Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

why is the LLM-compiler analogy flawed? Is it only because LLM output is non deterministic?

I really wish seemingly intelligent people would stop using the abstraction analogy (like the article does). The key word is: determinism. Every level of abstraction (inc. power tools, C, etc.) added a deterministic layer you can rely on to more effectively do whatever it is that you're doing - same result, every time. LLM's use natural language to describe programming and the result is varied at the very best (hence agents, so we can brute force the result instead). I think the real moat is becoming the person who can actually still program.

We are experiencing what Civil Engineers experienced going from slide rules to calculators. Or electrical engineers going from manual circuit path drawing to CAD tools.

The interesting thing to me is that, Software Engineering will have to evolve. Processes and tools will have to evolve, as they had evolved through the years.

When I was finishing university in 2004, we learned about the "crisis of software " time, the Cascade development process and how new "iterative methods" were starting.

We learned about how spaghetti code gave way to Pascal/C structured prpgramming, which gave way to OOP.

Engineering methods also evolved, with UML being one infamous language, but also formal methods such as Z language for formal verification; or ABC or cyclomatic complexity measurements of software complexity.

Which brings me to Today: Now that computers are writing MOST of the code; the value of current languages and software dev processes is decreasing. Programming Languages are made for people (otherwise we would continue writing in Assembler). So now we have to change the abstractions we use to communicate our intent to the computers, and to verify that the final instructions are doing what we wanted.

I'm very interested to see these new abstractions. I even believe that, given that all the small details of coding will be fully automated, MAYBE we will finally see more Engineering (real engineering) Rigor in the Software Engineering profession. Even if there still will be coders, the same way there are non-engineers building and modifying houses (common in Mexico at least)

Seems the solution here is the same it's actually always been if you want career progression: be more than just a code jockey. The true value of an engineer is to be plugged into overall roadmaps, broader thinking around product, how to achieve company goals, etc etc.

Yes, LLMs might dramatically reduce the amount of code we write by hand. But I'm a lot less convinced they'll solve all of the amorphous, human-interacting aspects of the job.

The argument is that “that’s what always happened in the past”.

Which is true, but it’s true as long as it’s not true.

The classic example of how drastically this kind of thinking can fail is Malthusian theory, that populations would collapse because food growth was linear while population growth was exponential. This was true for all of history until Malthus actually made this observation.

At a mechanistic level, the “we have always found other jobs” argument misses that the reason we’ve always found other jobs is because humans have always had an intelligence advantage over automation. Even something as mechanical as human inputs in an assembly line was eventually dependent on the human ability to make tiny, often imperceptibly, adjustments that a robot couldn’t.

But if something approximating AGI does work out, human labor has absolutely no advantage over automation so it’s not clear why the past “automation has created more human jobs” logic should continue.