Agree. It is just like 2 totally separate groups are arguing.
One very tiny slice of speciality/ rare industries where code is critical but overall small part of project costs. I can see if code / software is 5% of overall cost even heavy use of AI for code part is not moving the needle. So people in this group can feel confident in their indispensability.
Second group is much larger and peddling CRUD / JS Frontends and other copy/paste junk. But as per industry classification they are just part of same Coder/Developer/IT Engineer group. And their bleak prospects is not some future scenario, it is playing out right now with tons of them getting laid off. And whole lot of people with IT degrees, certifications are not finding any jobs in this field.
After hearing various similarly sounding opinions about CRUD being easy for LLMs, I started tracking how well LLMs handle a standard CRUD Django app I'm familiar with at https://github.com/marcindulak/learning-api-styles-gen-ai-ex....
So far it appears that LLMs still require constant hand-holding, even for a small educational CRUD app.
What makes you feel that a complex frontend would be easier for AI than a non-CRUD backend system?
I agree with the 2 separate groups theory, but I don't buy that the group that produces "copy/paste junk" is the much larger group. I think in most mega-corps, there is a huge existing code base, there are huge organizational challenges, and there is huge hierarchy with most people not being the junior juniors. 90+% of the work is "not coding." Probably way, way more if we include the middle managers. At startups, there is a lot of "copy/paste junk" but also often a decent amount of push the boundary new stuff. I don't know. I've been in the industry for 8 years now and it's been really rare to see the actual coding being the bottleneck or even the thing that takes the majority of the time.