Why Programming Is Especially Exposed to AI Automation

Summary: While AI may transform our world in many ways, it seems to me that programming is especially exposed to automation. Below I share 6 specific reasons why.

Many decades ago, people imagined that advances in cybernetics would give us intelligent machines in the form of humanoid robots, speaking in metallic voices and helping people with various physical tasks.

Robby the Robot from "Forbidden Planet", a sci-fi film from 1956

Things have developed differently. AI in the form of LLMs can do some intellectual work and, together with other models, generate realistic speech, images, and video, while general-purpose robots manipulating physical world are still very clumsy and far for being able to help us in everyday chores.

I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes. — Joanna Maciejewska

Switching to programming, I still remember reading the book "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks a long time ago. The author argued that despite advancements in more convenient, higher-level programming languages, "there is no silver bullet" - no single development can provide an order of magnitude improvements in programming productivity. The argument behind it was that we can reduce the "accidental complexity" of the code (boilerplate code, manual memory management, friction with language syntax, etc.), but there is always "essential complexity" left to handle. If an app needs to provide 5 features, we need to specify all these 5 features fully and precisely how they should work. No matter how high level is the description, it always ends up being... some form of code.