The end of code, or the harbinger of a new beginning?

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The software world has long been on the verge of change, but this time it is not just an update, but a paradigm shift. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, artificial intelligence will "slowly" but surely push software engineers off the stage. This could be the end of coding. Or the beginning of something even stranger.

The Age of Codex Begins

OpenAI recently introduced an autonomous software engineering agent based on the Codex-1 model. Its name: Codex. But it is not just an ordinary coding assistant. Codex:

•Writes code,

•Debugs errors,

•Runs tests,

•Understands and refactors your code

and does all of this in 1 to 30 minutes. While you are still struggling with linter settings in your IDE...

Moreover, it doesn't need coffee, motivational tweets, or to search for 'how to exit Vim' every single time...

It's Not Just Speed, the Economy Is Changing Too

The average developer spends 42% of their time on bug fixes. Codex just says, 'Hold my semicolon' to that.

Is the merge time for a pull request 4 days? Codex finishes the job in 30 minutes.

The annual cost of a developer? An average of £70,000. Codex? Included in the ChatGPT Pro package. (For now...)

And yes, there is talk that OpenAI will acquire Windsurf, a coding startup, for $3 billion. For an AI that pushes directly to 'main' while writing code but never complains...

So, Where Do Humans Fit In?

As of 2024, there are 28.7 million software developers in the world. This number is expected to reach 45 million by 2030. In other words, we are still busy training developers, while AI is already at the point of replacing them.

The regional distribution is as follows:

•Asia: 6.5 million (led by India and China)

•Europe: 6.1 million (Germany, UK, France)

•USA: 4.4 million developers

But the question is: What will these people do?

Writing Prompts Instead of Writing Code

In the coming years, what will be valuable is not writing the code, but correctly describing what needs to be written. In other words, "prompt" skills. The code itself? Codex already understands it. Moreover, it might actually understand all the lines we pretend to understand.

The CTO of the future – Chatbot Technical Overlord – says the following:

"Writing code? Now you just describe it, and the algorithm handles the rest."