TL;DR It doesn't matter that ChatGPT can generate boilerplate that almost works, and it doesn't matter that, feasibly, a hypothetical model in the (near) future could write code that reliably works and might be a little bit more interesting than boilerplate. The concern that deep learning AIs could replace programmers is based on a misunderstanding of what a programmer's job actually is.

All this talk I’m seeing about AI being close to replacing programmers indicates there’s a significant gap between what people think programming is like and what programming is actually like. I get the sense that most people who don’t work in tech think that programming is like sitting down in front of a computer, saying to yourself, “alrighty, let’s make an app,” and expertly busting out code until you have a fresh app. It’s more like getting onboarded into an organization that has hundreds of thousands of lines of archaic, institutional code, and being tasked with finding and fixing the 1-10 lines that happen to be somehow causing the most urgent bug, and then doing this over and over.

There’s a reason we tend to call it “software development” or “software engineering” instead of “programming.” The actual “programming” (the code composition, the fingers-on-the-keys) is a very small part of the job. Most of the job is code maintenance (which is doing things like fixing bugs) and technology integration (which is doing things like connecting a UI framework to an API that provides data). Yes, there is composition of novel functionality involved, it’s just a comparatively small and easy part of the work. Most software work—and the hardest software work—is maintaining big existing institutional software. And even when you are creating new things, the state of the software universe is such that almost all of the work has already been done for you, and all you have to do is the technology integration: people have already created all the libraries and frameworks and resources that implement basically any fundamental thing you could ever need to do, and there’s no reason to re-implement it, so the code that you write is basically connecting together all of those libraries and frameworks and resources.

I spent several hours last weekend doing exactly this. I had an idea for an app, I knew what API provided the data I needed, and I knew what frontend framework I wanted to use (real-world...

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