AI-Powered Software Delivery Company Predicts 'The End of Programming'

Matt Welsh is the CEO and co-founder of Fixie.ai, an AI-powered software delivery company founded by a team from Google and Apple. "I believe the conventional idea of 'writing a program' is headed for extinction," he opines in January's Communications of the ACM, "and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed."

His essay is titled "The End of programming," and predicts a future will "Programming will be obsolete." In situations where one needs a "simple" program (after all, not everything should require a model of hundreds of billions of parameters running on a cluster of GPUs), those programs will, themselves, be generated by an AI rather than coded by hand.... with humans relegated to, at best, a supervisory role.... I am not just talking about things like Github's CoPilot replacing programmers. I am talking about replacing the entire concept of writing programs with training models. In the future, CS students are not going to need to learn such mundane skills as how to add a node to a binary tree or code in C++. That kind of education will be antiquated, like teaching engineering students how to use a slide rule. The engineers of the future will, in a few keystrokes, fire up an instance of a four-quintillion-parameter model that already encodes the full extent of human knowledge (and then some), ready to be given any task required of the machine. The bulk of the intellectual work of getting the machine to do what one wants will be about coming up with the right examples, the right training data, and the right ways to evaluate the training process. Suitably powerful models capable of generalizing via few-shot learning will require only a few good examples of the task to be performed. Massive, human-curated datasets will no longer be necessary in most cases, and most people "training" an AI model will not be running gradient descent loops in PyTorch, or anything like it. They will be teaching by example, and the machine will do the rest.

The field of computer science will look like less of an engineering endeavor and more of an educational one because the machines will be so powerful and already know how to do so many things. These artificial intelligence systems will be flying our airplanes, running our power grids, and possibly even governing the whole world. When we focus on teaching machines instead of programming them, the vast majority of ClassicalCS becomes irrelevant. In the traditional sense, programming will be dead.

The fundamental building blocks of computation are unpredictable and mysterious. There are a lot of huge risks associated with the shift in the definition of computing. I think it's time to evolve our thinking and accept that this is a very likely future, rather than just sit and wait.

"I think the debate right now is primarily around the extent to which these AI models are going to revolutionize the field," Welsh says in a video interview. "It's more a question of degree rather than whether it's going to happen.... "I think we're going to change from a world in which people are primarily writing programs by hand to a world in which we're teaching AI models how to do things that we want them to do... It starts to feel more like a field that focus on AI education and maybe even AI psychiatry. In order to solve these problems, you can't just assume that people are going to be writing the code by hand."