Is AI Going to replace us, programmers? GitHub founder thinks so and is betting on it

Last year, when I planned to discuss AI and jobs, a girl tweeted, “We should stop cashing in on the idea of AI taking away our jobs.” I gave the talk, and the piece’s conclusion was more like, “AI will not replace us if we make it our copilot.” That was what a big group of folks around the internet said, and I agreed with that. But I’ve just read something that made me change my mind.

For coding tasks, real LLMs serve as a co-pilot, helping us write sections of code. Some act as a chat that can answer questions about specific parts of our code base. This limited scope is due to the model being unable to keep the entire codebase in his “short-term memory” because of a limitation in the context size.

So, AI can’t replace programmers because we humans can know an entire codebase and reason about it, but AI can not. GitHub co-founder Nat Friedman believes this could change sooner rather than later. He’s just invested a ton of money in a startup aiming to build a completely autonomous AI programmer.

Magic.dev is a startup training model with much larger contexts to build an advanced AI programmer that can reason about your entire codebase and the transitive closure of your dependency tree. The whole thing sounds like magic, hence the name.

Building an AI programmer is a challenging task and not cheap at all, for sure. But Nat’s investment of USD 100M in the company is a vote of confidence on the people building this. That makes me think they could make it.

It is interesting to watch projects attempting to replace humans with AI, but it remains uncertain whether AI will be able to replace us fully.

PS: Magic is looking for people who can help with their mission. If this sounds interesting to you, consider joining them.