I still differentiate between code monkeys, coders, programmers, hackers and software developers/engineers. Software development is not coding alone, you need to follow best practices and principles to create a stable, maintainable and trustworthy product, one that _you_ or your company owns. Maybe "code monkeys" (which is a minority) are replaceable. But for now, LLM cannot have a wider vision for your products future. The willingness of building something durable is totally human. To make this possible professional software developers are still mandatory and they will be for a long time. And yes, I think is it possible to learn those best practice and principle without coding. But I think this is very hard and boring.

Building software for me has always been about creatin a set of concepts (data structures, basic behaviors) out of the primitives of the platform (language, libraries,…) and then coordinate their behavior according to the requirements.

Based on comments here, LLM users belong in two categories: Those that don’t understand the previous paragraph and those that believe they can get the concepts and coordination out of prompts and specs.

But for both of them, there’s a common trait, which is not caring about maintenance. And you can observe this today where most AI projects either don’t survive the public release or have to revert to more traditional methods.