Suddenly everyone can create and build without code and suddenly everyone is an AI expert telling us when we will be replaced.
Where were you five years ago? Ten years ago? 20?
I've been in software engineering for 25+ years and this hype/story resurfaces all the time.
Ya'll ever heard of Macromedia Flash and Dreamweaver? What about Microsoft Frontpage? No code has been around forever, where were you then? In 1998, when I started learning ASP.NET, I used a GUI which allowed me to drag and drop elements and connect their inner workings.. . . sound familiar?
We've been using machine learning for a long time. Spam filters. Fraud detection. I've touched these systems. These systems have been running quietly in production for years while the current experts were still calling it "just automation."
I pursued an opportunity at Twitter in about 2018. Having been in startups my entire career, I thought this would be a fun change coming aboard the FAANG ship. I gave multiple presentations to recruiters and managers at Twitter. I met with their EM over their ML team and I was going to join him. Then I got cold feet when the offer was extended. It was honestly overwhelmingly exciting but not a change I THOUGHT I was ready for. I moved in a different direction and jumped aboard ShopMonkey - still a "startup" in terms of head count (200) but the biggest one I'd worked at with true unicorn status with the $500M in funding and revenue.
I digress...
Now the same people who discovered ChatGPT eighteen months ago are telling us our profession is obsolete by 2027.
The people who actually understand this technology? They're not making those predictions. They know what these tools can and can't do.