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.
By your definition in this comment chain, no one ever loses skills. You can relearn any skill whenever you want!
That's an odd way of framing the idea. Relearning a skill that has decayed from a lack of practice is still a lot of effort, it's not some trivial thing that should be thought of like riding a bike. If you went back and tried to learn Spanish, you'll find it's going to take many dozens or possibly hundreds of hours to regain the skill you lost.
This applies on a societal level too. The skill can be learned whenever anyone wants, but fewer people have it.
Let's apply that to the entire software development industry. People becoming overly reliant on chatbots are seeing their skills degrade fairly rapidly, in not much time at all they'll be incapable of what they used to be able to do. That might be fine! Or, that might mean that we are building up a debt that we are going to have to pay for later, like when the chatbot breaks something it can't fix and no one knows how to fix it anymore either. That skill will have to be relearned, and in the meantime it'll be broken because the computer can't do it for them.
By the way, did you hear ArchiveOfOurOwn.org is going to be down for almost a month because something went wrong?
Maybe it's unrelated! Or, maybe we can expect to start seeing that happen to more and more websites.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree here, but I still think you're really mixing up a lot of things and just painting a blanket "skills are lost" label to anything that's not at its peak.
Case in point, I used to wear bow ties once in a while, back when that was a cool thing people did. I haven't worn one in maybe 5 or 6 years. So I tried to tie one and it took a couple tries to remember how to do it.
Now, you're saying I "lost" the skill by not remembering perfectly. I'm saying my skill at it degraded.
Was I ever the best bow tie tier in the world? Of course not. My skill was good enough - maybe 50% of what it would have been had I worn one every day. So at my peak, my skill level was 50%. This morning, it was 10%. Now it's probably at 35%.
Was the skill ever down to 0% and lost? No. Did it degrade? Sure.
I learned a bit of Arabic once, and knew the alphabet decently well. That was 20+ years ago, and at this point I can't even write my own name anymore. That is a skill I've lost. 0% capacity right now to read even a single letter.
Which is to say that not every person that writes code is operating at 100% code knowledge and capabilities. I know some HTML, CSS, and JS among other things, but I'm like 5% at that level. I've worked with people that knew their stuff, but were sloppy and lazy and made mistakes. Maybe they're around 60% good at it. Will they ever lose that skill entirely? Maybe. But it might just degrade over time if they rely on LLMs to do the work.
Just like how the people that work in a Wonder Bread factory don't know how to bake bread, they know how to operate a bread-making machine.
As for security and reliance on LLMs code - no one should do that! But, as LLMs doing cybersecurity auditcs and attacks have readily shown, human code wasn't perfect. Far from it.
Someone that's lazy and sloppy and 2 years ago was writing bad code now can rely on the LLM to write bad code, and not know enough to QC it. That's someone that would rather run the bread making machine than bake the bread the right way because they don't value the product in the first place. If they're using their own bad code, or an LLM's bad code, what's the ultimate difference? Their poor skill erodes and degrades? Hard to be sympathetic to that when it's people that got paid well to shuffle along and barely do enough to get by sometimes and chose CS as a major in college for the money.