My bet is that promptgrammers will be so common they'll become standard full-stack engineers, and the few experienced programmers that still know software engineering from the ground up will become expensive gurus sought for critical tasks.

The elite gurus will get paid handsomely, while promptgrammers will be paid less since they've become a less-skilled commodity, and the company has to pay for the expensive tokens they'll avidly consume.

I've seen someone jump from Wordpress to deploying internet-facing APIs because 'they have PHP experience', and the holes in their knowledge were filled blindly by an LLM. I have also argued with a seasoned developer about how their code didn't need linting because LLMs 'already follow best practices'.

The future doesn't look bright when LLMs allow future generations to feign required knowledge.

It remains to be seen. Most of the effort of a normal decent software engineer, up until now, is not in "writing code" but in "writing code that is correct, understandable and maintainable going forward". We are now in a phase of rapidly losing our ability to understand programs. On this trajectory, programs will soon become as impenetrable as the LLMs themselves. We'll start finding out whether that matters or not soon.

Ultimately it will probably come down to liability, though. If someone receives the wrong dose of a drug due to a software error, whose fault is it? If you want it to be my fault, then I'll want to understand the software. Loads of people would take on the liability without fully understanding it, though. The future doesn't look good, but we'll just have to wait and see.

What of the workhorse in the face of mechanical workmen? Time for a mechanical pension!

Basically, an unemployed plumber.