[jtlicardo]

I agree that you still need programming skills (today, at least). Yet people are using those programming skills less and less, as you can clearly see in the article [1] I referenced.

You are also making the assumption that LLMs won't improve, which I think is shortsighted.

I fully agree with the part about the job becoming more like product management. I would like to cite an excerpt of a post [2] by Andrew Ng, which I found valuable:

Writing software, especially prototypes, is becoming cheaper. This will lead to increased demand for people who can decide what to build. AI Product Management has a bright future! Software is often written by teams that comprise Product Managers (PMs), who decide what to build (such as what features to implement for what users) and Software Developers, who write the code to build the product. Economics shows that when two goods are complements — such as cars (with internal-combustion engines) and gasoline — falling prices in one leads to higher demand for the other. For example, as cars became cheaper, more people bought them, which led to increased demand for gas. Something similar will happen in software. Given a clear specification for what to build, AI is making the building itself much faster and cheaper. This will significantly increase demand for people who can come up with clear specs for valuable things to build. (...) Many companies have an Engineer:PM ratio of, say, 6:1. (The ratio varies widely by company and industry, and anywhere from 4:1 to 10:1 is typical.) As coding becomes more efficient, teams will need more product management work (as well as design work) as a fraction of the total workforce.

To address your last point - no, I am not saying people should skip learning a whole way of thinking. In fact, the skills I outline for the future (supervising AI, evaluating results) all require understanding programming concepts and system thinking. They do not, however, require manual debugging, writing lines of code by hand, a deep understanding of syntax, reading stack traces and googling for answers.

[1] https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-illiterate-programmers

[2] https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-284/

[chriswait]

Obviously I assume LLMs will continue to improve, I don't know why you'd think I don't.

But the actual relevant prediction here (the one you're confident enough about to give skills development advice on) is whether they'll improve sufficiently that programming is no longer a relevant skill.

I think that's possible, but I'm not nearly so confident I'd write your article: LLMs went mainstream ~2 years ago, and they still have some pretty basic limitations when it comes to computational/mathematical reasoning, which they'll need to solve novel software engineering tasks. (Articles about these limitations get posted here pretty frequently)

To your second point, I'm still not sure how you will debug someone else's code without learning to write code yourself, because you need to be able to read code, and understand it well enough to execute it inside your mind. I am not totally convinced you understand the difference between "understanding programming concepts" and "being able to understand whether this code works".

Sorry if this comes across as rude, but I think the reason the feedback on your post is overall quite negative is that you're excited about AI making this job much easier, and your advice about which skills are worth learning are too confident. Ironically I think an LLM would give a more balanced view than you have.

[jtlicardo]

LLMs have already improved sufficiently that people are worried their programming skills are decaying, debugging skills included (based on the article I referenced). I'm curious to see how you envision LLMs improving without this not becoming even more pronounced. Isn't that the definition of a skill slowly becoming irrelevant? The fact that you can see you are not using it as much?

As for the reception, I did not expect it to be positive. People usually have a strong negative emotional reaction when you suggest their skills are, or are going to become, less relevant.