"Computer" use to be a job title. So no, I am not optimistic about the future of most programmers, maybe even all programmers.

One possibility is that software starts to look more like traditional manufacturing.

The machine is the company’s core asset. The engineer only needs to know how to operate the machine well. Once that happens, the barrier gets much lower, need much less people, and the job naturally become much less valuable. Some parts will still need to be done by hand, of course. But only a very small part. It is like old factories. They used to need lots of fitters, at all levels of skill. Now you only need a few of the elite ones.

AI is the CNC machine of the software industry.

The more pessimistic future is that, maybe five years from now, the best programmers will look at AI the same way the best Go or chess players look at AI today: Like KeJie said, "I don't even know what I am trying so hard against." We now have a new SOTA every two months. It just took 18 months for LLMs from reasoning models to disproving the unit distance conjecture. ChatGPT itself has not even existed for as long as a college student spends in university.

In any case, we have already passed the point where this can be rolled back.

Maybe ten years from now I will be leaving a comment saying that "programmer" used to be a job too :-/

Programming is the low-hanging fruit for AI. Open source and knowledge sharing have given it huge amount of public, high-quality training data at a level other industries can hardly imagine. And almost everything in programming can be tested and verified inside the computer quickly in a closed loop. No robot arm is needed.

The main weakness of current LLMs is still that they are static: They do not really change themselves through use. Harness tools are just elaborate ornamentation on top of prompts. LLMs are frozen at the moment training stops. Once we get models that can change their own weights through self-feedback, then maybe AGI really is on the horizon.

Thinking optimistically: I may be lucky enough to see it in my lifetime. Maybe by then, people will be able to live more like human beings, instead of organizing their whole lives around work :-)

Thank you for your comment. I enjoyed it a lot. Good food for thought.

Your analogon is a bit leaky abstraction in the sense that it misses out on the broad stastical nature of LLMs. However, I find it is a good way to illustrate the potential industrial transformation.

It is hard to say what the future will bring. The original AsK HN post is definitly an omen for things to come.