The main fear is that LLMs will increase programmer productivity so much that we won’t need so many anymore. On 5r other hand, so many software projects don’t get done already due to a lack of manpower, so I don’t see the extra productivity going to waste with as many programmers as we have now, we will just be able to get more things done.

That fear assumes humans have some expanding ability to context switch as the speed of information given to them increases, something I have little belief in.

If you can’t context switch faster, and embed yourself in the next task completely, in a way that lets you articulate the problem correctly to the LLM so that it can produce a correct answer for you, it can’t help you.

Right on the other hand it can’t replace us. The way LLMs work now…they are purely augmentative, the kind of experience that could work would be one of aid rather replacement. But of course, finding that experience will be tough.

you call it fear, I call it anticipation.

We've had such a spate of piss poor developers over the years that I find it gleeful to think they'll no longer be employable.

Yes, I know that makes me an asshole but I've seen some shit and it actively offends me that these people are paid for the code and the bad name it gives an industry I participate in and love. My hope is that AI will allow the good to great developers to be productive enough to force the craptastic developers to find another career.

My absolute favorite example is the guy who accidentally built a FSM with http redirects for the node transitions, all to animate a progress bar for a job queue on the server. No, he had no idea he had built a FSM.

In the long run, I am happy to be replaced by a machine if that’s how the people who work with me see me.

No you're not.

> No you're not.

Is that the machine speaking?

The fear is not of being replaced at all, but of reductions which will happen inevitably

I don't see how it will have more impact than compilers/libraries/internet that have already permitted to improve a lot individual productivity without significantly decreasing the demand for developers.

You're correct, but it's cool to blame new technology for a tech downturn instead of antigrowth policy.

Did they improve individual productivity or did they provide much more complexity by shifting the abstraction level? The more I code, the more I see we’re still solving the same core problem, sometimes with artificial constraints introduced by the choice of a platform.

The web was seen as a hub of information, but now people has been trying to make it a computing hub, ignoring the already available computing platform we already have (the devices in front of us).