Can AI replace human programmers?

 In the year 2025, there is no clear answer available to this question. Maybe its possible to replace human programmers with an AI, or maybe not. What we can say for sure is, that for simpler tasks AI is more powerful than a human.

These simpler tasks are the chess game, the Tetris videogame and also the ability to answer programming related questions. The first chess AI which was superior over a human grandmaster was Deep blue from 1997. Playing Tetris on a grandmaster level was also demonstrated. What is missing is the proof for more advanced tasks. Despite the existence of Large language models, most existing software was written by human programmers. There are some tools available like git and programmer friendly IDE which claim to improve the efficiency but coding remains a human task. What current AI systems are able to do is to solve minor tasks within a programming project, for example to program a hello world app in python or answer a detail programming question.

The task of creating an entire application which consists of thousands lines of code is a demanding problem. Some progress was made into this direction but the outcome remains unclear. What we can say for sure is, that in the future the importance of Large language models for programming tasks will growth.

A possible benchmark to judge about an AI is its ability to contribute to existing software projects. The AI needs to create a commit which gets accepted within a project as a sense making contribution. If an AI is able to do so mulitiple times for different projects this would be a proof, that the AI can replace human programmers.

From a technical perspective, a commit is changeset in an existing project. It can be a bugfix or an additional feature. At least for simpler projects like a prime number generator or a tgictactoe videogame, current LLMs are able to do so out of the box with current technology. The open question is, if they are able to do so for more advanced projects like larger video game or en entire operating system.

Real world software projects consists of 10000 and more lines of code. In addition there is longer documentation and discussion available in a forum which needs to understood before a commit can be created. Even for an AI from the year 2025, it would a complex task.