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I would like to advance a third option, which is that AI will create many, many more programmers, and new programming jobs will look different.

What do we call the emerging type of programming job where a person is instructing or orchestrating AIs and LLMs to do work while not necessarily knowing the lower level details (code)?

Including "AI" in the name feels wrong though, it's got a horseless carriage feel. All programming will involve AI, so including it in the name will be redundant.

The statement “All programming will include AI.” caught me attention. It seems like an optional, even niche tool at the moment. The prediction here being that it will become ubiquitous, perhaps to the same degree as using an IDE or to using auto code formatters.

I find myself and lots of others pondering on the impact of LLMs on software development to want to generalize to one big brush stroke, but I think the reality is going to be closer to what is described here.

I think we will see all three at the same time. Some AI-assisted software development will raise the bar for quality to previously cost-ineffective heights. Some AI-driven software will be the bare minimum, put together by people who could never have successfully written software before. And a great deal will be software of roughly the quality we see already, produced in less time, and in correspondingly greater quantity.

The general sentiment of this post is that there will be more jobs, not fewer. And that the impact on salaries (existing ones at least) won’t be much.

Some words of caution though:

But the adjustment won't be without pain: some shitty software will get shipped before we figure out how to put guardrails around AI-driven development. Some programmers who are currently shipping mediocre software will find themselves replaced by newer, faster, AI-assisted developers before they manage to learn AI tools themselves. Everyone will have a lot of learning to do. But what else is new? Software development has always evolved rapidly. Embrace change, and you'll be fine.

Via Seldo on Bluesky