There are a lot of senior developers who discuss how they use LLMs and why, for example, and it exposes that even with a decade or so of experience, people can have extremely thin and weak understandings of what they're doing, and why. That isn't to cast shade at all, and I've been (and will be) the experienced yet clueless person at times. I could be right now.

A reductive description is that it's turning a lot of people in expert beginners, and the coworker they collaborate most now has no way of compensating for it. LLMs are useful and powerful tools, but they can't make up for these kinds of deficiencies yet. It doesn't seem like they will very soon, either. As they get better at generating code, they seem to simultaneously widen gaps in their ability to identify or anticipate bugs or poorly fit solutions.

I can't imagine the messes people are creating with LLMs when they have no experience at all, though. They might feel empowered (and to a degree they certainly are) but when it comes to complex, large, mission-critical, and/or distributed systems... These tools are nowhere near where they need to be.

Otherwise, I've also found that important software can now become more ambitious. We seem to model the career risk developers face based on the software of today, but what I'm seeing is that I'm able to build and maintain more ambitious projects than ever. I'll be pushing the limits of what's possible for myself for a while yet, and I suspect it will continue to produce value for the people I work with. I could have these tools do the work I used to do (or help me do it faster) and leave it at that, but the reality is that I don't just stop there. I keep going, I continue refining, I discover more ways to make it more valuable, I iterate faster and maintain a tighter feedback loop with the people who use the things I create.

So, why would I be eliminated from that process? Do people really believe that my position in that loop will be eliminated by AI? This seems to disregard a myriad of qualities that allow software developers to be effective and valuable team members.

If that happens, frankly, I believe far more roles than software development would be eliminated at that point. The implications would go far beyond software.

It's not jealousy though. It's seeing an operational bottleneck as inefficiency. If you know what you want and you have to go through someone else to get it, that's frustrating, so you look for ways around it. AI is a way around software engineers.

The key to remaining usefully employed is not to be the bottleneck. If it's faster for someone to get to a solution with a software engineer than without a software engineer then you will remain employed. This is largely irrespective of cost - generally speaking spending money on a salaries to go faster is always better so long as you're actually going faster.

In the early 00s, nobody even knew what the hell we were doing. Most people asked things like “do you do IT?” nobody really got it.

The idea of photoshopping a mockup, or the idea that Wordpress is how you build the website for their business and why they now need “HTML5”, the cloud and advent of IaaS/PaaS, I digress:

All the esoteric aspects of the work and knowledge have been curricularized.

There are a million Joe React Developers now, everybody can use Figma, anyone can manage a sprint, and with AI forget it - anyone can play now.

Buuut not so fast you say, and yeah I agree with you!

And yet, I know that you know that they know that we know that they know. You know?

Narcissism

This feels like cope here.

They want to get rid of SWE because they are highly paid (in the US especially) and they want them for cheap (e.g. Bangalore, London)

AI just makes it a no brainer.

Also I don't think there is anything wrong with everyone being a software engineer, more accessibility to the SWE field for all is great.

Current SWE's will just need to now adapt quicker to remain relevant, and those that can't will just then leave the field.

Perhaps those that don't adapt were probably not good engineers anyway.