People with the attitude that real programmers are producing the high level product are going to get eaten slowly, from below, in the most embarrassing way possible.
Embarrassing because they'll actually be right. LLMs aren't making the high quality products, it's true.
But the low quality CRUD websites (think restaurant menus) will get swallowed by LLMs. You no longer need a guy to code up a model, run a migration, and throw it on AWS. You also don't need a guy to make the art.
Advances in LLMs will feed on the money made from sweeping up all these crap jobs, which will legitimately vanish. That guy who can barely glue together a couple of pages, he is indeed finished.
But the money will make better LLMs. They will swallow up the field from below.
just like you don't need webmasters, if you remember that term. IF you are just writing CRUD apps, then yeah - you're screwed.
If you're a junior, or want to get into the field? same, you're totally screwed.
LLMs are great at soft tasks, or producing code that has been written thousand of times - boilerplate, CRUD stuff, straightforward scripts - but the usual problems aren't limited by typing speed, nor amount of boilerplate but by thinking and evaluating solutions and tradeoffs from business perspective.
Also I'll be brutally honest - by the time the LLMs catch up to my generation's capabilities, we'll be already retired, and that's where the real crisis will start.
No juniors, no capable people, most seniors and principal engineers are retired - and quite probably LLMs won't be able to fully replace them.
To be fair those were eaten long ago by Wordpress and site builders.
A modern CRUD website (any software can be reduced to CRUD for that matter) is not trivially implemented and far beyond what current LLM can output. I think they will hit a wall before they will ever be able to do that. Also, configuration and infrastructure management is a large part of such a project and far out of scope as well.
People build some useful tools for LLM to enable them to do anything besides outputting text and images. But it is quite laborious to really empower them to do anything still.
LLM can indeed empower technical people. For example those working in automation can generate little Python or JavaScript scripts to push bits around, provided the endpoints have well known interfaces. That is indeed helpful, but the code still always needs manual review.
Work for amateur web developers will likely change, but they certainly won't be out of work anytime soon. Although the most important factor is that most websites aren't really amateur land anymore, LLM or not.
"That guy who can barely glue together a couple of pages" was never going to provide much value as a developer, the lunches you describe were already eaten: LLMs are just the latest branding for selling solutions to those "crap jobs".
I don't disagree btw. Stuff that is very easy to automate will absolutely be swallowed by LLMs or any other tool that's the iteration #13718 of people trying to automate boring stuff, or stuff they don't want to pay full programmer wages for. That much I am very much convinced of as well.
But there are many other, rather nebulous shall we call them, claims, that I take issue with. Like "programming is soon going to be dead". I mean OK, they might believe it, but arguing it on HN is just funny.