People today likely cannot relate, but a big concern back then was identical: If the non-tech users can write their own code/and or code is easier to write, why even learn to be a programmer? What's the point?

It seems absurd now but legitimately it was exactly the same stuff. Like then, programmers will fall into two camps, those that keep up and those that fall behind. The thing with LLMs (and agentic) is that it doesn't change WHAT we do but rather HOW we do it.

So will programmers exist in the early 2000s after RAD? Well turns out, yes, and in expanded numbers. Businesses just expected more from technology, and the personnel gap never really closed. With LLMs the same will likely happen - same number of people, higher expectation.

The limit on how many programmers they'd hire was never "wants." They always wanted more than they could get. The limit was budgets/money. Now more "wants" can be fulfilled (just like post-RAD/web), but the budgets are more or less similar.

PS - Although it should be noted that the economy is not in a good place currently, and we're seeing an unusual employment environment. A lot of which "AI" is blamed on, least of all because companies can save face that way.

I refuse to give my intellect over to the machine just to blindly consume its homogeneous excretions. I will keep doing what I've always done regardless of how well an AI could do it. I don't need to justify doing so, and neither do you, nor does anyone. It's OK to be a human.

Eat, Shit, Sleep: Doing only what is necessary is not much of a life.

Good luck.

If your goal is making small apps, websites, things that aren't too critical performance-wise, I don't think you should learn to code.

But code isn't disappearing. Calculation-heavy processes, large apps, video games, basically things that need a deep understanding of tradeoffs, still require a lot of human inputs.

Will it be always that way, I don't know. But I'd like to think AI won't totally kill the code, in the same way compilers didn't kill assembly dev.

Right now I'm strongly advising people not to care too much about narrow academic or intellectual pursuits because I think those skills will be almost entirely redundant to AI in a few years.

Learning to code today seems absolutely insane to me honestly. If you just want to understand at a high level how code works, then cool spend a week or two on it, but obviously outside of very niche edge cases which you can't build a career around humans won't be reading and writing code for much longer.

I'd even expand on this to say people should broadly avoid tech as a sector to learn anything in at this point. There will be a lot of disruption in the coming years. Hardware and software are going to change to better suite an AI-first world and this means almost any tech skill run a risk of disruption.

That said, I struggle predict past 10 years these days. In some ways we're now just weighing different sized infinities. In a world of AI and robotics perhaps the only good bet to make is that human are of no value anymore. This is the world I am personally preparing for. Any skills you learn today would ideally be in preparation for this.