I have a job at a place I love and get more people in my direct network and extended contacting me about work than ever before in my 20 year career.

And finally I keep myself sharp by always making sure I challenge myself creatively. I’m not afraid to delve into areas to understand them that might look “solved” to others. For example I have a CPU-only custom 2D pixel blitter engine I wrote to make 2D games in styles practically impossible with modern GPU-based texture rendering engines, and I recently did 3D in it from scratch as well.

All the while re-evaluating all my assumptions and that of others.

If there’s ever a day where there’s an AI that can do these things, then I’ll gladly retire. But I think that’s generations away at best.

Honestly this fear that there will soon be no need for human programmers stems from people who either themselves don’t understand how LLM’s work, or from people who do that have a business interest convincing others that it’s more than it is as a technology. I say that with confidence.

I spent a lot of time with traders in early '00's and then '10's when the automation was going full tilt.

Common feedback I heard from these highly paid, highly technical, highly professional traders in a niche indusry running the world in its way was:

- How complex the job was - How high a quality bar there was to do it - How current algos never could do it and neither could future ones - How there'd always be edge for humans

Today, the exchange floors are closed, SWEs run trading firms, traders if they are around steer algos, work in specific markets such as bonds, and now bonds are getting automated. LLMs can pass CFA III, the great non-MBA job moat. The trader job isn't gone, but it has capital-C Changed and it happened quickly.

And lastly - LLMs don't have to be "great," they just have to be "good enough."

See if you can match the above confidence from pre-automation traders with the comments displayed in this thread. You should plan for it aggressively, I certainly do.

Edit - Advice: the job will change, the job might change in that you steer LLMs, so become the best at LLM steering. Trading still goes on, and the huge, crushing firms in the space all automated early and at various points in the settlement chain.

1) I believe we need true AGI to replace developers.

2) I don't believe LLMs are currently AGI or that if we just feed them more compute during training that they'll magically become AGI.

3) Even if we did invent AGI soon and replace developers, I wouldn't even really care, because the invention of AGI would be such an insanely impactful, world changing, event that who knows what the world would even look like afterwards. It would be massively changed. Having a development job is the absolute least of my worries in that scenario, it pales in comparison to the transformation the entire world would go through.

I see LLMs as the next higher level of abstraction.

Does this mean it will replace me? At the moment the output is so flawed for anything but the most trivial professional tasks, I simply see, as before, it has a long long way to go.

Will be put me out of a job? I highly doubt it in my career. I still love it and write stuff for home and work every day of the week. I'm planning on working until I drop dead as it seems I have never lost interest so far.

Will it replace developers as we know it? Maybe in the far future. But we'll be the ones using it anyway.

The problem was it never worked. When generating the code, the best the tools could do was create all the classes for you and maybe define the methods for the class. The tools could not provide an implementation unless it provided the means to manage the implementation within the tool itself - which was awful.

Why have you likely not heard of any of this? Because the fad died out in the early 2000's. The juice simple wasn't worth the squeeze.

Fast-forward 20 years and I'm working in a new organization where we're using ArchiMate extensively and are starting to use more and more UML. Just this past weekend I started wondering given the state of business modeling, system architecture modeling, and software modeling, could an LLM (or some other AI tool) take those models and produce code like we could never dream of back in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s? Could we use AI to help create the models from which we'd generate the code?

At the end of the day, I see software architects and software engineers still being engaged, but in a different way than they are today. I suppose to answer your question, if I wanted to future-proof my career I'd learn modeling languages and start "moving to the left" as they say. I see being a code slinger as being less and less valuable over the coming years.

Bottom line, you don't see too many assembly language developers anymore. We largely abandoned that back in the 80s and let the computer produce the actual code that runs. I see us doing the same thing again but at a higher and more abstract level.