Search for that title on your search engine of preference and you’ll find articles over articles of people calling for teaching people how to code in an attempt to keep them in the working force after their jobs became less desired or relevant. There were start-ups actively doing this professional conversion education sort of thing, some of them quite successful and even the folks out of a job found a job. It was a relatively noble albeit definitely tone-deaf attempt at a solution from a segment of people that weren’t maybe used to the issue they were solving.
Funnily enough, (it’s not funny at all, neither was what the coal miners went through) we’re now in the coal mines ourselves along with a large proportion of the world.
I’ll try not to get too deep into the “yes, LLMs can code and think of solutions” since I want to make that a separate article that said LLMs will be able to crawl without giving me a single penny, so we’re using that as a working affirmation for now. LLMs can code and think of solutions.
I’ve been using LLMs more and more in my day-to-day, from a psychological crutch at times, health, cooking, fixing things, or coding a ridiculous amount of ridiculous things in a fraction of the time it took me to do before, and it’s great – in a vacuum at least. I don’t think I have a chart, but I’d have to say that starting sometime in 2024 my usage exponentially increased after I noticed it’s suddenly good enough to code non-trivial things as well. People in my team were using it since 2023 in a different way, closer to a StackOverflow workflow but from discussions that also changed in their usage in 2024, I’ve been fine with it as a manager solely because in the end we can ship more things faster and the business is happy with it. Obviously, a lot of caveats apply there but in short – it’s been good.
The issue comes when this extreme comfort and convenience is actually the shovel digging the ground underneath us, which I suppose was true for the coal miners that bought a Prius. LLMs in a way stole some things from us with this convenience, for example – there’s absolutely zero reason for me to write code out of pleasure anymore strictly because there’s no pleasure in doing that anymore, I tend to compare it to doing maths on a napkin “for fun” or using an abacus instead of calculator, I fail to see anything fun in that – I’d only see it as fun if I’d do it for the mental benefits of learning proper algebra maaaybe.
So now, the fun part I started thinking about recently was the demoscene, you know, writing assembly to output graphics on hilariously underpowered microprocessors. That sounds fun, because despite LLMs potentially being able to write said Assembly, they’re most certainly not capable of opening my box-of-shit, pulling out an ATTiny85 (which isn’t underpowered by demoscene standards) and a few resistors and hooking it up to a CRT. It’ll probably know how to guide me to do exactly that, but it will never actually be able to do it.
The fact that it’s digging isn’t even a point of contention anymore, a bit before writing this article I stumbled upon this discussion linked on HackerNews where Adam Wathan is being spoken quite sharply to a day after he had to let go 75% of Tailwind (LLMs’ favourite CSS framework) employees since despite usage going up by a lot, revenue dropped by 80%. Shitty time to be an OSS guy that made possible quite a few of my random LLM written projects, and I can’t but feel for the guy, I wouldn’t know how to manage this issue and I’m certain such issues are becoming more and more common in a lot of industries.
As for me, and statistically you, I’m actively targeted by LLMs powers, I’m an SRE that turned manager, I had to write code in basically any role I’ve had so far – but that’s starting to be less and less required, or more nuanced – that requires less and less people than it used to. I’m not a doomer by any means, LLMs are here to stay and they shouldn’t be cut out (since we literally can’t) but I’m unsure of what comes next and how we should go about it.
I’m left with some questions in the end, feel free to spark a discussion.
The manager path I’m on right now is less affected at this point, but LLMs could objectively be a better manager than any of us – they’re there, they’ve read all the books!
At what point should we give up and start growing food or fixing cars? Both are things that I’d enjoy, I’m particularly good at the latter, although I’ll miss the luxury afforded to me by the remote lifestyle (can’t help but think it might do wonders for my mental health).
How do we get the people building the blocks paid? The Tailwind team for example, 75% is a huge amount in percentage-talk, but that’s people in the end, people that built the tools that LLMs are using so efficiently now that it put them out of a job. I’ve read something about X402 but it doesn’t seem like a standard, it seems like crypto-wishful thinking, the real world needs invoices, receipts, approvals and so on.