AI has changed many aspects of the professional world, especially the practice of software development and engineering. A swathe of tools and platforms now enable programmers to use AI assistants and copilots – as well as swarms of agents – to work on building systems autonomously, based on instructions. And for one key figure in the AI space, this was something of an inevitability.
Going viral
In a viral post on the social media platform X, one of the key figures behind the conception of OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy, remarked on the future of programming, provoking a reaction from many in the industry at the time.
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ChatGPT had launched a few months prior to that, and developers were already familiar with the basic level of coding that the chatbot could perform, especially in popular languages such as Python and HTML. Much of this was also based on simple text-based instructions – meaning that the AI models could understand and process natural language and churn out complex programming in a way that hadn't been seen before.
Karpathy, who in 2024 co-founded Eureka Labs, an AI education platform, perfectly encapsulated the feeling, with the tech industry in the process of understanding the full implications of this technology.
Good vibes only
Karpathy added in a follow-up post that many examples out there in scientific literature showed that natural language was capable of wielding AI to engage in complex programming. These findings served as a collective precursor to many enterprise features that we see in widespread use today, such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and others.
However, the rise of vibe coding and instructions-based programming also means that the nature of the work is changing for many software developers. Many now simply review code instead of writing it themselves, engaging in validation and bug-squashing.
Thus, the role of software development is becoming something that requires fewer and fewer juniors. This, however, may lead to other unintended consequences – including the fact that the traditional career pipeline is permanently changed.