My reasoning starts from the idea that “prompting” is essentially programming in a higher-level language, and it will eventually replace traditional coding. At a certain point, we’ll be stating business requirements, and the algorithm will take care of logic and resource provisioning.
Longer-term, what we now consider tech skills will be replaced with communication skills and business domain knowledge. This will cause an influx of workers from different professions and walks of life. As the field starts encompassing a broader spectrum of work, the barrier for entry will be lowered, and there’ll be more work and more practitioners.
There will still be high-paid jobs, but on average, software development will become a more traditional middle-class profession.
People were saying this exact thing in 1960 about COBOL. The job of programmer was going to go extinct because business users could write their own software.
We've been through a number of iterations of the same pipe dream since then, but it always turns out that the actually hard problem in programming is figuring out the requirements in full detail without handwaving and glossing over anything, and translating them into unambiguous instructions. And "workers from different professions and walks of life" just inevitably suck at that.
Whether this time it really is different will hinge on whether LLMs can really figure out the handwavey parts, or whether those will be exactly where they will always make up shit and be confidently wrong.
No, higher-level programming languages didn’t make developers obsolete, but they’ve been increasingly lowering the barrier for entry into the field. Plenty of business people can write basic SQL queries nowadays, and Python is jokingly referred to as pseudocode.
Even before the recent ML advances, there’s been a shift towards involving a broader, less skilled workforce as the amount of work expands. Hence the people switching careers and getting gainful employment after a few months of even weeks in a coding bootcamp. Don’t think that was as common in the assembly coding days.
So while none of those advances suddenly destroyed the profession, there’s been a gradual change to include a broader spectrum of practicioners. I don’t expect the LLMs to revolutionize the field in two months, but I feel like it’s safe to extrapolate that this is where it’s headed eventually.
Longer-term, what we now consider tech skills will be replaced with communication skills and business domain knowledge. This will cause an influx of workers from different professions and walks of life. As the field starts encompassing a broader spectrum of work, the barrier for entry will be lowered, and there’ll be more work and more practitioners.
There will still be high-paid jobs, but on average, software development will become a more traditional middle-class profession.
This is all speculation on my part, of course.