The job has changed before, it will change again. It may get easier to enter the industry, but the industry will still exist and will still need subject matter experts a decade from now.
I also don’t like English as a language to express requirements, it’s not strict enough and depends too much on an implicit context. Whatever high-level abstraction we end up with it cannot be something that results in the wrong implementation because the agent incorrectly read the tone of the exchange.
That can easily be said of most Product Manager > SWE relationships too though
There are people on hacker news daily arguing this
In otherwords, they are cheaper mid to entry level employees which don’t get sick or have emotions. I think most people would agree with this.
One of the reasons well informed curious people tend to underestimate the value of LLMs despite their flaws is they underestimate the amount of routine work that could be automated but is still done imperfectly by humans. LLMs lower the barrier to entry to halfway decent automation and eliminating those jobs.
Where I’m not sold yet is on the whole idea of bots that go off and do their own thing totally unsupervised (but increasingly, you are having models supervise one another).