| I have been a software developer for almost thirty years. Every so often, I re-read Fred Brooks's essay "No Silver Bullet" and see if it still applies. My answer is always yes, though I'm amazed at the social, technological, and scientific advances that continue to sweep through the field. My perspective is that every generation of software developer believes that one of these advances is going to end their career. The dream of AI is a machine that can replace human coders. LLMs can reduce the number of human coders required for a project, which is simply a productivity advance. LLMs, if used effectively, might be able to replace an expensive coder with a low-skilled human, but you will still need coders. No software on the market today can replace a coder's job; it can only make the coder more efficient. This is as true today as it was in 1970. The software I write today looks a lot like the software I wrote in 1995. It just does a lot more for the same effort on my part. I can create a complex, highly performant web application with almost no HTML knowledge. Frameworks can abstract all the hard parts of JavaScript. What even is SQL? AI and similar advances only address the "accidental complexity" of software to use Brooks's term. The essential complexity remains a human task. My advice is to learn about the history of software development and understand what you are doing when you make software. It's more than typing Unicode characters into a text editor. As far as moving from web to something else, or incorporating AI into your personal coding practice, I don't think it matters. I have switched programming languages and technologies at least six times in my career. Yeah, it sucks to be in an area that is going away (desktop app development, like MS Word, was the Big Leagues in 1995), but most of your skills will be transferable if or when you have to switch. I believe software development will be a good career for the next 25 years. Of course, indie book cover design was a lucrative side project a few years ago. Now it's a struggle. Nothing is immune to the ravages of capitalism. |