ChatGPT replacing software engineers in 5 years?

The short answer: Nope, (and I hope I am right).

[If you have not heard from ChatGPT I recommend looking it up, Nick Chapsas has a nice clip on it. It is an AI trained with text from the internet and can keep context on what you are creating with the AI in form of a chat.]

I am a software engineer and I know what my work looks like. Am I spending a lot of time writing code? No I am spending time thinking what connections I need to make, where a piece of logic should live, what the responsibility should be or not be for a part of a system, should it own this piece of data or should it just cache it? I spend the most time thinking of the scenarios the system deals with, for instance business events can occur in wrong order, webservices could be offline, the system should be able to handle that. Usually when I am ready to write more complex code then just a simple function. I write a piece of comment that explains to myself what I am actually about to code there, or I copy a piece of the design I made before. This comment could be seen as the prompt for chatGPT. The hard part is now done, I know what the piece of code needs to do, I start coding and while coding I spot a scenario I did not think of before, I change the comment above and rethink my strategy. I conclude: Nah this event should not be dealth with in this consumer, I already have an appservice that is responsible for that, ok refactor that logic away into that class. Yes better! This consumer should only deal with this piece of the data and leave the other part to the other domain. The whole thing about software design is making a system that is maintainable, understandable by any developer who needs to work on it, it needs to perform, it needs to be robust, maybe you have heard of all the -ilities on wikipedia , that is in essence what a software engineer is doing, trying to do justice to all the -ilities

An other thought that came up on ChatGPT, it is using data from before 2021 or something, that means it does not know any of the .Net 7 or 8 features. How are you going to teach the AI this new stuff if there are no more coders asking and answering questions on stack overflow? All have been replaced by managers (who else?) telling ChatGPT what code to write remember? So there you have a problem, no coders means no content on the web about coding, also no need for documentation because there is no audience.

One more thought, Low Code, No Code, there is no code to write there and do I see any improvement on the development of software in that area? No I have not seen it, the hard thing about writing a good system is not the code it is the complexity of the system. These Low code No code apps are just as complex as coded systems and even harder to make if it comes down to do justice to all the -ilities. Now developers are hired to write Low Code No Code apps because it is to hard or time consuming for citizen developers.

Final thought. I asked ChatGPT to write a 250 words editorial for Perron 11, it has a new wallpaper collection for kids and the topic should be space and capybara's. It came up with a very good article, it even mentioned that the capybara and space were not so crazy as it seemed and that the Russians had brought a capybara with the name Ravik to space in the seventies. Wow! I knew about the dog Laika why not a big rodent! But then I tried to find if that was true... I can not find anything on a capybara to space, plain lie! ChatGPT great stuff to create fake news, it had me fooled at first.