Just to make this clear up front: I was always very skeptical of LLMs (I'll never call them AI) and still see them as fundamentally limited and unreliable. See my post history if you don't believe me.
Having said that: I work in business software and the models have progressed to the point where typing code and writing classes and functions by hand has become uneconomical. We review the output closely to avoid the idiocy of "vibe-coding", but the quality has improved to the point where we rarely have to outright reject solutions. The discussions have moved to high-level architectural points, where we just request better implementations than the first-shot. We get them, review again and move on. Maybe there are deeper, latent problems beeing embedded in the code-base through this process, but we can't spot any although we are looking intently.
And just like that, my profession has died. Nobody in my team writes code anymore. Things that would have taken days are now done in minutes. We are all just considering design and architecture. We are changing our processes since they are not fit for the new way of doing things. Scrum? What's even the point anymore? We can work through a sprint-backlog that would've taken two weeks in two days now. We do reviews 90% of the time. When we request changes they come back in minutes.
I have a feeling like the ground has been taken from below me. My son wanted to become a developer, that isn't a real job anymore. Everyone around me feels the same way, including our management. We are a small team and a small company, everyone is effective and our jobs are not in danger as long as our product is succesful. But my profession is essentially dead. It's a craft I honed for many, many years and the craft itself is now automated. I wanted to improve my typing skills to code faster, this is now a ridiculous endeavour. We don't know what comes next, but I now only have my analytical skills and knowledge of good architecture to fall back on.
And it all changed so fast. I don't think this will transfer to other professions so easily, but for programming LLMs ended it all in the span of the last four months. I thought I knew what my future holds as a senior dev, now I can barely see past christmas.This is a nightmare.
I really worry about this. It is not my area of expertise by any means. I assume that it is acceptable at coding because the people making it have shoved every line of code they could scrape from the internet (and probably other places) into it. So it can reproduce approximate code to do anything that has been done before. But I worry it can't do anything in a new way. It can't innovate. If no one is writing code that is able to actually think about the code and understand how code works, then we as a species can't innovate anymore either. If it all goes LLM, then we've built every lego shape we will ever make and anything we build from now on has to be able to be built from the bricks we already have.
I worry we are watching the early stages of a technological dark age wash over society.
Innovation in enthusiast open source projects?
This is a great way to describe this problem
Unthinkingly holding on to how things have been done before and not seeing the value of creative solutions or just plain never even getting bored with doing same thing over and over seem to be the main state of mind for huge amount of people. No wonder this is happening.