[abcde666777]

> People fear that programming is dead.

> People stop learning programming.

> Programmers become scarce.

> Programmers become valuable again.

Maybe it's wishful thinking but I'm not going to be surprised if it plays out like this. In some sense the reverse happened over the last couple of decades - everyone and their mother got into IT and the industry became saturated.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

It's hard to say if there's anything new under the Sun...

There were always unqualified people coming out of college, but the amount of people in interviews that can literally do nothing these days seems higher than before.

There was always some cohort of people that somehow managed to graduate from college with a CS degree, and seemingly not learning anything, or at least not learn how to even write basic code (independently).

It seems like AI is not reducing that percentage - possibly increasing it.

Anecdata, take it with a grain of salt.

[fakedang]

> It seems like AI is not reducing that percentage - possibly increasing it.

AI is definitely increasing it. I barely type out any code now, and simply sit back and review what Claude dumps out. Even if it's a minor UI change, I just request the LLM and it executes the change for me. Thankfully I don't write code for my day-job anymore and mostly just sit in my office and pontificate :). I know my code skills and inclination to write code have atrophied to an extent, thanks to AI. Currently what I'm able to do with AI far surpasses the capabilities of what I was able to do without relying on AI.

Now if my employees were relying on LLMs to do their coding for them, I would be very disappointed. And I think that that limited space in algorithmic and HFT trading is where exceptionally talented programmers will find room in, leaving the others to dry out and wither.

Perhaps the best example of frogs in a boiling pot are all these folks in frontier AI companies themselves who are building the blocks for the very things that are going to replace them, if not already. Maybe they'll make off like bandits before their work gets adversely affected, or maybe not.

[Capricorn2481]

> I barely type out any code now, and simply sit back and review what Claude dumps out

> Now if my employees were relying on LLMs to do their coding for them, I would be very disappointed

Why in the world would you be disappointed in your employees doing exactly what you do?

[variadix]

Maybe, another possibility is the frontier providers change their pricing terms to try to capture more of the value once a sufficient number of people’s skills have atrophied. For example: 20% of the revenue of all products built with $AI_SERVICE. For someone several years out of practice they may have no other option.

[khuey]

I think there's a decent chance that the open weight models remain close enough to the frontier labs that they won't be able to do things like this.

[nemo44x]

Essentially what happened after .com bust. For years CS departments had to sell themselves and convince people there was a future in computers.

Not that AI is the same as Websites all going broke. But no one can see the future and it’s unlikely that deep technical knowledge will be obsolete.

[ares623]

Software became ubiquitous because a huge majority of the population found utility and enjoyment from what software had to offer. Very quickly that number in the population is dwindling. (Good) software can only thrive in an environment where other sectors are also thriving. Who needs 99.999% uptime when your family is starving and freezing.

[noelsusman]

Assuming the AI maximalist digital god bros are wrong, there will always be some demand for programmers, the question is how much. It's not hard to see a future where programming goes the way of farming where the demand for small-scale farming still exists but at a tiny fraction of what it once was.

[killingtime74]

I think this happened with airline pilots and they're experiencing a boom now