New-ish thread from Baldur Bjarnason:

Wrote this back on the mansplainiverse (mastodon):

It’s understandable that coders feel conflicted about LLMs even if you assume the tech works as promised, because they’ve just changed jobs from thoughtful problem-solving to babysitting

In the long run, a babysitter gets paid much less an expert

What people don’t get is that when it comes to LLMs and software dev, critics like me are the optimists. The future where copilots and coding agents work as promised for programming is one where software development ceases to be a career. This is not the kind of automation that increases employment

A future where the fundamental issues with LLMs lead them to cause more problems than they solve, resulting in much of it being rolled back after the “AI” financial bubble pops, is the least bad future for dev as a career. It’s the one future where that career still exists

Because monitoring automation is a low-wage activity and an industry dominated by that kind of automation requires much much fewer workers that are all paid much much less than one that’s fundamentally built on expertise.

Anyways, here’s my sidenote:

To continue a train of thought Baldur indirectly started, the rise of LLMs and their impact on coding is likely gonna wipe a significant amount of prestige off of software dev as a profession, no matter how it shakes out:

• If LLMs worked as advertised, then they’d effectively kill software dev as a profession as Baldur noted, wiping out whatever prestige it had in the process
• If LLMs didn’t work as advertised, then software dev as a profession gets a massive amount of egg on its face as AI’s widespread costs on artists, the environment, etcetera end up being all for nothing.