Massive job cuts, bad job market, AI tools everywhere, probable bubble, it seems naive to be optimistic at this juncture.
LLMs may be accelerating the process, but definitely not the cause.
If you want a career in technology, a durable one, you learn to adapt. Your primary skill is NOT to master a given technology, it is the ability to master a given technology. This is a university that has no graduation!
If you're a great programmer, can you can stop using Angular and master React? Yes. Can you stop telling the computer what to do, and master formal proof assistants? Maybe. Can you stop using the computer except as a tool and go master agricultural technology? Probably not. (Which is not to say you can't be a good programmer at an agritech company)
Let’s talk about the industries the computer killed: travel agents, musician, the entire film development industry, local newspapers built on classified ads, the encyclopedia industry, phone operators, projectionists, physical media industries, and a few dozen other random industries.
We aren’t special because we are coders. Creativity and engineering thoughtfulness will still exist even with LLMs, it will just take a different form.
This is the fundamental problem with how so many people think about LLMs. By the time you get to Principal, you've usually developed a range of skills where actual coding represents like 10% of what you need to do to get your job done.
People very often underestimate the sheer amount of "soft" skills required to perform well at Staff+ levels that would require true AGI to automate.
I remember a cinema theater projectionist telling me exactly that while I was wiring a software controlling numeric projector, replacing the 35mm ones.
[citation needed]
It has just merely moved from "almost, but not entirely useless" to "sometimes useful". The models themselves may perhaps be capable already, but they will need much better tooling than what's available today to get more useful that that, and since it's AI enthusiasts who will happily let LLMs code them that work on these tools it will still take a while to get there :)
[citation needed]
:P
This thing has changed the way I work. I barely touch my editor to actually edit anymore, because speaking into the chat field what changes I want it to make is more efficient
The tooling does need to get better, yes, but anecdotally, I do a fundamentally different job (more thinking, less typing, less sifting through docs, less wiring up) than 3 months ago
So much of my career was spent on especially rummaging in docs and googling and wiring things up. I believe that's the same for most of us
If we truly value human creativity, then things that decrease the rote mechanical aspects of the job are enablers, not impediments.
Society can interpret sociopathy as damage and route around it, if we do the work to make it happen. It will not happen by itself without effort.