The difficulty with building software has mostly never been the code itself, but how to tease out what to actually build and how to connect system components together in a sane way that meets business requirements.
It is indeed neat that LLMs with fancy agent harnesses can write code very well at this point, but that doesn’t mean the average person can think through problems in the way that is required to build software that operates at meaningful scale with complex trade-offs and architecture decisions to be made. In my experience with others in other fields, that is not a common skill, and I really don’t see how an LLM is going to solve that.
For this reason, I do not see software engineering going anywhere, but I do believe it is possible/likely there will be negative changes in hiring and wages.
It is indeed neat that LLMs with fancy agent harnesses can write code very well at this point, but that doesn’t mean the average person can think through problems in the way that is required to build software that operates at meaningful scale with complex trade-offs and architecture decisions to be made. In my experience with others in other fields, that is not a common skill, and I really don’t see how an LLM is going to solve that.
For this reason, I do not see software engineering going anywhere, but I do believe it is possible/likely there will be negative changes in hiring and wages.