I think this is very real, and will act as a force towards center of gravity of the LLMs which means popular and established tech. It might even create a divide

I think this is very real, and will act as a force towards center of gravity of the LLMs which means popular and established tech. It might even create a divide between ”prompt engineer engineers” and those who understand. That assumes using LLMs will not improve your understanding compared to traditional means which isn’t necessarily true. I dislike LLMs as coders but for learning new topics quickly they are better than obscure literature or googling for deep blog posts. That said the pure prompt engineers might suffer similar fate as Stack Overflow engineers, for another reason: the limiting factor of building software is not shitting out code or even tests, it’s curbing the accumulated total complexity in the project as it grows. This is incredibly hard even for humans but the best engineers can reduce it. These most difficult problems have at least 2-3 properties that make them almost impossible for LLMs today: they’re non-local, hard to quantify and have enough constraints to mandate solutions that end in the fringes of training data set. Even simple self-contained LLM solutions introduce more complexity than necessary.