You don't need code to be a programmer. But you do need expertise | John Naughton
Mar 15, 2025
AI is so good at writing software that one father asked it to organise his kids’ school lunches. But that doesn’t mean it’s taking overWay back in 2023, Andrej Karpathy, an eminent AI guru, made waves with a striking claim that “the hottest new programming language is English”. This was be
cause the advent of large language models (LLMs) meant that from now on humans would not have to learn arcane programming languages in order to tell computers what to do. Henceforth, they could speak to machines like the Duke of Devonshire spoke to his gardener, and the machines would do their bidding.Ever since LLMs emerged, programmers have been early adopters, using them as unpaid assistants (or “co-pilots”) and finding them useful up to a point – but always with the proviso that, like interns, they make mistakes, and you need to have real programming expertise to spot those. Continue reading... ...read more read less