I feel reasonably confident that most of the people who are making these hyperbolic claims either don't understand programming at a deep enough level to make the claim or are trying to sell you something.
I'll throw my hat behind this horse because, honestly, if I was just learning to code, I would have probably quit by now due to the frequency of these types of comments. LLMs have certainly improved at an impressive rate, and they're fairly decent at producing 'Lego' blocks. However, when it comes to block building—the real meat and potatoes of programming—they're, at best, bad butchers. Building functional systems is hard, and it's simply something LLMs can't do now or perhaps ever. Or I just don't know how to prompt. 50/50.
FWIW, very few people will actually care about this statement unless you state your name, work you've done, etc. A lot of users here don't pay heed to anonymous appeals to authority.
and who would actually verify the output of llm works as expected? Unit tests? Who would verify unit tests are testing what needs to be tested instead of just a branch/output coverage? I've used these tools personally and I've used gh copilot at company I work in and at no point in time I was under impression llm's can do all of my work. Each step needs verification if it actually gives what you need, some steps do need good description by someone who knows what the system is doing to perform the changes where these are needed. Continuous extension of features without good design patterns in place, usually checked by devs, can also create a lot of problems. So what makes you think in one year swe will be considered a dying field? What I see is the need for better devs that can see beyond boilerplate that can be empowered by llm's, but it doesn't mean a dying field, it means rising the standards to break into the field.
Yeah good idea to put everyone out of their job and give it to 2 companies. Then what happens when those companies decide to rise prices by x1000 (twitter api ?). Or what happens when your system has a bug and does not work and the AI says it’s all good ? Who will introspect your code to find what’s wrong ?
Where will all the power and computers come from that will replace the tens of millions of software developers?