#[1]alternate [2]It’s the End of Computer Programming as We Know It.
  (And I Feel Fine.)

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  Farhad Manjoo

It’s the End of Computer Programming as We Know It. (And I Feel Fine.)

  June 2, 2023
  A series of 0s and 1s.
  Credit...Flavio Coelho/Moment, via Getty Images
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  [10]Farhad Manjoo

  By [11]Farhad Manjoo

  Opinion Columnist

  I was 5 or 6 when I got my first sense of the joys of computer
  programming. This was in the early 1980s, when few people had a
  computer. One day, my dad brought home a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, one of
  the world’s early [12]affordable, mass-market PCs. The device looked
  like a chunky keyboard; it had [13]48 kilobytes of memory (my phone has
  about 125,000 times as much RAM); and it used your TV as a display.
  Software, mainly games, came on cassette tapes that you loaded into the
  computer with a connection to a tape player — the floppy drive of its
  time.

  But the games took forever to load, and while waiting I would often
  pore over the incredible programming [14]manual that came with the
  Spectrum. The book was full of simple programs written in the
  accessible [15]BASIC programming language. Most of it went over my
  head, but as I experimented with the examples, I began to feel [16]the
  thrill that people who fall for computer programming often talk about —
  the revelation that, with just the right set of incantations, you can
  summon to life these otherwise inert machines and get them to do your
  bidding.

  My obsession with programming deepened when I got to high school (I was
  very popular!), and there were a few weeks early in college when I
  thought coding could be something I did for a living. Of course, I
  didn’t stick with it; for me, writing words won out over writing code.

  Image
  A 1982 ZX Spectrum.Credit...Sspl/Getty Images

  Though I did find it fascinating [17]to learn to think the way
  computers do, there seemed to be something fundamentally backward about
  programming a computer that I just couldn’t get over: Wasn’t it odd
  that the machines needed us humans to learn their maddeningly precise
  secret languages to get the most out of them? If they’re so smart,
  shouldn’t they try to understand what we’re saying, rather than us
  learning how to talk to them?

  Now that may finally be happening. In a kind of poetic irony, software
  engineering is looking like one of the fields that could be most
  thoroughly altered by the rise of artificial intelligence. Over the
  next few years, A.I. could transform computer programming from a
  rarefied, highly compensated occupation into a widely accessible skill
  that people can easily pick up and use as part of their jobs across a
  wide variety of fields. This won’t necessarily be terrible for computer
  programmers — the world will still need people with advanced coding
  skills — but it will be great for the rest of us. Computers that we can
  all “program,” computers that don’t require specialized training to
  adjust and improve their functionality and that don’t speak in code:
  That future is rapidly becoming the present.

  A.I. tools based on large language models — like [18]OpenAI Codex, from
  the company that brought you ChatGPT, or AlphaCode, from Google’s
  DeepMind division — have already begun to change the way many
  professional coders do their jobs. At the moment, these tools work
  [19]mainly as assistants — they can find bugs, write explanations for
  snippets of poorly documented code and offer suggestions for code to
  perform routine tasks (not unlike how Gmail offers ideas for email
  replies — “Sounds good”; “Got it”).

  But A.I. coders are quickly getting smart enough to rival human coders.
  Last year, DeepMind reported [20]in the journal Science that when
  AlphaCode’s programs were evaluated against answers submitted by human
  participants in coding competitions, its performance “approximately
  corresponds to a novice programmer with a few months to a year of
  training.”

  “Programming will be obsolete,” Matt Welsh, a former engineer at Google
  and Apple, [21]predicted recently. Welsh now runs an A.I. start-up, but
  his prediction, while perhaps self-serving, doesn’t sound implausible:

    I believe the conventional idea of “writing a program” is headed for
    extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications,
    most software, as we know it, will be replaced by A.I. systems that
    are trained rather than programmed. In situations where one needs a
    “simple” program … those programs will, themselves, be generated by
    an A.I. rather than coded by hand.

  Welsh’s argument, which ran earlier this year in the house organ of the
  Association for Computing Machinery, carried the headline “The End of
  Programming,” but there’s also a way in which A.I. could mark the
  beginning of a new kind of programming — one that doesn’t require us to
  learn code but instead transforms human-language instructions into
  software. An A.I. “doesn’t care how you program it — it will try to
  understand what you mean,” Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the
  chip-making company Nvidia, said [22]in a speech this week at the
  Computex conference in Taiwan. He added: “We have closed the digital
  divide. Everyone is a programmer now — you just have to say something
  to the computer.”

  Wait a second, though — wasn’t coding supposed to be one of the
  can’t-miss careers of the digital age? In the decades since I puttered
  around with my Spectrum, computer programming grew from a nerdy hobby
  into a vocational near-imperative, the one skill to acquire to survive
  technological dislocation, no matter how absurd or callous-sounding the
  advice. Joe Biden to coal miners: [23]Learn to code! Twitter [24]trolls
  to laid-off journalists: [25]Learn to code! Tim Cook to French kids:
  [26]Apprenez à programmer!

  Programming might still be a worthwhile skill to learn, if only as an
  intellectual exercise, but it would have been silly to think of it as
  an endeavor insulated from the very automation it was enabling. Over
  much of the history of computing, coding has been on a path toward
  increasing simplicity. Once, only the small priesthood of scientists
  who understood binary bits of 1s or 0s could manipulate computers. Over
  time, from the development of [27]assembly language through more
  human-readable languages like C and Python and Java, programming has
  [28]climbed what computer scientists call increasing levels of
  [29]abstraction — at each step growing more removed from the electronic
  guts of computing and more approachable to the people who use them.

  A.I. might now be enabling the final layer of abstraction: the level on
  which you can tell a computer to do something the same way you’d tell
  another human.

  So far, programmers seem to be on board with how A.I. is changing their
  jobs. GitHub, the coder’s repository owned by Microsoft, [30]surveyed
  2,000 programmers last year about how they’re using GitHub’s A.I.
  coding assistant, Copilot. A majority said Copilot helped them feel
  less frustrated and more fulfilled in their jobs; 88 percent said it
  improved their productivity. Researchers at Google found that among the
  company’s programmers, A.I. [31]reduced “coding iteration time” by 6
  percent.

  I’ve tried to introduce my two kids to programming the way my dad did
  for me, but both found it a snooze. Their disinterest in coding has
  been one of my disappointments as a father, not to mention a source of
  anxiety that they could be out of step with the future. (I live in
  Silicon Valley, where kids seem to learn to code before they learn to
  read.) But now I’m a bit less worried. By the time they’re looking for
  careers, coding might be as antiquated as my first PC.

Office Hours With Farhad Manjoo

  Farhad wants to [32]chat with readers on the phone. If you’re
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  IFRAME:
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  Farhad Manjoo became an Opinion columnist for The Times in 2018. Before
  that, [40]they wrote the [41]State of the Art column. They are the
  author of “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.”
  [42]@fmanjoo • [43]Facebook
  A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 4 of
  the New York edition with the headline: Maybe We Don’t Need To Learn to
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