No more manual code

Programming, using a language to tell the computer to perform tasks, will be less important and not only specified by programmers. Because of the broadly rising of AI, and the ability to independently produce, debug and review thousand of code lines, anyone can create a program, a website, computational tools just in a prompt sentence. Using programming language was considered special and only be done by people who have spent years learning syntax, making projects, but in the future programming is not limited for other non-technical users.

Not really a shock

Although it may sounds pretty pessimistic, in practical, programming is just a small step in a production chain and AI now just speed up this part, not replace the whole process. Take creating an app for example, the tasks include reading requirements, designing systems, adjusting patterns, coding, manual testings. Then we can apply AI to speed up some steps but not replace the whole process, and especially the large system design ( AI will follow this baseline for generating features), manual testings. In my 2nd year student opinion, due to the acceleration, a programmer will be able to perform wider selections of tasks, involve in more professional fields. Therefore, I need to upgrade my skills more, step out of my comfort zones to try different things, stay flexible and lifelong learning to stay consistent to any unpredictable changes in this AI eras.

About me

I known about programming since secondary school, but until high school, I dive deeply through competitive programming. Looking at back then, writing code is like suffering from constant pain and when I got AC on that question, I feel that I was chosen by God. Coding was much more difficult than nowadays, I have to search for wall-of-text documents, reread the file many times to find a stupid missing symbol, write the logic flow down to paper and spend hours staring at it. However, those bring the merit, helping me to debug code easier, adapt to other programming language faster. Right now I still try to manually code, it helps me to understand the even to the smallest thing in the program: why we set the variables like this, why we use this type of data structure instead of this… Although it’s sad to think that younger generations will not embrace coding like we did, technology still keep enhancing, developing for higher purposes, some of which could be replacing programmers like the machines take over tailors in the past.