They’re stupid or they’re already set up for success. The general ideas seems to be generalists are screwed, domain experts will be fine.
But I don't see how this holds up to even the slightest amount of scrutiny. We're literally training LLMs to BE domain experts.
1) My experiences with LLMs are so impressive that I consider their output to generally be better than what the typical developer would produce. People who can't see this have not gotten enough experience with the models I find so impressive, or are in denial about the devaluation of their skills.
2) My experiences with LLMs have been mundane. People who see them as transformative lack the expertise required to distinguish between mediocre and excellent code, leading them to deny there is a difference.
So now I tend to think a lot of people are in heavy denial in thinking that LLMs are going to stop getting better before they personally end up under the steamroller, but I'm not sure what this faith is based on.
I also think people tend to treat the "will LLMs replace <job>" question in too much of a binary manner. LLMs don't have to replace every last person that does a specific job to be wildly disruptive, if they replace 90% of the people that do a particular job by making the last 10% much more productive that's still a cataclysmic amount of job displacement in economic terms.
Even if they replace just 10-30% that's still a huge amount of displacement, for reference the unemployment rate during the Great Depression was 25%.
It's people in camp 1 that I wonder about. They're convinced that LLMs can accomplish anything and understand a codebase better than anyone (and that may be the case!). However, they're simultaneously convinced that they'll still be needed to do the prompting because ???reasons???.
They still have a long way to go before they can master a domain from first principles, which constrains the mastery possible.
For an LLM and this "vague" domain expertise, even if none of the LLM's training material includes certain nuggets of wisdom, if the material includes enough cases of problems and the solutions offered by domain experts, we should expect the model to find a decent relationship between them. That the LLM has never ingested an explicit documentation of the reasoning is irrelevant, because it does not perform reasoning.
Mastery isn't necessary. Why are Waymos lacking drivers? Not because self-driving cars have mastered driving, but because self-driving works sufficiently well that the economics don't play out for the cab driver.
Web front-end and backend developer as a career dies, probably desktop/mobile application development too. However, some of the more specialized software developer roles are likely to survive; none of the people on the Linux kernel team have anything to worry about and the same goes for the GCC folks.
