Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I’ll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don’t believe me.
Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of “vibe-coding”, but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can’t spot any although we are looking intently.
And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What’s even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would’ve taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.
I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn’t a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It’s a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don’t know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.
And it all changed so fast. I don’t think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.
I’ll comment here, rather than the other discussion we were having.
To answer your question here, you don’t. Here’s why:
Do you farm everything you eat? Do you weave the textiles that make your clothes? Do you smith the shoes that go on your horse? Do you form the bricks that made your house yourself? Do you harvest fire wood to cook your food? Do you tan leather to make belts and shoes? Do you
No. And why? Because technological improvements made the artisinal version of that work unnecessary to be largely done by artisans. Not that we don’t still have artisans doing these things. And not that we have every single article of clothing on Earth made by machines.
Coders are in the same plight that cobblers were in 100+ years ago. And I’ve been to a cobbler in the last year! But only because I really love this one pair of great boots that can be resoled. I don’t go there for running shoes and flip flops.
The part that feels like betrayal to coders is that the LLMs came from their own kind.
I don’t farm what I eat, but the people that do have to have that knowledge of how to do that.
That’s the difference here. LLMs are creating “developers” that need to have the knowledge to be able to audit the code produced, but they won’t have that knowledge. That is the problem. Not the “paradigm shift”.