Like it or not, we programmers, like painters before us, are slowly going to disappear. AI, like the camera, completely changed the game. You can sulk about it, or you can pick up a camera, start learning, and become a photographer.

Thinking that photography is just super advanced painting (and that there are no more painters??) shows a lack of understanding of either. But this is an AI-huffer, so I repeat myself.

If I'm no longer writing the code, what exactly am I doing? If you ponder that question, let me ask you another one: Do civil engineers do engineering?

My mom is a civil engineer. I have tons of memories of her at her giant drawing table with rice paper, rulers, pens, and razor blades, designing people's homes. With her pen she dug trenches, laid rebar, set walls, and picked the type of concrete to use without ever picking up a shovel. She was doing engineering. She was solving hard problems with hard constraints. The fact that someone else picked up a shovel, cut the rebar, set up molds, and poured the concrete doesn't take that away from her.

You literally just described engineering! Construction is a completely different job!

With the agents pouring concrete, we can now focus on the thing as a whole.

This is such a dumb take because it's wrong in both directions.

Either LLMs are really bad and shouldn't be trusted to write code and by trusting them you're going to utterly fail. Or LLMs are actually good enough to write code, but then they'll also be good enough to design/architect anything you could and reduce your labor's value to zero (e.g. someone will create a harness that lets the business guys TRULY prompt whatever they want into existence). The only situation where this works out for labor is if LLMs end up frozen in some middle ground where they don't get any more capable.

This idea that the LLM is analogous to a camera is such an insipid, thought-terminating cliché.