Writing code isn’t the bottleneck though. What LLMs do is knock out the floor because you used to need a pretty significant baseline knowledge of a programming language to do anything. Now you don’t need that because you can just spray and pray prompts with no programming knowledge. This actually works to a point since most business code is actually repetitive CRUD. The problem comes with the fact that implicit expectations that the higher level system run with a certain uptime, level of quality, and conform to any number of common sense assumptions that no one but a good programmer was thinking about until someone uses the system and says “why does it do this completely wrong thing”. There are huge classes of these types of problems that an LLM will not be capable of resolving, and if you’ve been blasting ahead with mountains of LLM slop code even the best human programmers might not be able to save you. In other words I think LLMs will make it easy to paint yourself into a corner if you gut the technical core of your team.
But there’s no hard ceiling above the people on the bottom. It’s not a stratification — it’s a spectrum. The lower-end developers replaced easily by LLMs aren’t going to just give up and become task rabbits: they’re going to update their skills trying to qualify for the (probably temporarily) less vulnerable jobs above them. They might never be good enough to solve the really hard problems, they’ll put pressure on those just above them… which will echo up the entire industry. When everyone— regardless of the applicability of LLMs to their workflow— is suddenly facing competition from the developers just below them because of this upward pressure, the market gets a whole lot shittier. Damn near everybody I’ve spoken to thinks they’re the special one that surely can’t be heavily affected by LLMs because their job is uniquely difficult/quality-focused/etc. Even for the smallish percentage of people for whom that’s true, the value of their skill set on a whole is still going to take a huge hit.
What seems far more likely to me is that computer scientists will be doing math research and wrangling LLMS, a vanishingly small number of dedicated software engineers work on most practical textual coding tasks with engineering methodologies, and low or no code tooling with the aid of LLMs gets good enough to make custom software something made by mostly less-technical people with domain knowledge, like spreadsheet scripting.
A lot of people in the LLM booster crowd think LLMs will replace specialists with generalists. I think that’s utterly ridiculous. LLMs easily have the shallow/broad knowledge generalists require, but struggle with the accuracy and trustworthiness for specialized work. They are much more likely to replace the generalists currently supporting people with domain-specific expertise too deep to trust to LLMs. The problem here is that most developers aren’t really specialists. They work across the spectrum of disciplines and domains but know how to use a very complex toolkit. The more accessible those tools are to other people, the more the skill dissolves into the expected professional skill set.
