As I see it, this is another step in a field whose history is a story of force-multipliers. 60 years ago, they used punch-cards. Every decade or so sees a sizable jump in how much an individual programmer can accomplish in a given time frame, and it has only increased the demand for such specialists.
For most of that time, we made middle-class money like most other engineering disciplines. We're due for a reversion to the mean.
Lately I keep thinking about Star Trek - everyone can issue commands to the computer, but they still had vast armies of engineers.
carlmr|2 years ago
There's a certain truth to that. I have a few colleagues that can't force-multiply with StackOverflow and Google yet.
Their command of English is just not on the level to search the American internet. So they restrict themselves to the German internet.
While ChatGPT works just as well in German as in English and this might enable them to harness it better. I think there will again be some people that are and some people that aren't able to use it properly.
If you can verbally express your issue you can ask it, and then you need to make sure the response actually works and isn't hallucinated, and you will need to make sure it works in conjunction with the rest of the code base.
In essence what we have been doing with StackOverflow and Google is being supercharged now. And while you can find almost every answer on StackOverflow, putting it all together, testing it, designing the system as a whole has taken up more and more mindshare.