TLDR; LLMs and AI aren’t taking away jobs but they are forcing those jobs to evolve in abstraction or complexity.
Forward: AI, ML and LLMs are interchanged so often it boggles the mind and I’m doing it again here. LLMs as they are right now are not Artificial Intelligence even though they mimic what we would expect AI to be.
The world wide web and all the technologies that support it came out after digital typesetting but quickly adapted the technology to structure information that would be rendered, laid out, in a meaningful way. Web pages started off as text but exploded in complexity before ever becoming the interactive medium it is today. Page layout became important and you had to design layouts and pages in a way that was attractive and easy to understand. Typesetters, Electronic Typesetting Machine Operators, Page Designers, Layout Designers, Information Architects, Web Designers, and Web Developers were all Typesetters or abstractions of typesetting for a new medium. The addition of interactivity in the world wide web brought the need for programmers to the Internet. They weren’t typesetters but did work in deterministic language that gave an expected output. That well defined output could be assigned to a layout and you get the idea.
Every job in this story can be said to be replaceable by Large Language Models (LLMs) and there are claims of it happening all over the web. This isn’t the end of the our jobs as programmers. The job title and description will change but the job requirements will remain. Creating functions that give expected output will always require intent. Many developers have been copy pasting code off StackOverflow for years now not knowing how it works only that the code does work. Before that the idea of how to use search engines like Google properly was considered a skill. LLMs become a new tool and this powerful new tool raises the bar again for our expected complexity in production. We’ll be able to create better programs and websites that work more reliably and fit more niche needs. Interacting with LLMs becomes another skill that expands what is possible.
There are all sorts of pitfalls and caveats to be explored in how LLMs integrate into our workflow. The only jobs that are 100% safe from “replacement” by LLMs are those which require one person performing a single action at a time. Programming isn’t going away but it will continue to evolve as it incorporates the usage of a new tool.