Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I’ll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don’t believe me.
Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of “vibe-coding”, but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can’t spot any although we are looking intently.
And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What’s even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would’ve taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.
I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn’t a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It’s a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don’t know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.
And it all changed so fast. I don’t think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.
LLMs have made writing code more efficient which used to be the bottleneck but now reviews, requirements engineering, system analysis, architecture and all the other parts become the bottleneck.
This ties also into Jevon’s paradox which says that making a resource such as coal more efficient increases consumption. I think this very much applies to software also, there are tons of projects such as creating custom solutions for a client that have become a lot cheaper and will lead to a lot more software being written. If Jevon’s paradox holds then we will see increased demand for developers in the future.
The job is changing but there’s a very strong possibility of demand for developers to increase. Imagine someone vibe coding their way to a usable product, that guy will need to hire someone. Businesses that used to be in shopify or WordPress get an internal system for workflows bolted on or get a custom website developed.
I myself learned Vim, edited code super fast, wrote tools and abstractions that actually helped and could implement features pretty fast and that skill I honed for 10 years is just not valuable anymore. The other skills such as reading code fast and debugging has become way more valuable though.
It could very much be that now is a great time to learn programming since people are not signing up and even though right now supply is higher than demand the demand could increase substantially as more software gets written. One thing is for sure though, our profession is going to write more code and that code will need maintenance and modification.
What are you on? Writting code was never thr bottleneck
I think, we watched same video by Hank Green
However the more developers there are, the more competition for the same job so the less pay. In our engineering firm we all develop little apps in Python. We only have one real developer for software and another for firmware, but everything in the company that needs coding is done by other engineers who just happen to use python regularly or use ai.
Exactly, the engineers are now creating software that they might not fully understand. That’s just more software going around at some point one of those engineers might say “hey, why is this not reading my csv”. One time I helped a guy with his PowerBI stuff api auth and turned out he was missing a character in his key. LLM is not likely to catch that. I recently was talking with a person vibe coding an app and she said “yeah every time I fix one thing another thing breaks”. These are all real issues that need developers to fix.
Then there’s also these engineers maybe want to share their work with people afraid of a CLI. Maybe they’ll have to get you to do that so they can focus on the actual engineering instead of creating an app.
The competition right now is tough for juniors and entry level which are likely to give up on the career while all this new software is being created. I could be completely wrong but it seems to me that there will be a shortage of developers in a couple of years time. Then when VC money runs out for AI companies the economics also shift in favor of having more devs.
Again, this is all speculation, I have no crystal ball but to me it looks like more devs will be needed.