Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers. While you can see them as a productivity enhancing tool, in times of tight budgets, they can be useful to lay off more programmers because a single one is now way more productive than pre-LLM. I feel that LLMs will increase the barrier…
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.
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.
[0] https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...