If you're on HN there's a good chance you've self-selected into "caring about the craft and looking for roles that require more attention."
You need to care if (a) your business logic requirements are super annoyingly complex, (b) you have hard performance requirements, or (c) both. (c) is the most rare, (a) is the most common of those three conditions; much of the programmer pay disparity between the top and the middle or bottom is due to this, but even the jobs where the complexity is "only" business requirements tend to be quite a bit better compensated than the "simple requirements, simple needs" ones.
I think there's a case to be made that LLM tools will likely make it harder for people to make that jump, if they want to. (Alternately they could advance to the point where the distinction changes a bit, and is more purely architectural; or they could advance to the point where anyone can use an LLM to do anything - but there are so many conditional nuances to what the "right decision" is in any given scenario there that I'm skeptical.)
A lot of times floor-raising things don't remove the levels, they just push everything higher. Like a cheap crap movie today will visually look "better" from a technology POV (sharpness, special effects, noise, etc) than Jurassic Park from the 90s, but the craft parts won't (shot framing, deliberate shifts of focus, selection of the best takes). So everyone will just get more efficient and more will be expected, but still stratified.
And so some people will still want to figure out how to go from a lower-paying job to a higher-paying one. And hopefully there are still opportunities, and we don't just turn into other fields, picking by university reputations and connections.
> You need to care if (a) your business logic requirements are super annoyingly complex, (b) you have hard performance requirements, or (c) both. (c) is the most rare
But one of the most fun things you can do is C: creative game development coding. Like coding world simulations etc, you want to be both very fast but the rules and interactions etc is very coupled and complex compared to most regular enterprise logic that is more decoupled.
So while most work programmers do fits A, the work people dream about doing is C, and that means LLM doesn't help you make fun things, it just removes the boring jobs.
You need to care if (a) your business logic requirements are super annoyingly complex, (b) you have hard performance requirements, or (c) both. (c) is the most rare, (a) is the most common of those three conditions; much of the programmer pay disparity between the top and the middle or bottom is due to this, but even the jobs where the complexity is "only" business requirements tend to be quite a bit better compensated than the "simple requirements, simple needs" ones.
I think there's a case to be made that LLM tools will likely make it harder for people to make that jump, if they want to. (Alternately they could advance to the point where the distinction changes a bit, and is more purely architectural; or they could advance to the point where anyone can use an LLM to do anything - but there are so many conditional nuances to what the "right decision" is in any given scenario there that I'm skeptical.)
A lot of times floor-raising things don't remove the levels, they just push everything higher. Like a cheap crap movie today will visually look "better" from a technology POV (sharpness, special effects, noise, etc) than Jurassic Park from the 90s, but the craft parts won't (shot framing, deliberate shifts of focus, selection of the best takes). So everyone will just get more efficient and more will be expected, but still stratified.
And so some people will still want to figure out how to go from a lower-paying job to a higher-paying one. And hopefully there are still opportunities, and we don't just turn into other fields, picking by university reputations and connections.