The amount and sophistication of sailing ships increased considerably as steam ships entered the market. Only once steam ships were considerably better in almost every regard that mattered to the market did the sailing ships truly get phased out to become a mere curiosity.
I think the demand for developers will similarly fluctuate wildly while LLM:s are still being improved towards the point of being better programmers than most programmers. Then programmers will go and do other stuff.
Being able to make important decisions about what to build should be one of those things that should increase in demand as the price of building stuff goes down. Then again, making important technical decisions and understand their consequences have always been part of what developers do. So we should be good at that.
The advantages of steam over sails were clear to everyone. The only issues left was engineering, solving each mini problem as they went and make the engine more efficient. Since the advent of ChatGPT, hallucinations were pointed out as a problem. Today we're no way close to even a hint on how to correct it.
> superior in some areas, inferior in others, with the balance changing with technological advancement.
So what are the areas that AI are superior to traditional programming? If your answer is suggestion, then refinement with traditional tooling, then it's just a workflow addon like contextual help, google search, and github code search. And I prefer the others because they are more reliable.
We have six major phases in the software development lifecycle: 1) Planning, 2) Analysis, 3) Design, 4) Implementation, 5) Testing, 6) Maintenance. I failed to see how LLM assistance is objectively better even in part than not having it at all. Everything I've read is mostly anecdote where the root cause is inexperience and lack of knowledge.
I think the demand for developers will similarly fluctuate wildly while LLM:s are still being improved towards the point of being better programmers than most programmers. Then programmers will go and do other stuff.
Being able to make important decisions about what to build should be one of those things that should increase in demand as the price of building stuff goes down. Then again, making important technical decisions and understand their consequences have always been part of what developers do. So we should be good at that.