How many does it one shot in less time than your outage lasted?

And, you're right, I used to enjoy my job a lot more before AI. But in the end, the paychecks keep coming, and I can produce a lot of acceptable code quickly with little skill. Skill in coding no longer makes economic sense.

Most of the work today is manual testing and feeding the bugs back into the LLMs.

The customers will have to deal with it, of course. At least they bought physical systems instead of renting them, so they can use them until they're obsolete.

You're missing one word, and that word explains why everyone running the companies is so excited. The word is 'paying'. "But at that point, what is the point paying of you versus going to the LLM myself?"

And, yes, I think that LLMs make it a lot easier to hire a minimally trained stooge and get them productive. It's worked for me, and I appreciate being able to pretend to be productive and walk away from the job a bit early every day. I don't think software engineering is likely to be a high status, high income job for very long.

LLMs debug extremely well, generate code well enough, and do high level design acceptably, but fail in weird ways, so my actual work these days (outside of delegating to the LLM) is mostly manual testing. I need to give them nudges sometimes, but a year ago they needed constant nudges. In another year, I expect that it'll be good enough that pasting in a bug report with the right jargon will be all the nudging I need to get something that customers will accept if it gets shipped. They're already close.

It's obviously going to remain pretty manual without some breakthroughs, but it's largely not work that needs a ton of intelligence or skill. The world hasn't caught up with software development being a few steps up from burger flipping, so I'm still getting paid well to do it, and I'll keep collecting that paycheck as long as it lasts. But learning about code is rapidly becoming relatively valueless.

I wish it was different, I actually enjoyed getting paid to learn, but I play with the cards I'm dealt.

It's largely going to come from interpersonal skills and being likeable enough to be the face of the projects and companies. Technical skill is rapidly dropping in value.

You could probably replace me with a minimum wage worker to do some manual testing and copy-paste errors from the console into the LLM, and still be fine.

Let's see how long it is before the next round of layoffs, I guess. For now, the money's fine and the work's boring but ok.

But, no, the LLMs rewarding expertise line is pure cope. Software is not really skilled labor any more.

(obviously, throwaway -- I'm not interested in potentially advertising this to my employer)