Recently it is common to hear things like: "Programming is Solved", "There is no need to learn how to code anymore", etc.
Saying "AI" can program better than most people, so there is no need to learn programming anymore is the equivalent of saying calculators do arithmetic better than most people, so there is no need to learn arithmetic anymore.
The problem with this line of thinking is manifolds:
- "AI" or more accurately multimodal large language models are a tool to enhance our abilities. Not a replacement.
- We need to be careful about people trying to oversell their product (CEOs of "AI" companies aiming at overhyped IPOs)
- Blindly believing those people will likely lead to blindly relying on "AI" models, forgetting that those models are not coming up with things by themselves (as hard as people are trying to sell otherwise). "AI" models learn from human output. Thus, people stopping to learn programming will lead to a situation where there will only be a few capable programmers that can train the "AI" models from their skills. This will likely end-up in a situation where those very "AI" model will stagnate over time.
It is also common to hear some people saying that all programmers are now equal thanks to "AI". Ok, consider a primary school student with a scientific calculator vs a scientific calculator in the hands of a mathematics undergraduate. Is the primary school student as competent of a mathematician as the university math student? I don't think so. The primary school student will not even know how to use most of the features of the scientific calculator simply because they don't understand the concept themselves.
Let's be careful about blindly believing ~wanna-be "AI" overlords~ people with financial or ideological incentives to overstate AI's capabilities.
"Science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme" -- François Rabelais
It is important to acknowledge that "AI" has surely made programmers significantly more productive, and lowered the entry bar for making software. This is a good thing, and "AI" should be embrace is that sense. However, claiming that there is no need to learn to code anymore is misleading to the public.