Thank Crom I'm old. But I'm worried for my kids.
Thank Crom I'm old. But I'm worried for my kids.
I don't see it as "replacing programmers" but rather, trying to solve the types of problems that programmers solve, but more cheaply.
I'm not sure your age relative to mine, but I got my start a hair breath after 9-11 in the defense industry. I've experienced the "tectonic" shifts in programming since that time. In each case, Programmers seemed to shift away from the work that was being done more cheaply, to work that require more specialization that was harder to be done.
I see the promise of AI as a threat to my job, but the reality is likely more like what happened with automobiles vs horses. Less horse shoe makers, more car mechanics.
Some day, I may be too tired and too dumb to become a mechanic. But today is not that day.
The same goes for all the AI agents, it will change how we work but will not make programmers obsolete. I'm more worried about 3 million engineering grads per year from India replacing me than CoPilot/CursorAI
Unless work is a thing of the past by then, and we were the last generation of suckers who lived under the reality where 40hrs/week was just the way life is.
Look, technology has always replaced jobs, throughout history (how many of you know professional lamp lighters, elevator doormen, or switchboard operators?) But the thing is, tech has always replaced the jobs that are easiest to automate ... not the "intellectual work".
I would be far more worried about being a real estate agent, food preparer, or heck, even a lawyer (for some specialties at least). I think they're all at more risk than programmers.
LLMs are great for tasks where small mistakes don't matter, and useless for ones where they do. Generating a 10,000-line Rails app where 10 of those lines are wrong is not very useful.