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A future where everyone would be a coder is getting closer with each passing year – or month, maybe. In the latest podcast with Lex Fridman, when asked how much programming people would do in the next 5-10 years, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “A lot, but I think it’ll be in a very different shape.”
Altman said that many have already started programming entirely in natural language. “No one programs by writing code…some people do. No one programs the pun cards anymore,” he quipped, adding that it would change the nature and the skillset, not so much the predisposition for who we call programmers in the future.
Recently, there have been discussions on X about how there would be fewer software engineering jobs in the future as most of the code would be written by AI. On the contrary, Fracois Chollet, the creator of Keras, predicted that there would be 10 million more coding jobs in the next five years, the ones that would require the knowledge of programming languages like Python, C, or JavaScript.
Plenty software programs left to write
“The best practitioners of the craft will use multiple tools and they’ll do some work in natural language,” he added. Altman explained that people would be able to focus on the higher level of abstractions, and the puzzle-solving skill set of programming, which Fridman agreed, was the harder part.
This is similar to what Chollet posted on X last week. “If you could fully automate software engineering (my job), I think that would be great, since I could then move on to higher-leverage things. Making software is a means to an end, not the end.” He added that software engineering is not just about copy-pasting code, but about developing mental models of problems and their solutions.
“The way I think about it is not what percent of jobs AI will do, but what percent of tasks will AI do,” Altman explained when asked about the capabilities of GPT-4 and how people fear monger AI replacing jobs, giving examples of how AI would be able to assist in five-minute tasks to five-days tasks. “Because AI is a tool,” he adds, that people should be able to operate at a higher level of abstraction and become way more efficient at the job they do.
Eventually, everyone is likely to be coding in the natural language, but that wouldn’t necessarily make them a software engineer or a programmer. The skills required to be a coder are far more complex than being able to put prompts in an AI tool, copying the code, or merely typing in natural language.
The most recent tool by Cognition Labs, Devin, is also an assistant which requires a programmer to guide it.
What would be the new job requirements then?
NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang believes that everyone would be a programmer one day and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella has been quoted as saying that “everyone’s a developer”. It now gets increasingly clear that the goal was always to make programming as natural as possible, and LLMs have made that possible now.
Soon, there would be a programming language exclusively in our very own English language.
Not to be confused with prompt engineering and writing code, the term natural language programming means that most of the coding would be done by the software in the backend. The programmer would only have to interact with the tool in English, or any other language and never even look at the code.
On the contrary, a few experts believe that English cannot be a programming language because it is filled with misunderstandings. “If they’re going into machines, which will affect the lives of people, we can’t afford that level of comedy,” said Douglas Crockford when talking to AIM.
Would this mean the end of coding? It would probably mean as Darian Moody put on X, “The real 5th generation programming languages actually turned out to be natural language. It’s a lot less upsetting when you think about it like this.” The real skill set in the future would be how to manage teams who program in natural language and the skills in English, instead of Python.
