As a junior, this scares me. I don't think I'll be out of a job soon, but certainly the job market will change drastically and the times where SWEs are paid like doctors and lawyers will end?
Make sure you learn a lot. Ask the LLMs to explain anything you don't deeply understand. With all of these coding assistants, there will be many juniors that get a lot done, but don't really understand what they are doing, and their worth will drop quickly.
So far LLMs are great at producing code, but not at architecture or maintenance.
Who's to say that their worth will really drop. We already live in a world where security and performance are largely forgotten aspects when it comes to software.
Unfortunately I fear we will just enter an era of general slop where people get away with creating without really understanding. It sucks for anyone who is actually passionate and curious and really investing the time.
Across most of the world SWE's aren't paid like this anyway. It really is only the US that has this level of pay for the SWE staff unless you are into a different domain specialty (e.g. trading/finance) in which case you aren't just paid for coding knowledge.
Coding is the real market for LLM's - it is the "killer app". I'm starting to think that a possibility is that for most jobs it ends up being a "what was all the hype about" but for SWE's it will be carnage globally w.r.t jobs. They aren't generally intelligent (lots of hallucinations in other domains), but with RL can be trained on the mountains of open source software out there to displace software.
Software developers automating their own jobs away. The promise of "free software" with open source was realised - just not as people envisioned it.
No other profession would do this or at least not as fast. As a honest answer, as much as I want to be wrong, I don't recommend new comers join the industry unless they really want to do it and are happy taking the risk. The uncertainty is high right now, and the anxiety these tools are giving quite a number of people I talk to is very high. Capitalism doesn't reward value or how much is built - it allocates resources and rewards people who produce into scarce markets. AI makes the product of code significantly less scarce.
