If we're the luddite artisans, LLMs seem to represent the knitting frames which replaced their higher quality work with vastly cheaper, far crappier merchandise. There is a historical rhyme here.
There's a lot of code out there written for people who are far more concerned with cost and speed than quality - analogous to the "fast fashion" consumer segment.
Ive worked on all sorts of code bases filled to the brim with bugs which end users just worked around or ignored or didnt even encounter. Pre-product market fit startups, boring crappy CRUD for routine admin, etc.
It was horrible shit for end users and developers (me) but demand is very high. I expect demand from this segment will increase as LLMs drive the cost of supply to nearly zero.
I wouldnt be surprised if high end software devs (e.g. >1 million hit/day webapps where quality is critical) barely do anything different while the demand for devs at the low end of the market craters.
> I wouldnt be surprised if high end software devs (e.g. >1 million hit/day webapps where quality is critical) barely do anything different while the demand for devs at the low end of the market craters.
Over the last few decades the prevalance of more and more frameworks to handle more and more of what used to be boilerplate that everyone had to do for GUI apps has not significantly impacted the bottom end of the job market.
It's only, if anything, caused even higher demand for "just one more feature".
When's the last time you worked on a product in that space where the users or product managers didn't have any pending feature requests? Didn't add new ideas to the backlog faster than the team could implement?
Someone's gonna have to know just enough to make sure the LLM is producing shit that passes the (low) bar of adequateness. But that job will probably be even further away from the CS-knowing, performance-critical, correctness-matters roles than it is today. It's already a big gap, I just don't see the shit-shoveler job going away. The corporate world loves its shit shoveling.
People stress about good system design because of maintainability. No one cares about binary code because that's just the end result. What matters is the code that generates it, as that’s what needs to be maintained.
We have not yet reached a point where LLM generated code can also be maintained by LLMs and the tooling is not there. Once that happens, your argument will hold more weight. But for now, it doesn’t. Injecting unreadable, likely bug-ridden code into your application increases technical debt tenfold.