I do not predict the elimination of the humble coder, but the covid hiring wave has come and gone, and Big Tech for the most part successfully minimized the workforces of those who were hired in the covid wave: frontend, backend and fullstack engineers. The patterns of code required for these positions have been successfully recognized by the LLMs I think, and for many cases a single staff engineer with experience and a trusty LLM is similarly productive as a team of 2-4 junior engineers led by a senior engineer was only a short 5 years ago. I do not expect much expansion in this "traditional" web development (these positions have really only existed in modern form for about 20 years, roughly when Rails was first released).
Many such as Amjad Masad and Beff Jezos are of the opinion that for those who would have taken these positions before, the options are to either drill down the stack towards the bare metal, by reason of relative difficulty of embedded engineering, and that one struggles to imagine high-stakes software such as in a SpaceX rocket, Boeing airplane, or Anduril drone relying primarily on vibe-coded slop hastily LGTM'd into production. So the kind of software that requires large amounts of formal, simulated, or physical verification seems to still be necessary, but this is much more difficult to write than a webpage. Expansions in the labor market for those writing C, C++, Rust in the context of operating systems, embedded systems, microcontrollers, drivers, and so forth seems likely.
The other option seems to be to leave the stack entirely, and leverage small teams to create niche and targeted applications for small segments of users. There has been some success in this area as well, but requires a much broader skillset than simply being an expert programmer and understanding some computer science.
The options seem to be either to start reading Bjarne Stroustrup or Peter Thiel. But the skill ceiling for either path is fairly high, and for the short term I predict a sustained contraction in the software engineering labor market, while people adapt their educations and long-term career goals. Headcounts at FAANG I don't see recovering soon if ever. This has broader implications for a traditional startup route where one earned their stripes at FAANG before launching their own venture, but I digress ...
The workflows we have are not quite right for it. Coding has always been 10% coding and 90% debugging but I think the rate at which we generate the 10% will grow exponentially.
This means that the debugging has to grow. We will generate errors at an unprecedented rate.
LLMs trained on previous errors and methods won’t catch them. They’ll be more complicated and spread out over the code.
We need new tools to visualize the code and track errors. I think what it means to be a programmer will change. More testing, thinking and less klocs.
However, I think there is a second thing that is often overlooked here. It seems the angle is always 'oh companies can replace developers' but no one seems to consider that developers can replace companies. I think you are going to see small teams of very skilled people replace able to make amazing products. There are limits to what llm's can do on their own but a skilled engineer who masters the tooling and can unblock the models and knows the techniques to keep the models productive as the codebase grows will be able to produce amazing things far beyond what they could ever produce before. I think you are going to see an explosion of new, smaller companies. I think if you are an engineer you shouldn't be gloomy, you should be excited.
How did the finance world adjust to a world where financial transactions were automated on the blockchain using smart contracts?
How have cities adapted to the massive migration of in-person experiences to the metaverse — and so soon after they rebuilt all their physical infrastructure around the revolutionary personal transportation system known as the Segway[0]?
[0] none other than Steve Jobs predicted that cities would be designed around the Segway https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/04/engineering.hi...
It's just one more step in the multi-generational trend of eliminating/outsourcing lower skilled jobs and increasing the barriers to entry for the remaining jobs. I'm not optimistic.
Generalists will be undervalued, but will always be able to find a job.
There will be pockets of extraordinary cruelty and pockets of extraordinary grace.
Where you find yourself on the cruelty/grace/specialist/generalist surface will still be up to you, but also, just as it has been for thousands of years, also up to fate.
Do your best, control the things you can, and accept the things you can't. Remember that work is just work, not living.
Hang in there, it's only 10 years more to get there...
One thing that is constant is the billions of people using the internet and their buying power, so I think there will also be tremendous opportunity for people able to release good software while mid+large+huge tech companies focus on eliminating the expensive tech salaries that built and sustain their fortunes. Their software is going to become shittier until LLMs get much better.
After a week, take note of how many hours you spend actually writing code.
I won’t share my exact count, but it’s shockingly low in relation to all of the hours spent working.
My bottleneck to more productive output is 100% not “unable to write more code faster”. It’s actually people. Other people.
10 years after that will be interesting. Can you imagine a $100m business running on dozens of apps generated by various LLMs. Are management going to sign off a rebuild from an LLM or are they going to get a team in to do it from scratch and consolidate the systems.
Agile principles will be back, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" will be a popular line.
existing team produces 200
2/10ths of the team + LLM produces 200
existing team + LLM produces 4000
Now, I also have (constantly) in mind Orwell's "in front of your nose" [0], so some-one/some-company may sacrifice (as they usually do) the long term for the short term (shareholders must get their dividend _now_ or else...) and in which case, 'never let a crisis go to waste' let's all fire 20% of our staff, destroy benefits/salaries, and hire back everyone at 20%-30% less. Yes our companies will have less profit in the short term, but the cost saving (2y no pay, and afterwards 30% cheaper labour) would be great.
[0]: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
The current era of making the most complicated fucking thing possible is clearly nearing its conclusion. The writing is on the wall with the now weekly conversations about vendor and dependency management crises.
One might say to use something with more batteries included or whatever. I'd go 5 steps further - have you solved the problem outside the computer yet? Do you understand the domain model? Do you understand why the customer wants to pay for any of this bullshit in the first place?
I think that's approximately what it's going to look like. Excel, bash and powershell replacing kubernetes clusters.
Average devs will be no longer needed as all they can do a senior will be able to do in the same time with LLM.
I think we'll go back to the system as in the Mythical Man-Month - one lead developer, one below them to do less important tasks, and a few domain experts not related to programming. Ironically I think good front-end developers may remain useful as UI/UX experts.
The rate of adoption of new APIs will slow down considerably.
LLMs only really know what they're taught and when a new API comes out, the body of learning material is necessarily small. People relying on LLMs to do their jobs will be hesitant to code new things by hand when a LLM can do the same using older APIs much faster.
Who is going to do it then? Well, someone has to or else the API in question won't see widespread adoption.
I think we’ll see advancements in robotics and more hires there.
And I think there will be more jobs around the LLM ecosystem — progress on foundational models, inference optimizations, on prem migrations, networks of agents, AI more deeply integrated with existing sw.
Overall I think there will be more jobs in observability, security, and infrastructure.
I agree there will be fewer junior positions. I’ve written about some of these ideas before including a deskilling for new practitioners https://matthewbilyeu.com/blog/2025-03-08/ai
Initially there will be a huge employment downturn as organisations follow the pattern of hiring a Gen Y expert and supplementing them with Gen Z juniors using increasingly good AIs.
After a while, the Gen Y seniors will retire and/or die and it will be impossible to source a senior developer with actual knowledge. Wages will skyrocket for a few Gen Z experts, but in general there will be a shortage and the entire industry will eventually reboot, although I am stuck to speculate how exactly.
At some point, we will lose the ability to quickly make advancement in AI because engineers will stop understanding how they work due to a lack of deep understanding in mathematics etc. and advancement will drop by 100x or 1000x.
Due to people becoming very lazy on average, capitalism will become ineffective and most governments will veer towards centralised services, or central planning/communism to cope with the lazy populous. A few people with work ethic approximate to today’s founder work ethic, or deep skills, will be worshipped.
I also see the blending of engineers and data scientists with product managers.
Computer Engineering domain will continue to grow. This will be due to 1) need for better GPUs and CPUs 2) need for data centre infrastructure engineers
LLM ecosystem will also continue to grow along with Machine learning ecosystem. Regression based models cannot be replaced by LLMs due to inherently not being reliable in producing consistent output for structured problems
Tech work will look more like a data center tech. Demand for programmer jobs will shrink to only what the hardware manufacturers need.
Recently, there was an analysis of when we might get to Post-Labor Economics:
> 2025 to 2030: Collapse of knowledge work. The "KVM Rule" applies: any job you can do entirely with a keyboard, video, and mouse will be fully replaced.
https://x.com/daveshapi/status/1916188978727784847?t=9YNl90V...
I think we are SEVERELY underestimating the amount of slop that is going to come from this.
The reasons why exist in Taleb's antifragility thesis: the antifragile will gain from disorder.
The nature of the tech industry, in the decades roughly since the Cold War ended(which put to rest a certain pattern of tech focused on the MIC and moved SV forward into its leadership position), has promoted fragility along several of Taleb's dimensions: it aims to scale, it aims to centralize, and it aims to intervene. The pinnacle achievement of this trend is probably the iPhone, a convergent do-everything device that promises to change your life.
But it's axiomatic(in Taleb's view, which I will defer to since his arguments are good enough for me) that this won't last, and with talk of "the end of the US empire", and a broader pessimism in tech, there seems to be popular agreement that we are done with the scale narrative. AI is a last holdout for that narrative since it justifies further semiconductor investment, stokes national security fears of an "AI race" and so on - it appeals to forces with big pocketbooks, that are also big in scale, and also in a position of fragility themselves. But eventually they will tap out too, for the same reasons. Whether that's a "next year" thing or a "twenty years" thing is hard to predict - the fall of the USSR was similarly hard to predict.
The things that are antifragile within software are too abstract to intentionally develop within a codebase, and are more a measure of philosophy and how one models the world with data - CollapseOS is at the extreme end of this, where the viewpoint is bacterial - "all our computing infrastructure is doomed if it is not maintainable by solo operators" - but there are intermediate points along it where the kinds of software that are needed are in that realm of a plugin to a large app or an extension to an existing framework, and development intentionally aims not to break outside that scope. That thesis agrees with the "small niches" view of things.
Since we have succeeded in putting computers into every place we can think of, many of the things we need to do with them do already have a conventional "way of doing it," but can exist in a standard and don't need to be formalized behind a platform and business model - and LLM stuff does actually have some role in serving that by being an 80% translator of intent, while a technical specialist has work in adding finish and polish. And that side of things agrees with going deeper into the stack.
I believe one pressing issue that's faced with this transition is the inclination brought from the corporate dev environment to create a generalized admixture of higher and lower level coding - to do everything as a JS app with WASM bits that are "rewritten in Rust" - when what indie software needs is more Turbo Pascals, Hypercards, and Visual Basics, environments that are tuned to be complete within themselves and towards the kinds of apps being written, while being "compatible enough" to deploy to a variety of end-user systems.
Enough time for LLMs to see marked improvement and possibly the hallucination issue to be significantly reduced or solved.
When then happens the remaining software engineers won’t be skilled. Like many people in the principle or staff position or managerial position… technical skills don’t matter. AI now handles technical skills and the people controlling the AI are people who can navigate the politics.