Shift feels real. LLMs don't replace devs, but they do compress the value curve. The top 10% get even more leverage, and the bottom 50% become harder to justify.
What worries me isn't layoffs but that entry-level roles become rare, and juniors stop building real intuition because the LLM handles all the hard thinking.
You get surface-level productivity but long-term skill rot.
> juniors stop building real intuition because the LLM handles all the hard thinking. You get surface-level productivity but long-term skill rot.
This was a real problem pre-LLM anyway. A popular article from 2012, How Developers Stop Learning[0], coined the term "expert beginner" for developers who displayed moderate competency at typical workflows, e.g. getting a feature to work, without a deeper understanding of lower levels, or a wider high-level view.
Ultimately most developers don't care, they want to collect a paycheck and go home. LLMs don't change this; the dev who randomly adds StackOverflow snippets to "fix" a crash without understanding the root cause was never going to gain a deeper understanding, the same way the dev who blindly copy&pastes from an LLM won't either.
> Ultimately most developers don't care, they want to collect a paycheck and go home. LLMs don't change this; the dev who randomly adds StackOverflow snippets to "fix" a crash without understanding the root cause was never going to gain a deeper understanding, the same way the dev who blindly copy&pastes from an LLM won't either.
I read this appraisal of what "most devs" want/care about on HN frequently. Is there actually any evidence to back this up? e.g. broad surveys where most devs say they're just in it for the paycheck and don't care about the quality of their work?
To argue against myself: modern commercial software is largely a dumpster fire, so there could well be truth to the idea!
> I read this appraisal of what "most devs" want/care about on HN frequently. Is there actually any evidence to back this up? e.g. broad surveys where most devs say they're just in it for the paycheck and don't care about the quality of their work?
Almost every field I've ever seen is like that. Most people don't know what they're doing and hate their jobs in every field. We managed to make even the conceptually most fulfilling jobs awful (teaching, medicine, etc).
You could say the same sort of thing about compilers, or higher-level languages versus lower-level languages.
That's not to say that you're wrong. Most people who use those things don't have a very good idea of what's going on in the next layer down. But it's not new.
Complex technology --> Moat --> Barrier to entry --> regulatory capture --> Monopoly == Winner take all --> capital consolidation
A tale as old as time. It's a shame we can't seem to remember this lesson repeating itself over and over and over again every 20-30-50 years. Probably because the winners keep throwing billions at capitalist supply-side propaganda.
What worries me isn't layoffs but that entry-level roles become rare, and juniors stop building real intuition because the LLM handles all the hard thinking.
You get surface-level productivity but long-term skill rot.