Programming in age of AI

I often hear from people that AI will make coding skills useless and AI will make programmers jobless. I personally like programming but fears about future. :cold_face:

  • Should we learn programming in the age of AI when AI is becoming stronger?
  • How should we adapt or change our perception and goals about learning programming in AI era?
  • Should we keep alternative carrier options also?
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Always keep career options open. Because you never know. Think of AI as a force multiplier. That means you must have some force to apply, just as a project manager for a programming team has to understand the nature of the work to be able to guide it.

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I am doing scientific programming, and for this, a good background in some field is required. I am good at physics, for example. In science, software is a tool, AI is a force amplifier, and the field in which you do research (e.g., physics) is the foundation.

This year, I spent some time to figure out what AI is already useful for, and what it cannot do effectively (yet). This is an important skill nowadays, to give only tasks to the AI where there is a good chance that AI can solve it successfully. It works reasonable well for writing tests and for writing code to create plots, for example. But you still need to be able to proof-read and understand the AI code.

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My take on this is that you should definitely learn a few programming languages to understand code and compilers in general. I would go so far as to say that fundamentals have never mattered more than they do today. Not because you will actually be doing much programming yourself in the future (I believe a lot of the actual coding will be done by assistants) but to know how to design, think about and criticize code.

Learn:

  • discrete math, algorithms, data structures and some calculus.
  • some basic electrical engineering
  • a few CPU and GPU architectures
  • operating systems and compilers (one or two is enough)
  • C, Julia/Python, and Bash

This I believe we all have to know in addition to our own field.

I am no fan of vibe coding something you couldn’t have done yourself given enough time.

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