I'm surprised so many people are only waking up to this now. It should have been obvious as soon as ChatGPT came out that even with only incremental improvements, LLMs would kill programming as we knew it. And the fact that these utterances, however performative, from developers expressing grief or existential despair have become commonplace tells me as much about the power of these systems than whatever demo Anthropic or OpenAI has cooked up.

I would also point out that the author, and many AI enthusiasts, still make certain optimistic assumptions about the future role of "developer," insisting that the nature of the work will change, but that it will somehow, in large measure, remain. I doubt that. I could easily envision a future where the bulk of software development becomes something akin to googling--just typing the keywords you think are relevant until the black box gives you what you want. And we don't pay people to google, or at least, we don't pay them very much.