[frje1400]

Here's a thought experiment: think about what you did at work in the last few weeks, but instead of you doing it, someone that doesn't know programming is given those tasks instead. They have state of the art LLMs to help them. How would they do?

In my particular case, they might make some progress on the React component I worked on. I did use ChatGPT myself to get some help with CSS (the part of my current stack that I'm least proficient in). They would make zero progress on our big Java service because it's simply too custom for an LLM to be of much help.

For the database stuff that I also did, it was mainly about reading official docs and testing assumptions and behaviour based on those, something that you would think an LLM would be great at, but the answers I got when I tried weren't really helpful. The issues were too specific to certain versions of dependencies and in some cases, the docs' recommendations were questionable. I then had to convince other devs that my findings were correct and that we could go ahead with the, potentially risky, change.

So no, I don't think programming is dead. Not yet anyway. Who knows what the future might bring.