Haven't most productivity improvements led to more rather than less programmers? Why would this one be any different?
I was thinking today that with respect to programming, LLMs are a bit like spreadsheets. They make "programming" accessible to more people. I can use vim and bash and script my way to do changes in a file with millions of line. Most non-programmers couldn't, but now they can use an LLM-based solution instead, they can program in English. So what used to be a back-and-forth between e.g. a secretary and an understaffed IT department can be done by the secretary alone, while IT can look at longer-term goals.
New lines of C/C++ are still written everyday in spite of all higher-level languages. Add LLMs to this pile of higher-level languages. You'll still need Java programmers in the future, even if they interact with an LLM on a daily basis. But maybe you won't need them to write a script for which there's an equivalent prompt that anybody can come up with and which can be fed into an LLM.
I was thinking today that with respect to programming, LLMs are a bit like spreadsheets. They make "programming" accessible to more people. I can use vim and bash and script my way to do changes in a file with millions of line. Most non-programmers couldn't, but now they can use an LLM-based solution instead, they can program in English. So what used to be a back-and-forth between e.g. a secretary and an understaffed IT department can be done by the secretary alone, while IT can look at longer-term goals.
New lines of C/C++ are still written everyday in spite of all higher-level languages. Add LLMs to this pile of higher-level languages. You'll still need Java programmers in the future, even if they interact with an LLM on a daily basis. But maybe you won't need them to write a script for which there's an equivalent prompt that anybody can come up with and which can be fed into an LLM.