I expect for there to be a delay in deployment, but I think ultimately OpenAI is aiming as a near term goal to automate intellectually difficult portions of computer programming. Personally, as someone just getting into the tech industry, this is basically my biggest near-term concern, besides death. At what point might it be viable for most people to do most of what skilled computer programmer does with the help of a large language model, and how much should this hurt salaries and career expectations?
Some thoughts:
- It will probably be less difficult to safely prompt a language model for an individual "LeetCode" function than to write a that function by hand within the next two years. Many more people will be able to do the former than could ever do the latter.
- Yes, reducing the price of software engineering means more software engineering will be done, but it would be extremely odd if this meant software engineer salaries stayed the same, and I expect regulatory barriers to limit the amount that the software industry can grow to fill new niches.
- Architecture seems difficult to automate with large language models, but a ridiculous architecture might be tolerable in some circumstances if your programmers are producing code at the speed GPT4 does.
- Creativity is hard to test, and if former programmers are mostly now hired based on their ability to "innovate" or have interesting psychological characteristics beyond being able to generate code I expect income and jobs to shift away from people with no credentials and skills to people with lots of credentials and political acumen and no skills
- At some point programmers will be sufficiently automated away that the singularity is here. This is not necessarily a comforting thought.
Edit: Many answers contesting the basic premise of the old title, "When will computer programming become an unskilled job?" The title of the post has been updated accordingly.
I can foresee a near future where people can "program" by passing pseudo-code in plain English to LLMs, but I still think that we are nowhere near the point where programmer truly becomes an unskilled job. "Writing correct algorithms in plain English" is not a common skill, and you can't have LLMs writing perfect code 100% of the times. At the very least, you will still need a competent human to find bugs in the machine-generated code... my best guess is that the software industry will hire less programmers rather than less competent programmers.