Why coders love the AI that could put them out of a job

By Padraig Belton
Technology of Business reporter

"When you start coding, it makes you feel smart in itself like you're in the Matrix [film]," says Janine Luk, a 26 year-old software engineer who works in London.

Born in Hong Kong, she started her career in yacht marketing in the south of France but found it "a bit repetitive and superficial".

So, she started teaching herself to code after work, followed by a 15-week coding boot camp.

On the boot camp's last day, she applied for a job at a cyber-security software company, Avast.

And started there a week later.

"Two and a half years later, I really think it's the best decision I ever made," she reflects.

When she started at the company, she was the first woman developer working on her team. She now spends her spare time encouraging other women, people of colour, and LGBT people to try coding.

For programmers like her, she says the most interesting shift recently has been the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) tools which can bite off increasingly big chunks of programming all by themselves.

In June, GitHub, a San Francisco-based code-hosting platform with 56 million users, revealed a new AI tool called Copilot.

You start typing a few characters of code, and the AI suggests how to finish it.