Matt Welsh shares his perspectives about the future of computer science, distributed computing, and if ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot represent the beginning of the end of programming.

The New Stack is a publication covering trends and technologies in cloud-native development, DevOps, and software delivery. Developers can learn about containerization, Kubernetes, and cloud computing, as well as explore topics such as microservices architecture, serverless computing, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

The New Stack

Matt Welsh is a former professor of computer science at Harvard. He spoke at a virtual meetup of the Chicago Association for Computing Machinery(ACM) Welsh is now the founder of Fixie.ai, a platform they are building to let companies develop applications on top of large language models to extend with different capabilities.

The End of Programming Is Nigh

“Well, if computing becomes, let’s say, democratized, because now you don’t need to be this like wizard in a tower, who understands how to write Rust code, to instruct a machine, that’s going to completely change that dynamic,” Welsh said. “Anyone will be able to do it. And I actually think that’s a really good thing.&quot;
I have the exact opposite opinion, having people who have absolutely no experience generating code they don’t understand and committing it is beyond dangerous and you just begging for massive trouble.
The reason why you need to learn the language is because you need to know what you’re writing and what you’re instructing, or what GPT is generating, you need to know what it all means you can’t just trust a language model.
I’ve heard people talk about this future where devs just oversee Chat GPT, and simultaneously futures where anyone can be a dev, these things are not compatible, these are clashing views, if the devs need to oversee the language model they need to be more experienced, if anything you’d erase the entire role of “junior developer” which brings on it’s own questions, how do you generate new senior devs without junior devs?
Similar to the issues craftsmanship suffered when they stopped getting new apprentices, the craft dies and the know-how is lost to the future generations.
Alternatively if anyone can be a dev then no company is going to be able to say with full reliability that their engineers fully understand their codebase and what’s going on with it and there’s no point to dive much deeper since you don’t write code day to day, so there’d be no “senior developers” anymore, everyone would be a junior.

I agree! You can’t replace the programmer so easily. The process may become even easier as technology evolves, but you will still have programmers to do it. Besides, there will always be new things, the developer may migrate to a new area of development that may appear in the future.
For example, AI’s need to go through some training to generate limitations in their responses. Who knows if this will become an industry in the future? Even the fact of asking an AI to transmit everything about a need requires a more technical knowledge to know how to ask for things, otherwise the answer is something abstract.
An example is if you ask for python code to create a function. If you ask abstractly, the answer is something very general. But if you ask for something specific (because you know the language), like a function that takes x and y, and the result of that is a tuple with the standard deviation and the mean, it tends to bring a much more precise result. So I think that as strange as it may be, the “ask” may be an industry in the future.
It will be a long time before they dominate the human being 🤣