Some code writes itself, and I hope generative AI will help with it, but a lot of code doesn’t. Which is likely why generative AI is so terrible at writing good code.
Of course that doesn’t mean that generative AI won’t see widespread adoption by non-programmers in digitalisation in the coming decade. We already have a lot of “process people” making things with GPT, and those things work. Or at least, they sort of work, but they are also build so terrible that they won’t scale and won’t be maintainable. Which is fine for a while, and it’s probably even fine for the lifetime of some programs. Because let’s be honest, often the quality of the programs that are implemented in non-tech enterprise aren’t important. In fact, often excel “programmers” can frankly do wonders in terms creating business value on short lived automation that won’t need to scale or be maintained in the long run because it’s simply going to be replaced by the time it stops being useful because you’ll have grown to a size where you’re buying SAP or similar (regardless of whether it’s a good idea or not). I do think that a lot of us are going to spend a lot of time “cleaning up” after non-programmers doing GPT programming. Which will be lucrative and boring.
But writing good code for complicated problems? I’m not sure when/if generative AI will be able to handle that. I had hopes until GPT. We use it quite a lot mind you, it writes a lot of our documentation. We have high hopes it’ll eventually get good enough to write a lot of our unit tests as well, and obviously we’re already in a world where a lot of the “trivial” code can be auto-generated, but we were frankly able to do that before generative AI, but actual programming? Heh.
Of course that doesn’t mean that generative AI won’t see widespread adoption by non-programmers in digitalisation in the coming decade. We already have a lot of “process people” making things with GPT, and those things work. Or at least, they sort of work, but they are also build so terrible that they won’t scale and won’t be maintainable. Which is fine for a while, and it’s probably even fine for the lifetime of some programs. Because let’s be honest, often the quality of the programs that are implemented in non-tech enterprise aren’t important. In fact, often excel “programmers” can frankly do wonders in terms creating business value on short lived automation that won’t need to scale or be maintained in the long run because it’s simply going to be replaced by the time it stops being useful because you’ll have grown to a size where you’re buying SAP or similar (regardless of whether it’s a good idea or not). I do think that a lot of us are going to spend a lot of time “cleaning up” after non-programmers doing GPT programming. Which will be lucrative and boring.
But writing good code for complicated problems? I’m not sure when/if generative AI will be able to handle that. I had hopes until GPT. We use it quite a lot mind you, it writes a lot of our documentation. We have high hopes it’ll eventually get good enough to write a lot of our unit tests as well, and obviously we’re already in a world where a lot of the “trivial” code can be auto-generated, but we were frankly able to do that before generative AI, but actual programming? Heh.