Soon machines will steal all the copy-pasting from Stackoverflow jobs.
But really, this is super impressive for ML. It's not software development, though. It's analyzing a corpus and performing a search.
The nasty bit is that if that is all it takes to do most software dev jobs, and hey, we might find that most software dev really is just pattern matching and regurgitating those patterns—as the project gets more complex, the specifications will have to be more complex and we'll end up mostly back where we started.
this is great for all the people who hate gluing together boilerplater and pipes. in my opinion, the hardest part of development is the "natural language description". gathering requirements, making sure everyone is on the same page with what is being requested, etc. if we're able to quickly generate prototypes from that language that greatly reduces the cycle time from ideation to prototype. what I forsee is that companies will need less developers overall, but more companies will bring in technical talent they wouldn't have otherwise, knowing it's that much easier to get working code
The trick will be whether the code generation works well enough most of the time, but if it generates some 1% weirdness that becomes a needle in the haystack. It seems to be it will be great for product manager/business person prototypes and potentially helpful for "hyper auto-complete" for a developer, but likely not for automating mission critical code.
But really, this is super impressive for ML. It's not software development, though. It's analyzing a corpus and performing a search.
The nasty bit is that if that is all it takes to do most software dev jobs, and hey, we might find that most software dev really is just pattern matching and regurgitating those patterns—as the project gets more complex, the specifications will have to be more complex and we'll end up mostly back where we started.