LLMs are getting better at coding. This may be news to people that have tried CoPilot or other AI assistants and decided they weren’t useful enough but work is happening to improve them. My take is that they’re not going to directly take your job but someone using LLMs to be more productive could.

If you’re a developer then this could be scary. I like to think of the story of the plumber who gets called out to fix a broken heating system. He walks round for ten minutes, listening to the system, then he thumps it in a specific place. It’s fixed and the happy customer asks for the bill. $250 says the plumber. “$250! but it took ten minutes and you just thumped it in one place” says the customer. The plumber replies “The breakdown is $5 for thumping it, $245 for knowing where to thump.”

The value that a developer should be adding is knowing what code needs to exist to meet the business objectives. LLMs can help with the code but there will still be a lot of work for those who know how to tell them what code to actually generate.