Everyone’s a programmer in the future, according to Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang who recently said:

Over the course of the last 10 years, 15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you that it is vital that your children learn computer science. That everybody should learn how to program. And in fact, it’s almost exactly the opposite.

It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer.

This is the miracle of artificial intelligence.

I like to think that we have naturally progressed towards this even before AI came into the picture. The goal of any new programming language released in the last 2 decades have always been about simplicity and abstraction. With the advent of AI, it seems like we can stop making programming languages simple, as AI can understand a requirement and translate it to code. But I have a sinking feeling that we are hitting the peak of programming early if we proceed in this manner.

Abstraction-Abstraction-Abstraction

There is clearly a reason why only few programming languages from 30 years ago survived. A new programming language is created that does all the things that the old ones does, but faster and simpler. We went through the Assembly -> Fortran -> C -> C++ -> Rust transition. We made C simple with Python, and made it the de-facto language for machine learning. And AI today will generate Rust or Python code based on English (or any human language). We programmers have corny t-shirts and mugs that say “I’ll replace your job with a bash script”. Is this our “Bash script” moment?

Will programmers be replaced by AI?

Simple answer, no. Long answer, nooooooooo…

Jokes aside, not for a long time. The main component of programming is not coming up with a code, but planning. It’s easier to come up with simple snippets of code than to come up with a complex architecture for a software. When Jensen mentioned that `Everyone can be programmers’, what I could relate to is that we can now book airline tickets ourselves instead of relying on a travel agency or at the airport. We still have to use airports and airplane operators to fly across (unless you are Taylor Swift), and we would still need programmers as a separate job to handle the complexity of programming and software infrastructure.

Thoughts

I like to think Jensen Huang meant this in a positive way. I read some of the reactions on Twitter claiming how Jensen is pushing this agenda so that companies can buy his Nvidia hardware and make money. But AI helped me to make and learn cool stuff, even as a seasoned programmer. For instance, I learned React and NodeJS overnight trying to build a ChatGPT clone using ChatGPT, and then used it again to build NextJS + Tailwind app to build another LLM based app CodeSecurely.

Once LLMs become cheaper to run on consumer hardware, or to serve as an API, people will use it to automate some parts of their lives without relying on programmers. You could claim that it could do it right away, but LLMs can’t install Python in your Windows systems yet, and control it to build apps. And it can’t relied upon to fix bugs that are caused by its own code. Till then, programmers can relax and build things.