[wincy]

In 1989 or so the man who later became my programming teacher at community college night school was at a party and a man who he knew came up to him and told him he was a programmer now too!

This confused my teacher as he knew this guy wasn’t super technical, and asked him more about it. I may have the details not exactly right but the man said something like “I use lotus notes every day!”

The word programmer had a very different meaning 40 years ago.

[voxl]

What makes you think that trend won't continue? In the Myspace era people constantly said "oh I know some html", now we will have people saying "oh I can make LLMs generate python"

Writing software has always been a skill with no ceiling. Writing software can be literally equivalent to doing research level mathematics. It can also be changing colors on a webpage. This is why I have never been worried about LLMs taking software jobs, but it is possible they will require the level of skill to be employable to spike.

[Wobbles42]

Perhaps there will be a lot more people who can write software as well as I can weld metal.

Welding is peculiar in that becoming a professional welder takes a great deal of time and effort (and probably some talent that I don't have), but becoming a terrible welder can be accomplished by anyone in a couple of weekends, and there is great utility in being a terrible welder. Well worth the investment of a couple hundred dollars and a couple weekends.

With LLMs there is now much more utility in being a terrible programmer too. A couple of weekends yields real return on the effort now.