As for every job done well the most important thing is to truly understand the essence of your job, why it exist in the first place and which problem truly solves when done it well.
A good designers is not going to be replaced by Dall-e/Midjourney, becuase the essence of design is to understand the true meaning/purpose of something and be able to express it graphically, not align pixels with the correct HEX colour combination one next to the other.
A good software engineer is not going to be replaced by Cursor/Co-pilot, because the essence of programming is to translate the business requirements of a real world problem that other humans are facing into an ergonomic tool that can be used to solve such problem at scale, not writing characters on an IDE.
Neither Junior nor Seniors Dev will go anywhere, what we'll for sure go away is all the "code-producing" human-machines such as Fiver Freelance/Consultants which completely misunderstand/neglect the true essence of their work. Becuase code (as in a set of meaningful 8-bits symbols) was never the goal, but always the means to an end.
Code is an abstraction, allegedly our best abstraction to date, but it's hard to believe that is the last iteration of it.
I'll argue that software itself will be a completely different concept in 100 years from now, so it's obvious that the way of producing it will change too.
There is a famous quote attributed to Hemingway that goes like this:
"Slowly at first, then all at once"
This is exactly what is happening and and what always happens.
It's a good point, and I keep hearing it often, but it has one flaw.
It assumes that most engineers are in contact with the end customer, while in reality they are not. Most engineers are going through a PM whose role is to do what you described: speak with customers, understand what they want and somehow translate it to a language that the engineers will understand and in turn translate it into code. (Edit), the other part are "IC" roles like tech-lead/staff/etc, but the ratio between ICs and Engineers is, my estimate, around 1:10/20. So the majority of engineers are purely writing code, and engage in supporting actions around code (tech documentation, code reviews, pair programming, etc).
Now, my questions is as follows -- who has a bigger rate of employability in post LLM-superiority world: (1) a good technical software engineer with poor people/communication skills or (2) a good communicator (such as a PM) with poor software engineering skills?
I bet on 2, and as one of the comments says, if I had to future proof my career, I would move as fast as possible to a position that requires me to speak with people, be it other people in the org or customers.
(1) is exactly the misunderstanding i'm talking about, most creative jobs are not defined by their output (which is cheap) but by the way they reach that output. Software engineers that thought they could write their special characters in their dark room without the need to actually understand anything will go away in breeze (for good).
This entire field was full of hackers, deeply passionate and curious individuals who want to understand every little detail of the problem they were solving and why, then software becomes professionalized and a lot of amateurs looking for a quick buck came in commoditizing the industry. With LLM will go full-circe and push out a lot of amateurs to give again space to the hackers.
i can only assume software developers afraid of LLMs taking their jobs have not been doing this for long. being a software developer is about writing code in the same way that being a CEO is about sending emails. and i haven't seen any CEOs get replaced even thought chatgpt can write better emails than most of them
But the problem is that the majority of SWs are like that. You can blame them, or the industry, bust most engineers are writing code most of the time. For every Tech Lead who does "people stuff", there are 5-20 engineers who, mostly, write code and barely know that entire scope/context of the product they are working on.
> bust most engineers are writing code most of the time.
the physical act of writing code is different than the process of developing software. 80%+ of the time working on a feature is designing, reading existing code, thinking about the best way to implement your feature in the existing codebase, etc. not to mention debugging, resolving oncall issues, and other software-related tasks which are not writing code
GPT is awesome at spitting out unit tests, writing one-off standalone helper functions, and scaffolding brand new projects, but this is realistically 1-2% of a software developer's time
Everything you have described, apart from on-call, I think LLMs can/will be able to do. Explaining code, reviewing code, writing code, writing test, writing tech docs. I think we are approaching a point where all these will be done by LLMs.
You could argue about architecture/thinking about the correct/proper implementations, but I'd argue that for the past 7 decades of software engineering, we are not getting close to a perfect architecture singularity where code is maintainable and there is no more tech debt left. Therefor, arguments such as "but LLMs produce spaghetti code" can be easily thrown away by saying that humans do as well, except humans waste time by thinking about ways to avoid spaghetti code, but eventually end up writing it anyways.
people using GPT to write tech docs at real software companies get fired, full stop lol. good companies understand the value of concise & precise communication and slinging GPT-generated design docs at people is massively disrespectful to people's time, the same way that GPT-generated HN comments get downvoted to oblivion. if you're at a company where GPT-generated communication is the norm you're working for/with morons
as for everything else, no. GPT can explain a few thousand lines of code, sure, but it can't explain how every component in a 25-year-old legacy system with millions of lines and dozens/scores of services works together. "more context" doesn't help here
> A good software engineer is not going to be replaced by Cursor/Co-pilot, because the essence of programming is to translate the business requirements of a real world problem that other humans are facing into an ergonomic tool that can be used to solve such problem at scale, not writing characters on an IDE.
Managers and executives only see engineers and customer service as an additional cost and will find an opportunity to trim down roles and they do not care.
This year's excuse is now anything that uses AI, GPTs or Agents and they will try to do it anyway. Companies such as Devin and Klarna are not hiding this fact.
There will just be less engineers and customer service roles in 2025.
Some will. Some won't. The ones that cut engineering will be hurting by 2027, though, maybe 2026.
It's almost darwinian. The companies whose managers are less fit for running an organization that produces what matters will be less likely to survive.
Only dodgy dinosaur companies with shitty ancient crusty management see engineers as cost centers. Any actual modern tech company sees engineers as the engine that drives the entire business. This has been true for decades.
From a financial point of view, engineers are considered assets not costs, because they contribute to grow the valuation of the company assets.
The right thing to do economically (in capitalism) is to do more of the same, but faster. So if you as a software engineer or customer service rep can't do more of the same faster you will replaced by someone (or something) that alleggedly can.
> From a financial point of view, engineers are considered assets not costs
At Google? Perhaps. At most companies? No. At most places, software engineering is a pure cost center. The software itself may be an asset, but the engineers who are churning it out are not. That's part of the reason that it's almost always better to buy than build -- externalizing shared costs.
Just for an extreme example, I worked at a place that made us break down our time on new code vs. maintenance of existing code, because a big chunk of our time was accounted for literally as a cost, and could not be depreciated.
So what you're saying is that some of us should be gearing up to pull in ludicrous amounts of consultant money in 2026, when the chickens come home to roost, and the managers foolish enough to farm out software development to LLMs need to hire actual humans at rate to exorcize their demon-haunted computers?
Yeah that will be a lucrative niche if you have the stomach for it...
> A good designers is not going to be replaced by Dall-e/Midjourney, becuase the essence of design is to understand the true meaning/purpose of something and be able to express it graphically, not align pixels with the correct HEX colour combination one next to the other.
Yes, but Dall-e, etc. output will be good enough for most people and small companies if it's cheap or free even.
Big companies with deep pockets will still employ talented designers, because they can afford it and for prestige, but in general many average designer jobs are going to disappear and get replaced with AI output instead, because it's good enough for the less demanding customers.
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Programming is just a mean to an end, please stop this cringe romantic rhetoric. If you really love programming you don’t care about the medium, the fact that a program is represented as text is just a transient phase in the history due to the current tech we have available in this specific moment in time. Programming (today) is expressed as text, LLMs auto complete boring text, so that us “the artists” can write more of it faster, end of story.
Totally and this is the problem with startup founders of today. Their minds are filled with liquidity and an exit event. Steve Jobs had famously said how pathetic that is. And Zuckerberg, love or hate him, turned down billion dollars.
Selling your startup is not a good plan. Make it big, change the world, and swim in money.
Sure--if you're looking to do that, you're probably not taking VC and almost definitely not using YC.
VC does then choke out nascent companies in the "mid-sized, actually employs people" space if they think there's the potential for a quick buck, by driving it to zero, but the founders trying to do as you describe aren't anywhere near Y Combinator in the first place.
I don't know why you're saying midsized companies where what I am saying is that you can become the largest companies on this planet by not selling out.
When it comes to becoming the largest company on the planet, like the Highlander, "there can only be one", and those that fail wind up with their heads chopped off, not thriving in a smaller niche.
If you have a swimming pool worth of money, or a pond, or a canal, or a river, or maybe an ocean - you can swim in all these. Some founders maybe don't want to turn 58 trying to reach that perfect cubic m. volume of water to be able to swim. They might rather want to start swimming when they are kinda younger (30s maybe?). Who knows. And while already swimming they might want to get another pool, maybe an olympic size later and so on, instead of keep waiting for that "perfectly sized water body for them".
> change the world
Oh ffs. Really? Is that even a thought on the distant horizon of startup founders? Haha.
I’ve made the mistake myself to try to “change” my co-founder attitude and work ethic but it just not worth it. Fire him and look for a new co-founder who is actually passionate about the company vision and mission
You don’t understand the essence of your job.