There’s a way we can interpret the core job of a programmer or hacker as making computers do things. What that means keep changing over time. We have to do less toil than we used to and that enables us to achieve more. Maybe eventually the job of “programmer” will stop being a job and the only interesting skill left will be coming up with good ideas about what computers should do. Barring that, in the mean time I expect programmers to continue to have a lot of work to do, but for it to change.
This isn’t really different than being a programmer now, other than the rate of change is likely to accelerate. Folks will need to be ready to do things like change how they write code quickly once LLMs get good enough to reliably write code that could be used in a product code base without significant rewriting.
If you like, the way to think about it is that skills that humans can do and get paid for will move up the stack, just like the market for low-level programming “dried up” and got replaced by people working in higher level languages.
In terms of career advice, focus on the core problem solving skills related to programming, not becoming a world class expert in something that can be automated away. LLMs mean expert programmers will be less in demand and programmers who can take a project from 0 to 1 will be in greater demand.
There’s a way we can interpret the core job of a programmer or hacker as making computers do things. What that means keep changing over time. We have to do less toil than we used to and that enables us to achieve more. Maybe eventually the job of “programmer” will stop being a job and the only interesting skill left will be coming up with good ideas about what computers should do. Barring that, in the mean time I expect programmers to continue to have a lot of work to do, but for it to change.
This isn’t really different than being a programmer now, other than the rate of change is likely to accelerate. Folks will need to be ready to do things like change how they write code quickly once LLMs get good enough to reliably write code that could be used in a product code base without significant rewriting.
If you like, the way to think about it is that skills that humans can do and get paid for will move up the stack, just like the market for low-level programming “dried up” and got replaced by people working in higher level languages.
In terms of career advice, focus on the core problem solving skills related to programming, not becoming a world class expert in something that can be automated away. LLMs mean expert programmers will be less in demand and programmers who can take a project from 0 to 1 will be in greater demand.