I remember that. I studied CS in that period and some professors were convinced that software development was going to become an unskilled job, analogous to bricklaying, and that our goal as future CS graduates should be to become managers, just like someone that studies a university degree about making buildings is intended to become an architect and not a bricklayer.

I never believed it, though (if I had, I would probably have switched degrees, as I hate management). And while the belief was common, my impression is that it was only so among people who didn't code much. The details on how it would happen were always highly handwavy and people defending that view had a tendency to ignore any software beyond standard CRUD apps.

In contrast, if I had to choose a degree right now, I'd probably avoid CS (or at most study it out of passion, like one could study English philology or something, but without much hope of it being a safe choice for my career). I think the prospects for programmers in the LLM era look much scarier, and the threats look much more real, than they ever did in that period.

It's a bit too generalizing that it failed and happens "now and then", offshoring is a multi-billion industry employing millions of people.

And the "unskilled people putting together legos" is also very much a thing in the form of low/no-code platforms, from my own circles there's Mendix and Tibco, arguably SAP, and probably a heap more. Arguably (my favorite word atm) it's also still true in most software development because outside of coding business logic, most heavy lifting is done by the language's SDK and 3rd party libraries.

I'm still of the opinion that coding will be the last thing to go. LLMs are an enabler, sure, but until they integrate some form of neuroplasticity they're stuck working on Memento-guy-sized chunks of code. They need a human programmer to provide long context.

Maybe some new technique will change that, but it's not guaranteed. At this point I think we can safely surmise that scaling isn't the answer.

> before LLMs I definitely thought coding would be the last thing to go.

While LLMs do still struggle to produce high quality code as a function of prompt quality and available training data, many human software developers are surprised that LLMs (software) can generate quality software at all.

I wonder to what extent this surprise is because people tend to think very deeply when writing software and assume thinking and "reasoning" are what produce quality software. What if the experience of "thinking" and "reasoning" are epiphenomena of the physical statistical models present in the connections of our brains?

This is an unsolved and ancient philosophical problem (i.e. the problem of duality) of whether consciousness and free will affect the physical world. If we live in a materialist universe where matter and the laws of physics are unaffected by consciousness then "thinking", "reasoning", and "free will" are purely subjective. In such a view, subjective experience attends material changes in the world but does not affect the material world.

Software developers surprised by the capabilities of software (LLMs) to write software might not be so surprised if they understood consciousness as an epiphenomenon of materiality. Just as words do not cause diaphragms to compress lungs to move air past vocal cords and propagate air vibrations, perhaps the thoughts that attend action (including the production of words) are not the motive force of those actions.