A couple reasons why I am not scared of AI taking my job:
1. They are trained to be average coders.
The way LLMs are trained is by giving them lots of examples of previous coding tasks. By definition, half of those examples are below average. Unless there is a breakthrough on how they are trained any above average coder won't have anything to worry about.
2. They are a tool that can (and should) be used by humans.
Computers are much better at chess than any human, but a human with a computer is better than any computer. The same is true with a coding LLM. Any SWE who can work with an LLM will be much better than any LLM.
3. There is enough work for both.
I have never worked for a company where I have had less work when I left than when I started. I worked for one company where it was estimated that I had about 2 years worth of work to do and 7 years later, when I left, I had about 5 years of work left. Hopefully LLMs will be able to take some of the tedious work so we can focus on harder tasks, but most likely the more we are able to accomplish the more there will be to accomplish.
Have you ever been working on a project and ran "yarn install pkg" only to realize that the project you are working on doesn't use yarn so now you have to delete the yarn lock file and re-run the command with npm? Welcome to the future!! Just use "nstl" and you don't have to care about which package manager to use, or which arguments to use. Is it --save-dev or --dev? No one cares. use whichever one you want.
Drivers. Try buying anything that you have to plug into your Linux machine. It is not easy figuring out if it works on your version of Linux. You can read so many reviews on how great it works for this other version of Linux but when you get it there is still a big chance it will not work, or it worked last year than something changed so you have to downgrade or use this software that hasn't been updated on five years.
My first PHP app was an invoicing application. It is ~3500 lines of php in a single file. Most of which is a few heredocs with javascript to be in lined on the client side. I haven't touched the code in 10 years. I still use it for my freelance invoicing.
1. They are trained to be average coders.
The way LLMs are trained is by giving them lots of examples of previous coding tasks. By definition, half of those examples are below average. Unless there is a breakthrough on how they are trained any above average coder won't have anything to worry about.
2. They are a tool that can (and should) be used by humans.
Computers are much better at chess than any human, but a human with a computer is better than any computer. The same is true with a coding LLM. Any SWE who can work with an LLM will be much better than any LLM.
3. There is enough work for both.
I have never worked for a company where I have had less work when I left than when I started. I worked for one company where it was estimated that I had about 2 years worth of work to do and 7 years later, when I left, I had about 5 years of work left. Hopefully LLMs will be able to take some of the tedious work so we can focus on harder tasks, but most likely the more we are able to accomplish the more there will be to accomplish.