How Is AI Going To Take Your Software Job ?

One of the conversations with ChatGPT is becoming popular recently. A person was able to create an entire game using just ChatGPT without writing even a single line of code, with just plain English prompts. The game is similar to the famous “Flappy Bird” game. All it took was a few iterations with ChatGPT to build a working game, which would have been an effort of not more than 1 hour at max. I am sure that the majority of software engineers would take at least a day to build the exact same game. Many would even take more than a week. You can find the entire ChatGPT conversation in this reddit post.

This is how the conversation went.

The person asked ChatGPT to develop a flappy bird like game using HTML and JS. In response ChatGPT was able to produce a HTML file and a JS file with some basic code written.

The person found that the game had certain glitches, so they explained to ChatGPT about the issue they observed and asked it to fix the glitch. ChatGPT again responded with another iteration of the code.

The person wanted to add a countdown timer at the beginning of the game, so they just asked ChatGPT to do that, and it responded with an updated version of code which had a timer at the start screen.

After a few iterations like above, by asking ChatGPT to fix the issues observed on the screen in plain English prompts, the person could generate the entire working code for the game without even writing a single line of code. You can see the entire conversation here.

This is truly a miracle advancement in the field of AI, and at this pace, the day is not far where AI will be able to self correct itself to even be able to write the code itself without requiring human input. Even with current capabilities of AI, a person who has very rudimentary knowledge of code (like code deployment) can write complex pieces of software without even writing a single line of code. This definitely raises an important question about the future of software engineering as a profession. It is high time that we start thinking on how we can upgrade ourselves to remain relevant as this technology grows.