which can get the data needed to train cutting edge AIs are few so workplace in that field would be limited in number and reserved to very highly educated people (maybe a Master’s degree wouldn’t be enough) therefore I hope which general programming will still be a feasible option but yours and other replies made be optimist about that 🙂

@TheCommoner282 that’s a good point, maybe the day in which an AI would be able to replace us our workplaces will be the last of our concerns

@GeorgeBool I code in Vim so I get you, I’m not a fan of IDEs too 🙂 I agree which the current iteration of Copilot makes quite shitty code and while it may save you some seconds in typing then it wastes minutes in reading and refactoring the verbose code it generates, the only thing in which currently it seems useful is in auto filling repetitive patterns (for example if you have to make the same two annotations over n fields of an object).
Still seeing it in action was a quite uncanny experience but the many replies I’ve received here made me understand which I don’t have to worry.