I think in some sense the opposite could occur, where it democratizes access to becoming a sort of pseudo-junior-software engineer. In the sense that a lot more people are going to be generating code and bespoke little software systems for their own ends and purposes. I could imagine this resulting in a Cambrian Explosion of small software systems. Like @m_ke says, there will be way more software.
Who maintains these systems? Who brings them to the last mile and deploys them? Who gets paid to troubleshoot and debug them when they reach a threshold of complexity that the script-kiddie LLM programmer cannot manage any longer? I think this type of person will definitely have a place in the new LLM-enabled economy. Perhaps this is a niche role, but figuring out how one can take experience as a software engineer and deploy it to help people getting started with LLM code (for pay, ofc) might be an interesting avenue to explore.
I tend to agree. I also think that the vast majority of code out there is quite frankly pretty bad, and all that LLM's do is learn from it, so while I agree that LLM's will help make a lot more software, I doubt it would increase the general quality in any significant way, and thus there will always be a need for people who can do actual programming as opposed to just prompting to fix complex problems. That said, not sure if I want my future career to be swimming in endless piles of LLM-copy-paste-spaghetti. Maybe it's high time to learn a new degree. Hmm.
Who maintains these systems? Who brings them to the last mile and deploys them? Who gets paid to troubleshoot and debug them when they reach a threshold of complexity that the script-kiddie LLM programmer cannot manage any longer? I think this type of person will definitely have a place in the new LLM-enabled economy. Perhaps this is a niche role, but figuring out how one can take experience as a software engineer and deploy it to help people getting started with LLM code (for pay, ofc) might be an interesting avenue to explore.