A long time ago, I held the grandiose title of software architect. My job was to describe in a mix of diagrams, natural language and method signatures what deve

A long time ago, I held the grandiose title of software architect. My job was to describe in a mix of diagrams, natural language and method signatures what developers were supposed to do. The back and forth was agonising. They were all competent software engineers but communicating with them was often far more work than just writing the damn code myself. So yes I do believe that our trade has changed forever. But the fact that some of our coworkers will be AIs doesn't mean that communicating with them is suddenly free. Communcation comes with costs (and I don't mean tokens). That won't change. If you know your stuff really well, i.e. you work on a familiar codebase using a familiar toolset, the shortest path from your intentions to finished code will often not include anyone else - no humans and no AI either. In my opinion, "LLMs are only marginally useful in coding" is not true in general, but it could well be true for a specific person and a specific coding task.