Nope. Compensation is exponential. Being able to replace a top performer with a fee mediocre devs pair coding with an LLM is more than fine for 90% of use cases.

These people will continue to have value. But most businesses don’t have problems that can be profitable solved only by brilliant coders.

Commercially, you can. After all, that's the current music business.

I think it is more likely that great programmers might just increase their productivity even more with, which will make their value even greater.

Sure. Plenty of businesses are. Particularly in the commercial automation sector that numerically hires the most people.

> more likely that great programmers might just increase their productivity

For those in high-productivity, high-margin businesses, yes. For most of the world, no—the surplus productivity doesn’t outweigh the compensation and concentration risk.

I broadly expect a spate of age discrimination lawsuits in the near future because most businesses don’t need a few stars. In the meantime, I’ve watched a lot of people find two people in Brazil + an LLM equals one WFH very good (but not brilliant) coder.

If a top performer can produce 5x or more of the value, I would expect companies to continue to value top performers.