But it is sad if good programmers should loose sight of the opportunities the future will bring (future as in the next few decades). If anything, software expertise is likely to be one of the most sought-after skills - only a slightly different kind of skill than churning out LOCs on a keyboard faster than the next person: People who can harness the LLMs, design prompts at the right abstraction level, verify the code produced, understand when someone has injected malware, etc. These skills will be extremely valuable in the short to medium term AFAICS.
But ultimately we will obviously become obsolete if nothing (really) catastrophic happens, but when that happens then likely all human labor will be obsolete too, and society will need to be organized differently than exchanging labor for money for means of sustenance.
Any implementation moat around rapid prototyping, and any fundraising moat around hiring a team of 10 to knock out your first few versions, seems gone now. Trying to sell MVP-tier software is real hard when a bunch of your potential customers will just think "thanks for the idea, I'll just make my own."
The crunch for engineers, on the other hand, seems like that even if engineers are needed to "orchestrate the agents" and manage everything, there could be a feature-velocity barrier for the software that you can still sell (either internally or externally). Changing stuff more rapidly can quickly hit a point of limited ROI if users can't adjust, or are slowed by constant tooling/workflow churn. So at some point (for the first time in many engineers' career, probably) you'll probably see product say "ok even though we built everything we want to test, we can't roll it all out at once!". But maybe what is learned from starting to roll those things out will necessitate more changes continually that will need some level of staffing still. Or maybe cheaper code just means ever-more-specialized workflows instead of pushing users to one-size-fits-all tooling.
In both of those cases the biggest challenge seems to be "how do you keep it from toppling down over time" which has been the biggest unsolved problem in consumer software development for decades. There's a prominent crowd right now saying "the agents will just manage it by continuing to hack on everything new until all the old stuff is stable too" but I'm not sure that's entirely realistic. Maybe the valuable engineering skills will be putting in the right guardrails to make sure that behavioral verification of the code is a tractable problem. Or maybe the agents will do that too. But right now, like you say, I haven't found particularly good results in conceptualizing better solutions from the current tools.
yeah, and i'm surprised nobody talks about this much. prompting is not that hard, and some non software people are smart enough to absorb the necessary details (especially since the llm can tutor them on the way) and then let the loop produce the MVP.
> Or maybe cheaper code just means ever-more-specialized workflows instead of pushing users to one-size-fits-all tooling.
Interesting thought
OR,
something like Mercor, currently getting paid really well by Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini to pay very smart humans really well to proof language model outputs.
I think we realistically have a few years of runway left though. Adoption is always slow outside of the far right of the bell curve.
As someone who’s always wanted to “get home and code something on my own”, I do have a glimmer of hope that I wonder if others share. I’ve worked extensively with Claude and there’s no question I am now a high velocity “builder” and my broad experience has some value here. I am sad that I won’t be able to deeply look at all the code I am producing, but I am making sure the LLM and I structure things so that I could eventually dig in to modules if needed (unlikely to happen I suppose).
Anyway, my hope/question: if I embrace my new role as fast system builder and I am creative in producing systems that solve real problems “first”, is there a path to making that a career (I.e. 4 friends and I cranking out real production software that’s filling a real niche)? There must be some way for this to succeed —- I am not yet buying the “everything will be instantly copyable and so any solution is instantly commodity” argument. If that’s true, then there is no hope. I am still in shape, though, so going pro in pickleball is always an option, ha ha.
Maybe I'm just as naive as those who said that photographs lack the soul of paintings. But I'm not 100% convinced we're done for yet, if what you're actually selling is thinking, reasoning and understanding.
Some will have to crash and burn their company before they realize that no human at all in the loop is a non sense. Let them touch fire and make up their mind I guess.
"Oops I automated myself out a job".
I can't help but resist this line of thinking as a result. If the end is nigh for us, it's nigh for everyone else too. Imagine the droves of less technical workers in the workforce who will be unseated before software engineers. I don't think it is tenable for every worker in the first world to become replaced by a computer. If an attempt at this were to occur, those smart unemployed people would be a real pain in the ass for the oligarchs.
Frankly, I am not sure there is a place in the world at all for me in ten years.
I think the future might just be a big enough garden to keep me fed while I wait for lack of healthcare access to put me out of my misery.
I am glad I am not younger.
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