Every time I see these articles I get more and more worried about my employability to be frank... with no backup plan and way too much time poured into learning software engineering. It's not looking good gang.
That sounds a lot like programming to me!
I expect our work will change: we'll be able to spend more time thinking about what we are building and less time typing code on our keyboards. But if anything, we're going to become more valuable - because we'll be able to get a whole lot more done.
It depends if the 'skill' of programming/creating shifts more to the LLMs vs programmers. If so market capitalism will see programming commodified.
If not, and LLMs just add leverage to what programmers/creatives do, it'll move more towards a sports/entertainment model (winner takes all, or most), with probably far fewer professional participants.
1. Define problem
2. Generate specifications <-
3. Write the code
Knowing how to do step 3 will get less and less important everyday.
EDIT: for example, Character.ai as an example of character prompting. You can prime an LLM with a prompt so that it asks you certain types of questions.
While most developers don't hold interface designers in particularly high regard, honestly ask average people what they think of most developer-made interfaces and you'll find out the skill is a lot trickier than it seems. Most developers only think they know what developers do, but they're like many corporate workers see everyone from the head network architect to the community college desktop support intern as "computer people who can fix your email." Most think interface designers primarily work on aesthetics, but most probably aren't even invited to meetings about branding/visual aesthetic/etc...) Going further, many of those designers are savvy enough to write some basic code and likely bodge something into place, especially if they're using some kind of purpose-built interface that can handle things like data model consistency between builds.
It's a very unpopular opinion around here, but I think designers using the next generation of no-code tools will eat front-end and simple app developers' lunches and I think it will happen really soon. I'll bet teams at Wix, Webflow and other no-code authoring tools are working like mad to develop these tools right now, and I'll bet that's a hair's breadth from automatically generating electron apps from whatever users make there. If your specialty is code, and there are people with whole other useful skillsets that could passably approximate that capability with a few occasional hours from a contractor, the developer isn't going to be the one that still has a job.
While the demand for developers is still large, it's not infinite, and I look askance at assumptions that there won't be a really painful 'adjustment' for a lot of working professionals.
a: These people are very young and don't understand what it takes to invest 3, 4, or 5 decades in a career and/or despite their assumptions about their life experiences, have never actually experienced significant hardship.
b: They're neurologically or emotionally incapable of empathy or lack a usable theory of mind.
or
c: They've read too much inspirational linkedin hustle porn about people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps (which is actually supposed to be a joke-- it's obviously impossible to pull youself up by your own bootstraps, but for some reason people repeat it without considering its true meaning) and think if they are tough and ruthless enough that they'll be one of the ones on top. Which is kind of sad.
Even in most lucky case, pivoting your career into an entirely different category means reverting to entry-level pay, while your age, health and obligations remain the same. Imagine just the paycut alone happening to you, out of a sudden. And that's the best case for what people displaced by AI will experience.
And, of course-- all of the "unpleasant" side effects of massive innovation would be totally avoidable if we didn't treat people as disposable labor units worth nothing more than their market value.
Why do you think that?
People used to think that making paintings and poems would be one of the most difficult things for AI, and look how that turned out.
I'm sure Wix et al are indeed working on that. Looking at their website, they've been at it for 17 years and have a whole bunch of high-level things already available — meaning "blog" and "eCommerce" and "scheduling", not merely "fancy checkbox" or "date widget" — which will cover the needs of a lot of small businesses who neither want nor could afford a single full-time web dev for even just 3 months.
Nevertheless, I disagree with your core claim: I learned how HTML worked partly by reading the output of Dreamweaver[0], followed by teens working with REALbasic (now Xojo) and then VisualBasic. I also spent most of the last decade using Interface Builder in Xcode (with 1.5 years of "why did you do this in C++?" and 1.5 years of "why won't Xcode render this SwiftUI like it's supposed to?").
I don't understand why the visual editors aren't more popular in our profession — they seem like they should be perfect; SwiftUI and React shouldn't need to even exist — and it's that gap between how I think the world ought to work and how I observe it actually working that contains the real problem that means so many of the jobs we do, aren't with the no-code tools we already had 25 years ago.
(Of course, one possibility is that Upton Sinclair quote: “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”, and perhaps we're all just in a bubble of belief that can collapse at any time…)
[0] I think. Something like that anyway, free demo on a Mac[Format|World|User] magazine cover CD.
I mean that there are (and have been for decades) tools which designers can use directly, that should mean that nobody has to code any UI.
That would be lovely, but not how efficiency works in a capitalistic society. We can produce cars much faster in a factory then we could in the past due to various factors including automation. This doesn't mean the workers get to take their time and a do a better job. Instead it means they are expected to have a higher volume.
This is what I worry about with the rise of LLM programming (especially as someone who is less than impressed with the actual output I've seen). It's not that I as a software engineer will be replaced by someone using GPT, but rather it's I'll be replaced by another software engineer who doesn't care, using GPT to produce 3x as much "software" at half the quality because the only metric that some will look at is volume.
Jokes aside, I think you kind of need to know how to problem solve in code to even know in which direction to go.
If I tell it, create a Facebook - the limit will kick in. But most people do not konw how to destructure Facebook in terms of functionality and what components are.