I have a job at a place I love and get more people in my direct network and extended contacting me about work than ever before in my 20 year career.
And finally I keep myself sharp by always making sure I challenge myself creatively. I’m not afraid to delve into areas to understand them that might look “solved” to others. For example I have a CPU-only custom 2D pixel blitter engine I wrote to make 2D games in styles practically impossible with modern GPU-based texture rendering engines, and I recently did 3D in it from scratch as well.
All the while re-evaluating all my assumptions and that of others.
If there’s ever a day where there’s an AI that can do these things, then I’ll gladly retire. But I think that’s generations away at best.
Honestly this fear that there will soon be no need for human programmers stems from people who either themselves don’t understand how LLM’s work, or from people who do that have a business interest convincing others that it’s more than it is as a technology. I say that with confidence.
U.S. (and German) automakers were absolutely sure that the Japanese would never be able to touch them. Then Koreans. Now Chinese. Now there are tariffs and more coming to save jobs.
Betting against AI (or increasing automation, really) is a bet against not against robots, but against human ingenuity. Humans are the ones making progress, and we can work with toothpicks as levers. LLM's are our current building blocks, and people are doing crazy things with them.
I've got almost 30 years experience but I'm a bit rusty in e.g. web. But I've used LLM's to build maybe 10 apps that I had no business building, from one-off kids games to learn math, to building a soccer team generator that uses Google's OR tools to optimise across various axes, to spinning up four different test apps with Replit's agent to try multiple approaches to a task I'm working on. All the while skilling up in React and friends.
I don't really have time for those side-quests but LLM's make them possible. Easy, even. The amount of time and energy I'd need pre-LLM's to do this makes this a million miles away from "a waste of time".
And even if LLM's get no better, we're good at finding the parts that work well and using that as leverage. I'm using it to build and check datasets, because it's really good at extraction. I can throw a human in the loop, but in a startup setting this is 80/20 and that's enough. When I need enterprise level code, I brainstorm 10 approaches with it and then take the reins. How is this not valuable?
LLMs are good for playing with stuff, yes, and that has been implied by your parent commenter as well I think. But when you have to scale the work, then the code has to be easy to read, easy to extend, easy to test, have extensive test coverage, have proper dependency injection / be easy to mock the 3rd party dependencies, be easy to configure so it can be deployed in every cloud provider (i.e. by using env vars and config files for modifying its behavior)... and even more important traits.
LLMs don't write code like that. Many people have tried with many prompts. It's mostly good for just generating stuff once and maybe do little modifications while convincingly arguing the code has no bugs (and it has).
You seem to confuse one-off projects that have zero to little need for maintenance for actual commercial programming, perhaps?
Your analogy with the automakers seems puzzlingly irrelevant to the discussion at hand, and very far from transferable to it. Also I am 100% convinced nobody is going to protect the programmers; business people trying to replace one guy like myself with 3 Indians has been a reality for 10 years at this point, and amusingly they keep failing and never learning their lesson. /off-topic
Like your parent commenter, if LLMs get on my level, I'd be _happy_ to retire. I don't have a super vested interest in commercial programming, in fact I became as good at it in the last several years because I started hating it and wanted to get all my tasks done with minimal time expended; so I am quite confident in my assessment that LLMs are barely at the level of a diligent but not very good junior dev at the moment, and have been for the last at least 6 months.
Your take is rather romantic.
Truly hit the nail on the head there. We HAD no business with these side-quests, but now? They're all ripe for the taking, really.
LLM pair programming is unbelievably fun, satisfying, and productive. Why type out the code when you can instead watch it being typed while thinking of and typing out/speaking the next thing you want.
For those who enjoy typing, you could try to get a job dictating letters for lawyers, but something tells me that’s on the way out too.
Why are half the replies like this?
Yea i built bunch of apps when RoR blog demo came out like 2 decades ago. So what?