They'll be the ones begging and cajoling LLMs to write the code.
Notice that even these days, senior devs aren't supposed to code much - they're supposed to train up junior devs, up to the point said juniors become competent, at which point the juniors join the rank of seniors and begin to teach fresh junior hires.
I.e. increasingly, juniors are the only people actually coding anything, and LLMs will only reinforce this trend.
> they're supposed to train up junior devs, up to the point said juniors become competent, at which point the juniors join the rank of seniors and begin to teach fresh junior hires.
Some of the shittiest code comes out of developers with this level of experience, but they're senior now and teach fresh junior hires?
Assuming it actually happens, how different is it from a ton of other things? Hpw many rote sysadmin or paralegal tasks of 20 years ago still need basically a warm body to do them?
I doubt anyone has a clear enough crystal ball to give confident, actionable advice. Obviously AI, among many other things, erodes the value of most easy to acquire knowledge skills at the low end. But that kind of thing is constantly being eroded all the time and while uplevel/upskill is generally good advise, it's hardly unique to AI. Nor is there evidence yet that computer programming/software engineering is going to be uniquely impacted by these new technologies.
Content farms and other low-end writing almost certainly will be impacted significantly. But that was mostly not a good place to be anyway. Writing generally isn't a good bet unless it's effectively in support of something else that pays the bills or you get very lucky.
reasonable statement. I think of programming as a discipline with three core skills, those being choosing what problem to solve, writing a solution, and debugging the solution. I suppose it's the writing that's gotten a lot easier with the addition of GPT, debugging has gotten slightly easier, and choosing what to work on has gotten a lot more competition.
From that framework, debugging is the new code monkeying... anyone have thoughts on that analysis?
Notice that even these days, senior devs aren't supposed to code much - they're supposed to train up junior devs, up to the point said juniors become competent, at which point the juniors join the rank of seniors and begin to teach fresh junior hires.
I.e. increasingly, juniors are the only people actually coding anything, and LLMs will only reinforce this trend.