I think the question here is wrong: it’s not about losing jobs, though that’s a real and consequential concern of the real concern. The real concern is that programmers will keep their jobs and end up doing something they don’t love to do. People who love programming don’t want to be tech leads, code janitors, QA engineers, or product managers, they want to code! For some, losing their job is absolutely a real concern, people need to make money to live, sure. But I think for programmers who love what they do, this is the bigger worry: they’re going to get asked to do something they don’t love to do, and they’ll hate doing it.

To be clear, I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen though. I think it will for a while, because founders and CEO’s are afraid of being left behind. Though LLMs are cool, I predict they’ll eventually be seen (as they’re starting to be now) as low quality slop. Not because what they can do isn’t impressive, I think LLMs are great for prototyping, lightweight learning, and developing proof-of-concepts. But they’re not going to replace what a human can do, especially at scale. If you’re building basic stuff, sure, maybe LLMs will help you, and your stuff will be just that: basic. But even within the next decade, they won’t be building truly great things: you will.

I compare LLM coding in the “Era of AI” to what Dreamweaver was to coding in the late 90’s: a powerful abstraction that lets non-experts produce code quickly, but often without understanding or control, resulting in bloated, broken, un-maintainable code that a human will have to fix and scale later.

I think a lot of the people who are excited about the idea of LLMs writing code are primarily tinkerers: people who can program a little, but aren’t necessarily someone mastering the craft. They see code as a means to an end, not as a craft itself: and you have to see it as a craft to do it well. Again, there will be legit programmers who adapt to this way of doing things, but they’ll be busy doing other roles poorly too: all while hating it! There is this misguided idea that programmers will do well at being in these new roles, the truth is that they won’t. And the tinkerers will not master programming, especially without actually doing it.

This is why I expect an inevitable result: a lot of AI garbage!

I really don’t agree that the main concern in this clip is whether LLM’s will cause job loss or not, especially for programmers: most will keep their jobs and go on to attempt becoming these mythical unicorns. It’s more about the industry asking them to instead do something they don’t love to do (and they’ll do it to keep their job!): which is going to result in a new AI-powered era of poor programming quality. Media online keeps focusing on the loss of jobs: it’s not about that! There are programmers who will adapt into this new world of LLM’s generated code: and they’ll hate it!