 The Software Engineers Are Freaking Out Learning to code was supposed to be a golden ticket. But in the age of AI, it’s a pointless skill. What are the computer science majors supposed to do?
“Nobody should learn coding; that’s just done,” Shawn said. (© CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
Shawn still remembers where he was when he saw it: the little blue doodle that ended his career. It was the spring of 2022. After 20 years of developing software, Shawn had worked his way up the ladders of Silicon Valley to a senior engineering position with a $150,000 salary. He was coding for the next big thing, the metaverse—a new version of the internet that existed as a virtual world people could enter with headsets. Shawn had reached the point in his career at which you should be able to breathe a sigh of relief. This article is featured in Tech and Business. Sign up here to get an update every time a new piece is published. But as he sat at his desk that day, something caught his eye: OpenAI had gone live with a special demonstration of their first model that could code. He clicked the link—and, in the span of five seconds, he watched as all his assumptions about what his future would look like came crashing down. The men doing the demonstrating, a group that included Sam Altman, “just spoke commands—Draw a square on this HTML page, and color it in blue—and then the language model just did it,” Shawn said. “It took me five seconds of going through the whole range of emotions before I was like: Okay, my career is cooked.”...
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