[WorldMaker]

If you are looking for any sort of hope, even a cursed one: there is the perspective that LLM generated code is legacy code as a service. LLMs were trained on a lot other people's legacy code. A lot of "vibe coding" is for what de facto are "day one legacy code apps". If my career has taught me anything, companies will always sunk cost fallacy throw new money at "fixing"/"expanding" legacy apps or the endless "rewrite cycle" of always trying to rewrite legacy apps but never quite succeeding.

Skills like Legacy Code Anthropology and Reverse Engineering will grow into higher demand. Like the worst legacy apps built by junior developers and non-developers (Access/Excel VBA and VB6 alone had a lot of "low code" legacy by non-developers), LLMs are great at "documenting" What was built, but almost never Why or How, so skills like "Past Developer Mind Reading" and "Code Seances" will also be in high demand.

There will be plenty of work still to do "when" everything is vibe coded. It's going to resemble a lot more the dark matter work a lot of software engineering is in big enterprise: fixing other people's mistakes and trying to figure out the best way you can why they made those mistakes so you can in theory prevent the next mistake.

It's a very dark, cursed hope to believe that the future of software engineering is the darkest parts of its present/past. As a software developer who has spent too large of an amount of my career in the VB6 IDE and who often joked that my "retirement plan" was probably going to be falling into an overly-highly-paid COBOL Consultancy somewhere down the line, I'm more depressed that there will be a lot more legacy work than ever, not that there won't be enough work to go around, and it will be some of the ugliest, most boring, least fun parts of my career, forever, and will have even less "cushiness" to make up for it. (That "dream" of a highly paid COBOL Consultancy disappears when good Legacy Code becomes too common and thus the commodity job. Hard to demand slicker, higher salaries when supply is tainted and full.)

[majormajor]

Along those lines, one of the biggest areas completely left out of this article - and many I've seen like it - is operations, cost, incident response, etc.

Maybe eventually you'll want to trust your corporate credit card to the LLMs too, but that's gonna be one of the last things where humans get taken out of the loop. And once the AI is that general what even is the CEO, salesperson, or entrepreneur's role either?

That "programmer/archeologist" idea of Vernor Vinge's books is likely to grow as the piles of generated code get bigger and the feasibility of tossing increasingly-large piles into a single context window at once might not keep up (or probably won't be the best or most cost-effective).