[jonplackett]

The thing is - is it a self fulfilling prophecy?

We already know junior hiring an are down. And how many people are now excited to learn to code compared to 5years ago?

How many of those excited people are ACTUALLY learning to code and not just learning to prompt?

LLMs/agents will take over (or at least dominate) software dev even if they don’t get any better because humans will just get old and there’ll be no new humans who know how to do it.

[piokoch]

Well, I see LLM coding capabilities as a great enabler for people who have some codeing-like skills or needs, but were not sufficiently skilled to do something more complicated. Think of people who are good at Excel, who use statistical tools like SAS, SPSS, other analytical software. Now they can ask LLM to create a Pandas/SAS lang script and do much more advanced stuff.

People who were in the marketing data analysis (like sentiment analysis) - 5 minutes and they have a code that uses Hugging Face model suited for sentiment analysis, zero-shot classification, etc. No need to pay for expensive online services or expensive NLP software. It's here for free or $20 a month.

Still, it does not mean you will be able to code database engine with LLM, application server, rewrite Django in Rust, etc. So software engineers still will be needed to do ambitious, complicated stuff.

So, I kind of see it backwards, real skills, like knowing algorithms, understanding performance (including hardware stuff like processor caches, etc.) will become needed, as other, simpler jobs that needed only a "coding monkey" will be gone.

We no longer need to dig ditches manually, we have machines for that, but the purpose of the ditches is still planned by man.

[jonplackett]

If you push that ditch analogy though. Yeah we no longer dig ditches manually - but we also then all got overweight and weak because people aren’t doing any physical labour anymore. (Most people anyway)

And diggers absolutely do have a monopoly on digging ditches now.

I don’t see how someone learning to code now will ever be as good at coding as someone who learned before LLMs.

Just like right now no-one is gonna get better at digging ditches than people were before diggers - it just doesn’t make sense for someone to put the time and effort into that.

[daedrdev]

This is quite true. Also, there is no project you can make as a junior to demonstrate your unassisted competence because 10 other people used AI for a similar project