alt Hacker NewsI'm kinda leaning towards the analogy that LLMs are to programming as textile machines were to the loom.
People still pay for hand-knit fabrics (there's one place in Italy that makes silk by hand and it costs 5 figures per foot), but the vast majority is machine made.
Same thing will happen to code, unless the bubble bursts really badly. Most bulk API Glue CRUD stuff and basic web UI work will be mostly automated and churned off automated agentic production lines.
But there will still be a market for that special human touch in code, most likely when you need safety/security or efficiency/speed.
> I'm kinda leaning towards the analogy that LLMs are to programming as textile machines were to the loom.
The difference is that textile machines reliably produce working cloth. LLMs do not, and indeed probably cannot, reliably produce working software. Instead they generate something which randomly has bugs sprinkled throughout such that a human needs to review the whole thing (which negates the gains). This would be like if a textile machine produced cloth that randomly would rip if you tried to use it for anything. Nobody would have accepted such a textile machine, just like nobody should accept LLMs.