Yesterday, a student asked me to help him with a program he was writing in his own time. It was an impressive project, but it wasn’t working properly.

I quickly spotted what the problem was, but finding exactly where the error lay in the code was a lot more difficult. This is typical in this sort of beginner project: there will be several hundred lines of badly laid out code as the student is still learning their craft.

After about half an hour I went to get a cup off coffee while I gave my mind a chance to reset. When I came back, the student said he’d found the problem. I congratulated him and asked him how he’d found it. He told me, and that’s when I realised I was now obsolete.

The student hadn’t, in fact, found the error himself. Rather he’d put the code into AI and got that to spot the mistake.

AI had just rendered me redundant. If I had a particular skill as a teacher of coding, it was in knowing what mistakes a student would typically make, the sort of mistakes that aren’t obvious to an experienced coder. A big part of teaching is knowing the misconceptions that students are going to have, and I’ve been teaching programming for nearly 30 years. I like to think few others have the same facility as I do for spotting those sort of mistakes.

Well, no more.

A lot of writers have posted about having their work ripped off by LLMs, me included. This is annoying, I know, and I’m as irritated as everyone else by this. Maybe not as irritated by those editors who are having to wade through a slew of AI generated stories, but still annoyed.

But annoyed as I am, I’ve yet to see a decent book created by AI. I like to think I still have some worth as writer.

But as a teacher, and not just a glorified childminder there’s now one less reason to pay my wages. It’s a sobering thought.

My first novels were about a benevolent AI. I hope this is the future I wrote about.