[voxleone]

I've been coding since I was about 15 and still love it. These days I mostly build tailored applications for small and medium companies, often alone and sometimes with small ad-hoc teams. I also do the sales myself, in person. For me, not using LLMs would mean giving up a lot of productivity. But the way I use them is very structured. Work on an application starts with requirements appraisal: identifying actors, defining use cases, and understanding the business constraints. Then I design the objects and flows. When possible, I formalize the system with fairly strict axioms and constraints.

Only after that do LLMs come in, mostly to help with the mechanical parts of implementation. In my experience it's still humans all the way down. The thinking, modeling, and responsibility for the system are human. The LLM just helps move the implementation faster.

I also suspect the segment I work in will be among the last affected by LLM-driven job displacement. My clients are small to medium companies that need tailored internal systems. They're not going to suddenly start vibe-coding their own software. What they actually need is someone to understand the business, define the model, and take responsibility for the system. LLMs help with the implementation, but that part was never the hard part of the job.

[jantb]

I’m doing the same as you and even though I was producing coding a lot of the actual products I estimated the coding part just to be about 20% of the work. The rest is figuring out what and how to build stuff and what stakeholders really need, and solving production issues in live event driven systems. Agentic coding is just faster at the 20% part, and I can always sit down and code the really hard stuff if I want to or feel I need to if the LLM gets stuck. If it produces something not understandable I either learn from it until I understand it og makes it do a pattern I know instead. So all in all, not so worried.