I have some doubt here, because I do know that managers of at least some seniority have the political antennae to be wary of taking responsibility for something they don’t understand blowing up in their face. If they use LLMs directly, then the number of production outages will increase with the use of these powertools in unskilled inexperienced hands. The causes will probably just tilt towards design mistakes and unforeseen exceptions rather than coding language defects. I can see them wanting to keep some techies around simply to have someone to blame. You don’t get far up the ladder without learning how to cover your ass.

> managers will simply direct them

that Made me laugh. what you say won't happen. it's not that AI won't be sufficiently intelligent, it's that managers are not.

I don't think they'll let the chain of managers above you handle the llm directly. That is just too much risk of incompetence. Instead, there will be micro teams (1 dev, 1 sre, 1 product owner) that are meta manageed by a LLM. And their llm reports directly to a higher up's llm. And software will diversify to prevent all these supply chain attacks we've seen lately.

Managers can barely direct me without shitting their pants. What saves them most of the time is my ability to say "No". Until LLMs can do that, which seems quite hard to do so far, good luck replacing me.

To all the managers reading this and thinking "phew. so long suckers!", I'd be willing do what you do for 50% of the pay. Surely it is _I_ that will be irreplaceable!