I think what we're seeing echoes a pattern we have lived through many times before, just with new tooling. Every major leap in developer productivity - from assembly to higher-level languages, from hand-rolled infrastructure to cloud platforms, from code libraries to massive open-source ecosystems - has sparked fears that fewer developers would be needed. In practice, these advancements have not reduced the total number of developers; they have just raised the bar on what we can accomplish.
LLMs and code generation tools are no exception. They will handle some boilerplate and trivial tasks, just like autocompletion, frameworks, and package managers already do. This will make junior-level coding skills less of a differentiator over time. But it is also going to free experienced engineers to spend more time on the complex, high-level challenges that no model can solve right now - negotiating unclear requirements, architecting systems under conflicting constraints, reasoning about trade-offs, ensuring reliability and security, and mentoring teams.
It is less about "Will these tools replace me?" and more about "How do I incorporate these tools into my workflow to build better software faster?" That is the question worth focusing on. History suggests that the demand for making complex software is bottomless, and the limiting factor is almost never just "typing code." LLMs are another abstraction layer. The people who figure out how to use these abstractions effectively, augmenting their human judgment and creativity rather than fighting it, will end up leading the pack.
LLMs and code generation tools are no exception. They will handle some boilerplate and trivial tasks, just like autocompletion, frameworks, and package managers already do. This will make junior-level coding skills less of a differentiator over time. But it is also going to free experienced engineers to spend more time on the complex, high-level challenges that no model can solve right now - negotiating unclear requirements, architecting systems under conflicting constraints, reasoning about trade-offs, ensuring reliability and security, and mentoring teams.
It is less about "Will these tools replace me?" and more about "How do I incorporate these tools into my workflow to build better software faster?" That is the question worth focusing on. History suggests that the demand for making complex software is bottomless, and the limiting factor is almost never just "typing code." LLMs are another abstraction layer. The people who figure out how to use these abstractions effectively, augmenting their human judgment and creativity rather than fighting it, will end up leading the pack.