Firstly, as many commenters have mentioned, I don't see AI taking jobs en masse. They simply aren't accurate enough and they tend to generate more code faster which ends up needing more maintenance.
Advice #1: do work on your own mind. Try to improve your personal organization. Look into methodologies like GTD. Get into habits of building discipline. Get into the habit of storing information and documentation. From my observations many developers simply can't process many threads at once, making their bottleneck their own minds.
Advice #2: lean into "metis"-heavy tasks. There are many programming tasks which can be easily automated: making a app scaffold, translating a simple algorithm, writing tests, etc. This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to real SWE work though. The intricate connections between databases and services, the steps you have to go through to debug that one feature, the hack you have to make in the code so the code behaves differently in the testing environment, and so on. LLMs require legibility to function: a clean slate, no tech-debt, low entropy, order, etc. Metis is a term talked about in the book "Seeing Like a State" and it encompasses knowledge and skills gained through experience which is hard to transfer. Master these dark corners, hack your way around the code, create personal scripts for random one-off tasks. Learn how to poke and pry the systems you work on to get out the information you want.
Yep, massive LOC means massive maintenance. Maybe the LLMs can maintain their own code? I'm skeptical. I feel like they can easily code themselves into an unmaintainable corner.
But maybe the times that happens is so rare and low that you just hire a human to unstuck the whole thing and get it running again. Maybe we'll become more like mechanics you visit every now and then for an expensive, quick job, vs an annual retainer.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a developer who enjoys refactoring a messy, bug ridden code base. This is the reason why rewrites happen, nobody wants to touch the old code with a ten foot pole and it’s easier to just rewrite it all.
So if you turn the entire job into that? I don’t think skilled people will be lining up to do it. Maybe consulting firms would take that on I guess.
Advice #1: do work on your own mind. Try to improve your personal organization. Look into methodologies like GTD. Get into habits of building discipline. Get into the habit of storing information and documentation. From my observations many developers simply can't process many threads at once, making their bottleneck their own minds.
Advice #2: lean into "metis"-heavy tasks. There are many programming tasks which can be easily automated: making a app scaffold, translating a simple algorithm, writing tests, etc. This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to real SWE work though. The intricate connections between databases and services, the steps you have to go through to debug that one feature, the hack you have to make in the code so the code behaves differently in the testing environment, and so on. LLMs require legibility to function: a clean slate, no tech-debt, low entropy, order, etc. Metis is a term talked about in the book "Seeing Like a State" and it encompasses knowledge and skills gained through experience which is hard to transfer. Master these dark corners, hack your way around the code, create personal scripts for random one-off tasks. Learn how to poke and pry the systems you work on to get out the information you want.