GPT-4 itself is capable of elucidating/extracting more valid code than I ever thought possible; and yet Sam gave an interview nearly a year ago where he was already talking about GPT-6; and reading between the lines, the takeaway was (and is now ever moreso):
Allowing businesses to have more effective ways of querying data is going to explode - of this I have no doubt.
That is very different than the system design and the detailed requirements necessary to design it. All of the systems I’ve ever designed never had clear requirements, the main challenge is to get them defined, at least to the point where you can actually design. Even safety critical systems with stringent requirement management processes still have requirements that aren’t as concise as they probably should be.
I’m also not sure we should try and thin the pool of junior developers even if we can. Long term we need experienced developers, I don’t see that ever changing...unless these AI technologies become so superior that we’re basically handing the keys over to them, which will also be way beyond writing code. This seems like a bad idea :)
We’re already seeing code assistants in Visual Studio, this will continue. I’d be far more concerned if my profession revolved around ‘standard knowledge’, not new design. This would include teaching, medical ‘standard’ care, the law, etc.. A lot of this information is static and unchanging. They just require somebody years to learn it all.