The recurring dream of replacing developers

Tim Bryce was kind of the anti Scott Adams: he felt that programmers were people of mediocre intelligence at best that thought they were so damn smart, when really if they were so smart, they'd move into management or business analysis where they could have a real impact, and not be content with the scutwork of translating business requirements into machine-executable code. As it is, they don't have the people skills or big-picture systems thinking to really pull it off, and that combined with their snobbery made them a burden to an organization unless they were effectively managed—such as with his methodology PRIDE, which you could buy direct from his web site.

Oddly enough, in a weird horseshoe-theory instance of convergent psychological evolution, Adams and Bryce both ended up Trump supporters.

Ultimately, however, "the Bryce was right": the true value in software development lies not in the lines of code but in articulating what needs to be automated and how it can benefit the business. The more precisely you nail this down, the more programming becomes a mechanical task. Your job as a developer is to deliver the most value to the customer with the least possible cost. (Even John Carmack agrees with this.) This requires thinking like a business, in terms of dollars and cents (and people), not bits and bytes. And as AI becomes a critical component of software development, business thinking will become more necessary and technical thinking, much less so. Programmers as a professional class will be drastically reduced or eliminated, and replaced with business analysts with some technical understanding but real strength on the business/people side, where the real value gets added. LLMs meaningfully allow people to issue commands to computers in people language, for the very first time. As they evolve they will be more capable of implementing business requirements expressed directly in business language, without an intermediator to translate those requirements into code (i.e., the programmer). This was always the goal, and it's within reach.

I was working with developer training for a while some 5-10 years back and already then I was starting to see some signs of an incoming over-saturation, the low interest rates probably masked much of it due to happy go lucky investments sucking up developers.

Low hanging and cheap automation,etc work is quickly dwindling now, especially as development firms are searching out new niches when the big "in-IT" customers aren't buying services inside the industry.

Luckily people will retire and young people probably aren't as bullish about the industry anymore, so we'll probably land in an equilebrium, the question is how long it'll take, because the long tail of things enabled by the mobile/tablet revolution is starting to be claimed.

I can see the 2030s dev doing more original research with mundane tasks put to LLM. Courses will cover manual coding, assembler etc. for a good foundation. But that'll be like an uber driver putting on a spare tire.

Really?

Is this reflected in wages and hiring? I work for a company that makes a hardware product with mission-critical support software. The software team dwarfs the hardware team, and is paid quite well. Now they're exempt from "return to office."

I attended a meeting to move a project into development phase, and at one point the leader got up and said: "Now we've been talking about the hardware, but of course we all know that what's most important is the software."

It is what he can deliver.