Semi-retired software/hardware engineer here. After my recent experiences with various coding LLMs (similar to the experience of the OP with the bluetooth fan protocol) I'm really glad I'm in a financial position such that I'm able to retire. The progress of these LLMs at coding has been astonishing over the last 18 months. Will they entirely replace humans? No. But as they increase programmer productivity fewer devs will be required. In my case the contract gig I was doing over this last summer I was able to do about 3 to 4X faster than I could've done it without LLMs. Yeah, they were generating a lot of boiler plate HDL code for me, but that still saved me several days of work at least. And then there was the test code that they generated which again saved me days of work. And their ability to explain old undocumented code that was part of the project was also extremely helpful. I was skeptical 18 months ago that any of this would be possible. Not anymore. I wasn't doing a project in which there would've been a lot of training examples. We're talking Verilog testbench generation based on multiple input Verilog modules, C++ code generation for a C program analyzer using libclang - none of this stuff would've worked just a few months back.
This. I'm not terrified by total automation (In that case all jobs are going away and civilization is going to radically alter), I'm scared of selective deskilling and the field getting squeezed tighter and tighter leaving me functionally in a dead end.
> But as they increase programmer productivity fewer devs will be required.
Can you point me to any company whose feature pipeline is finite? Maybe these tools will help us reach that point, but every company I've ever worked for, and every person I know who works in tech has a backlog that is effectively infinite at this point.
Maybe if only a few companies had access to coding LLMs they could cut their stuff, when the whole industry raises the bar, nothing really changes.
