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.
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.