Ah yes, the old “the rubes aren’t really against AI, they’re just ignorant!” We don’t actually have to change anything about what we’re doing or stop doing it, we just need to hire the right PR firm so what we’re doing seems “thoughtful.”

Being able to write code well is a rare skill, and I think that fact contributed to software being rare among career fields in combining high earning potential with relatively few structural barriers to entry. If you were good at coding you stood a reasonable shot of making it in the industry, even if you presented as neurodiverse/queer/non-WASP, didn’t go to the right school or any school, had a disability that would be difficult to accommodate in other fields, etc (we were by no means perfect at this, but a lot better than some other comparably well paid fields). And, if you made it in the industry, even if you didn’t make FAANGbucks, you probably had enough to live comfortably. There weren’t enough of us to go around, so companies had to hire on ability and skill rather than credentials to a greater degree than you see in other fields with similar earning potential.

I think our field will still exist in some form in 5 years, and for senior folks I think the day to day work will probably not feel all that different. What worries me is what it does to the first few years in the field. If LLMs are seen as good enough at writing code, it’s harder to justify hiring junior and mid level engineers, and it’s harder to argue for hiring as many of them as we might have hired before (in addition to teaching them and helping them grow, we senior folks used to delegate much of our code writing to them). What management expects of them also changes: not to write code, but to grow quickly into someone who can responsibly herd AI. So management will hire fewer juniors, there will be more juniors in the market looking around for longer, and management will find that they can be picky in terms of credentials and still hire people, something they couldn’t do as much before. I feel like that’s going to yank the ladder up from people who would be good engineers but didn’t go to MIT/Cal/Stanford and don’t have the financial resources to spend a year job hunting after they graduate college, and sort of quietly gentrify the profession more than it already is. I have a pretty nice life as an adult because of that ladder being there when I entered the workforce, and it makes me sad to think that it wouldn’t be if I graduated today.

It’s almost like dual class stock structures that give founders perpetual veto power over their boards might not be the best idea.

I’m far from a slop advocate, so this is more of a devil’s advocate point: plenty of code writing is not enjoyable.

If I’m working on my own project, to my own standards, writing exactly what I want to write I’m usually going to get enjoyment out of it. That’s pretty commonly not the case when writing code for an employer. Maybe the tech stack sucks, the product is inane or worse, you think the feature is a dumb idea but have to do it anyway, you’re bending over backwards to work around tech debt that you’re not allowed by management to fix, or you have to appease incompetent/out of touch architects or tech leads who presume to tell you how to do your job. I personally don’t enjoy writing that code very much. At a certain point it’s almost like nails on a chalkboard if you genuinely enjoy programming for its own sake: you know what good would look like, you know how far away what you’re working on is from good, and you feel sad at all the organizational inertia you’d need to overcome to get to good or, choosing not to do that, at compromising your standards. That bugs me, at least, and at a certain point makes it hard to even start certain work projects.

LLMs can make this at least bearable. Rather than spending hours looking into the change yourself, writing all of the code, fighting the shitty test framework and swearing at the past engineers who made it so bad, you let the robot figure it out and review its work. The result may still suck, but it was going to suck if you wrote it by hand too, for reasons largely out of your control. You can’t be fully hands off, and you still have to deal with the things you don’t like to get a good result, but you put yourself a step away from what bothers you and by doing so make it a little more pleasant. And, when you find work that’s actually fun, interesting, or rewarding, you just cherry pick that for yourself. I’ve grown to appreciate them for this reason. I have a lot less dread for the nails on a chalkboard work than I used to, anyway.