Staff engineer here. First started writing code roughly 24 years ago, been doing it professionally in one form or another for about 18 years. Many years ago I w

Staff engineer here. First started writing code roughly 24 years ago, been doing it professionally in one form or another for about 18 years. Many years ago I was asked how I planned to compete - because all IT was being offshored to other countries who worked cheaper and had more training in math than I did. I've been asked whether no-code platforms would make us obsolete. I've wondered if quantum computing would make everything we know become obsolete. Now people are wondering whether LLM tools will make us obsolete. All these things make us more productive. Right now I'm excited by AI tools that are integrated into my IDE and offer to finish my thoughts with a stroke of the 'Tab' key. I'm also very underwhelmed by the AI tools that try to implement the entire project. You seem to be talking about the latter. For the type of coding exercises we do for fun (test drive an implementation of Conway's Game of Life), LLM's are good at them and are going to get better. For the type of coding exercises we do for pay (build a CRUD API), LLM's are mediocre at them. They can give you a starting point, but you're going to do a lot of fiddling to get the schema and business logic right. For the type of coding exercises we do for a lot of pay (build something to solve a new problem in a new way), LLM's are pretty terrible. Without an existing body of work to draw from, they produce code that is either very wrong or subtly flawed in ways that are difficult to detect unless you are an expert in the field. Right now, they are best used as a productivity enhancer that's autocomplete on steroids. Down the road they'll continue to offer better productivity improvements. But it's very unlikely they will ever (or at least in our lifetimes) entirely replace a smart developer who is an expert in their field. Companies know that the only way to create experts is to maintain a talent pipeline and keep training junior developers in hope that they become experts. Software development has continued to grow faster than we can find talent. There's currently no indication of LLM's closing that gap.