Many believe AI will bring the end of the world, but Emad Mostaque believes AI (and humans) can change it.

Denis Bolkovskis

Anthropic

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Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI, has a provocative prediction as artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly transforms our world. Mostaque's company is the company behind Stable Diffusion, the world’s most popular open-source image generator. He envisages AI as a tool that enhances human potential.

Stability AI CEO: There Will Be No (Human) Programmers in Five Years

Anytime someone that has a financial interest in the outcome tries to predict the future, you should take it with a huge grain of salt, especially in the VC/hype driven industry that is software. This guy is not making a probable prediction, he is advertising his company and pushing share value upwards. Plus, it’s the CEO, not CTO, this guy has likely no programming experience himself whatsoever. The development of AI has been wild, I don’t think anyone can say for certain what is going to happen in five years, so it certainly could happen, but while AI is good for drafting code, prototyping and generating simple(!) programs, I’ve yet to see any indications that it’ll be able to:
<ul>
<li>Maintain legacy code or update 100.000 LOC code bases</li>
<li>Understand and help spec out complicated business logic</li>
<li>Optimise performance</li>
<li>Manage build systems, CI/CD, CDN</li>
<li>Set up caching and database optimasation</li>
<li>etc</li>
</ul>
Ultimately, LLM can only copy what has been done before, and any programmer worth their salt have experienced having to solve a unique problem for their code base or business case.

Highly controversial… I would only feel comfortable saying that AI might “replace” developers that will not use AI. By “replace” I don’t actually mean that they will get replaced but more around that the space will become more competitive for people. If AI will help devs to increase their productivity, then those who will use AI will be able to produce more than others who don’t.

Couldn’t agree more.
It’s like saying calculators are going to replace engineers. No doubt the introduction of calculators was terrible news for slide rule manufacturers - it was great news for the engineers who were freed of the burden of having to perform calcs by hand.
The big losers in the developer eco system will be those that are tied to the low level tools that will be made obsolete by this new way of writing code.

I’m using AI specifically “Phind” for all of dev issue and resolving them. Basically it does the googling for me, and if I have to learn something new then it provides me detailed tutorial which I can learn within 5 to 10 minutes.
AI + Developer = SuperX Developer
AI is not gonna replace us, it’s just gonna make us better if we use it. Those who don’t use it well… you know what’s happening with people who only have a physical store in their local community without any presence on the internet. :)