Don't worry, it's impossible to lay off programmers at ChatGPT

"In the next three to five years, can GPT reduce a ten-person programming and development team to just a few people?"

This is what I saw on Zhihu Question, I would like to share my thoughts here.

1

## I have repeatedly stated in my previous article As mentioned, ChatGPT has strong design capabilities and strong code generation capabilities. For module-level code, programmers only need to guide it to generate it, but programmers also need to verify and determine the correctness of the generated code.

Design ability: ChatGPT is beginning to threaten programmers’ core abilities!

Coding ability: Programmers can rest assured that ChatGPT can only write 95% of the code!

This is an important premise: with the assistance of ChatGPT, programmers' productivity will be greatly improved.

In many cases, code generation can be 10 times or more faster than hand-written code, potentially saving 3 to 5 times when verification and debugging time is taken into account.

There is a threshold for using ChatGPT now. There are a group of pioneers who took the lead and greatly improved work efficiency. There are still many people who are on the sidelines or even dismissive of ChatGPT. state.

As time goes by, most people will move to the camp of "using AI to generate code", because if you don't use it and others use it, your competitiveness will decrease relatively, especially In the eyes of the boss.

When most people move, will it happen that everyone quickly completes the work at hand and then happily fishes?

It’s unlikely. The boss is not a fool. When a revolutionary productivity tool appears, how could the boss not know about it?

How could he still think that programmer productivity remained the same? !

Capital is chasing maximum profits. After productivity increases, the boss is likely to streamline the team of ten people to two or three people and give the remaining people a 10% increase. Just the salary.

This means that 70 to 80 percent of programmers will be unemployed.

Will it really develop like this? This situation also has a premise: the total demand in the IT industry remains unchanged.

2

From Over the past few decades, the total demand in the IT industry has been expanding.

When Fortran, the world's first high-level programming language, appeared, it was a dimensionality reduction blow to existing assembly programming. Programmers' productivity skyrocketed, and the threshold was suddenly lowered a lot. It is somewhat similar to today's ChatGPT generated code.

At that time, many assembly programmers were unwilling to use this high-level language and found a bunch of reasons. For example, the binary code compiled by Fortran was inefficient, so it was better to write assembly.

However, simple and easy-to-use high-level languages ​​have swept the world with an unstoppable force. Now only people in specific fields use assembly.

High-level languages, like ChatGPT, have greatly improved productivity, but they have not led to a shrinking of the programming community. Instead, more programmers have appeared. This group is attractive due to high salaries. , on the contrary, it has prospered greatly because the entire market is expanding:

With the emergence of mainframes and minicomputers, computers began to enter companies from scientific research institutions;

The emergence of PC has brought computers from companies into homes.

The emergence of the Internet, especially mobile Internet, has brought computers from families to individuals.

Every change in history means a huge expansion of the market. Each expansion will bring a lot of demand. Obviously, these demands require more programmers. satisfy.

##3

If The large model represented by ChatGPT has really become a general artificial intelligence, then it can completely replace programmers, and the question at the beginning of the article will be meaningless. By then, it will not only be the programmer group that will be affected, but all walks of life. All walks of life.

But from the current stage, ChatGPT is a productivity tool. It will not directly lead to the shrinkage of the professional developer group. The key to the matter is that as AI large models penetrate into various industries, what can it bring? What opportunities come.

I am always optimistic about the emergence of new technologies. I hope that the popularity of ChatGPT will become a landmark event comparable to the Internet explosion in the 1990s and trigger a profound technological change.

Large models will gradually be combined with specific industries and specific fields. For example, Xueersi recently announced that it will develop MathGPT, and Harbin Institute of Technology’s open source Huatuo Medical GPT...

In the future, it is possible that some programmers will be responsible for training privatized models in various industries, while others will develop applications based on the models.

A programmer's technology stack may undergo dramatic changes, like moving from desktop development to web development.

Although ChatGPT can eliminate some jobs, it will also create more new jobs and the market can continue to expand.

In fact, if there is no new technology for a long time, the programmer group will be more miserable, because Internet traffic has peaked, dividends have been eaten up, companies have laid off employees, and salaries have been cut. Salaries were cut, and everyone had no choice but to get involved crazily.

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