Prompts as the new coding language: The abstraction battleground for tech jobs

It’s often said that AI will replace us or <a href="https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/generative-ai-could-raise-global-gdp-by-7-percent.html" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">take our jobs</a>. Maybe. But, which jobs first? I’ll argue that Gen AI will replace most work that lives in the middle ground of abstraction (the first battleground) leaving for us humans to toil on the value-based strategic work, and the specialist work.   An example of a typical application’s layers, with the right side increasingly implemented by reusable packages, and the developer working on the left and sometimes in the middle. Here I’m visualizing how a typical project is implemented, moving from an idea on the right to the low-level implementation on the right. Across the bottom are some examples of languages that are used at each level (roughly). It may be that Gen AI will take over the majority of this picture, but I think it will progress in stages, starting with the highlighted middle. On the left side of the picture above there is a dependency on unformalized, human-centric, value-driven goals and ideas. These may not even be expressed in words yet, so can’t be syntactically processed or automated until they are sufficiently formalized. The right side of the diagram depends on physical hardware, which also has a limit to what can be automated (it may not exist, or its capabilities may not be fully utilized or even conceived in formal syntaxes). So I’d argue that the middle is where Gen AI will first have the biggest impact in replacing human work, technical and otherwise. <a href="https://medium.com/@bmantoni42/prompts-as-the-new-coding-language-the-abstraction-battleground-for-tech-jobs-b9aa6d42b5a4">Website</a>