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.
If it makes you feel better they were selling you a bill of goods from the jump. Programming hasn’t been a stable or good career for ten years and the writing was on the wall twenty years ago. The fix was in when “learn to code” became commonplace.
The prevalence of the h1b program would have made your course of study a dead end in a few years even without llms.
Get an electricians certification and be a lineman. There will always be construction and storms. We’re building new houses so shitty that it’s guaranteed and there isn’t a weather control gun yet (even if there was, no one would use it to protect the people who live in tornado alleys or floodplains). You can’t get into that job in middle age so start young and avoid the temptation to buy a duramax, it’s how 20 year olds making 150k get fucked over. When everyone gives you shit for not having a truck, buy that old 6.0 and have a good mechanic fix it up.
If you really need the validation of typing instructions to a computer, go into embedded systems. Everyone will make fun of you because they’re twice your age but it’s a job. Those controllers aren’t going away because it’s a multi ten to hundred million dollar contract to replace them and it’s a few tens of thousands of couple hundred thousand to update them.
Stay in white collar work if you ever plan to get into it again. There’s a one way check valve on that so the moment you drive a truck you’re never getting hired for any entry level office position again no matter your qualifications. You can move back into office work at the management level though. The move is to make management on a work crew and then move back into an office.
Consider joining the brain drain. There’s lots of foreign companies happy to suck up discounted domestic talent.
Your work isn’t your identity no matter the job.
Being flexable in the coming years will mean having a savings you can fall back on and pumping it back up after you do. Learn how to set a budget and how to stick to it.
If people have to find a new career after they paid all that money for a degree, colleges should need to fully refund CS degrees.
LLM companies should also be taxed on tokens like labor is taxed. They also should have to retrain their models without the stolen, illegal data sources they used to train these models.
These companies just committed the biggest theft in human history and they’re not going to suffer consequences?
They need to suffer consequences.
Neither here nor there in the context of a reply to a self professed cry for help comment.
Of course neither you nor I nor the combination of every person either one of us has ever laid eyes on possesses the ability to perform the actions necessary to achieve what you suggest.
Even if what you said were possible it’s neither forward thinking or just, excepting a regressive, retributive conception of justice.