Yeah, I've been quite skeptical of LLMs, but I was wrong. The new models are capable of generating good quality code reasonably reliably. They still do some dumb things, but it's becoming more capable of one-shotting non-trivial stuff. I've no idea what software development will look like in a decade beyond absolutely nothing whatsoever what it looks like today. Even if we get sublinear progress from now on out, the current SOTA is already enough to redefine coding.

In general I expect the value of software, as a thing in and of itself, to sharply decline. With no barriers to entry, having software that just does something competently will no longer be worth much of anything. It's unclear what that will mean in the bigger picture. It'll also be interesting if this proves correct, given that software companies are largely the ones dumping so much money into this. Another probable outcome is major damage to the support-as-a-service model which again is going to directly affect many of the companies directly enabling this.

I guess the logic is that if you control the systems creating this, you control everything they're used for. But it seems equally obvious that free/local models will catch up to the SOTA today - and eventually tomorrow, so that's not a particularly realistic vision for the future.