As a software engineer who uses AI agents daily, let me tell you: now is as good a time as any to learn to code. LLMs won't replace any developers.

We are still a long ways away from AI being able to replace programmers. The amount of sheer bullshit code and wrong stuff it writes currently will cripple any information system currently keeping economies up and running.

Learn code anyway. LLMs can't code worth a shit, so there will be plenty of jobs available to clean up their mess.

LLMs can recite code when asked properly, with a lot of errors. Trying to put code together with it without understanding how said code works is a greater insanity, than making random numbers with mathematics.

The real reason why there's a downtick in coding jobs is due to Xitter not imploding immediately after the mass firings. Now coders are working overtime with skeleton teams on the same problems, while being overburdened and making more mistakes.

The Learn To Code hype was being driven by employers to create a work surplus to drive wages down. Now those same employers think they can use AI instead.

The code will break and they will be back. People are buying into the bullshit until they realize its just marketing and has no practical application

It's not so much we need manual labor but skilled technical labor. Like plumbing, electrical, working with pulse logic controllers, Mason, welder, Nursing, emergency room technicians. Etc

Remember when Biden told coal miners to learn to code

"My liberal friends were saying, 'You can't expect them to be able to do that,'" Biden told his New Hampshire audience. "Gimme a break! Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program for God's sake."

These politicians and policy makers don’t know what they talk about when it comes to tech. Any one who tells you that programming jobs will be gone because of AI has never written a complex piece of software before. Also the trades pay well because there is a shortage of workers. If everyone starts going into the trades wages will crater. It’s just cycles. I remember when nobody wanted to go into the trades because it didn’t pay well. This created the shortage of workers. And since salaries are better now because of the shortage lots of people want to go into the trades This will create an oversupply of tradespeople and the cycle will repeat.

I remain deeply skeptical that AI can solve the types of complex problems that require human thought. AIs will never be able to abstract away details correctly or design sensible workflows for boutique problems.

The reactionary “learn to code” nonsense started a lot further back than a few years! Also, who told you there won’t be any software development positions in 10 years?

Now there wont be any programming jobs in 10 years.

Bullshit.

I've been hearing that line for more than 20 years. Anytime there is a tech downturn you hear it loudly - this has happened several times since 2000. However the fact remains that most coders make far more money than most people in construction. The exceptions tend to be people who own their construction business - though if you do the paperwork construction is one of the easiest businesses to work for yourself in once you have skills.

Typical pork cycle. By the time everybody was pushed towards IT/Coding and all the hundred ways to get into IT popped up, there were already too many people wanting an IT job. You were basically called stupid if you didn't "just learn to code" to get a well paid, stable job. It's your own fault for chosing a manual labor job instead of applying yourself and learning some coding skills! So everybody was pushed towards IT and made to feel stupid if they didn't try to learn coding.

I can think of no better way to train an AI to hate humanity enough to invent Skynet and kill us all, than to introduce them to MS Teams meetings with managers who all want things that are completely incompatible with what they asked for the last time, and require you to throw away about 40% of what you already wrote.

the only job that can't be replaced is... venture capital guy

Well, anyone who knows anything about the current iteration of AI knows that it's not really happening.

Btw, people have been saying that since GPT-3 (which everyone nowadays admits was kinda shit if it wasn't for the novelty), so only 5 years left until my career is over.

Nah, it's just changed from

Learn to code

to

Learn to AI prompt engineer, bro!

The use of AI by non-developers to produce code will greatly increase the hourly rate I can charge.

The number of security holes produced is absolutely fabolous.

As soon as I graduated, 'too many people are fighting for IT jobs, depressing salaries, meanwhile we're paying plumbers $100/hour.'

That was 2001. Almost 25 years later, I recently paid a plumber $300/hour.

I'm fairly sure the "learn to code" thing was just a media campaign by corporations to assure an abundance of programmers, leading to decreased labor rates. Years earlier it was a push for electronic engineers and technicians.

If machine intelligence is indeed a different form of intelligence, then it can be observed and judged on the basis of its own merits, as opposed to a messianic waiting for a moment where it might equal or eclipse (weakly defined) human intelligence. This would even render obsolete the question as to whether or not machines can think—which in itself willfully glosses over the corresponding opposite question, “Can humans think?” posed by the former Fluxus artist (and Emmett Williams collaborator) Tomas Schmit in the year 2000 (Schmit et al. 2007, 18–19). — Crapularity Hermeneutics: Interpretation as the Blind Spot of Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Other Algorithmic Producers of the Postapocalyptic Present. Florian Cramer.