As the world becomes increasingly digital, computer programmers have been quietly taking over the world. We all know, they’re high in demand, earning big bucks, and seem to have an unfair advantage over the rest of the others.
As a semi-retired programmer, I’ve not only done this myself, but I’ve seen other programmers use AI to effortlessly solve complex problems in a few seconds. Just today, I asked Bing Chat to take a requirements document from a client and write the SQL that would create the database needed to build their business registry database. I then fed it into a code generator, and it created the web application for me. This took less than 10 minutes to do. Now, this unfair advantage is extending beyond the digital realm with the commoditisation of AI.
Why do programmers have an unfair advantage in the age of AI?
Most non-tech folks don’t have a good understanding of the technology that powers ChatGPT, why it’s a game changer, and how to use it properly. This is because they’ve been out of the AI loop for years. However, most of the programmers I know have been tracking its development for a few years now and have a deep understanding of what its strengths and weaknesses are and how best to use it. They also have the superpower of being able to code which forces you into breaking down larger problems into smaller chunks to be solved which is advantageous for prompt engineering a solution. This coding ability also means they can chain together a bunch of services to accomplish a particular goal.
For example, we’ve been experimenting with using AI for the last few months to help us develop our content pipeline. Basically, we have used the GitHub co-pilot AI to write a script to randomly choose a post from our WordPress blog and YouTube channel and then post this to our various social media channels automatically. So far this is working pretty well and has significantly reduced the time it’s taken for us to generate new content for social media.
However this highlighted a few things for us in that it makes those of us who are already well versed with coding and technology exponentially more productive.