There are several points of view here. Some people claim they will never need to "program" again because the LLM will do everything. That text editors are dead... and so is the career of programmer or software engineer. That nowadays, with Claude Code, you can reimplement anything (given a large enough context window, of course). That it is like being an expert in every programming language and system out there. That we should remove politicians and CEOs and put an AI in their place.

On the other hand, many people claim that machine-generated software STINKS. That it is extremely verbose, that it reimplements similar methods over and over again. That it would rather cut corners at a low level than build high-level abstractions. That it pulls in libraries and makes serious security mistakes. That it writes tests that are basically incomplete. That it is unable to synthesize and keep context. In short, it has the same flaws as humans.

I think these are binary points of view, and both are right. We have vampires that are incredibly fast, super-strong, super-intelligent and super-agile, that suck your blood (your money), and that die as soon as the sunlight of security or complexity hits them.

There has to be another way. Nobody questions the versatility LLMs provide, or the boldness they give you to take on new projects. But I am not convinced that programmers or software engineers are going to disappear. I am not convinced that a manager can ship a new feature in a couple of afternoons and then lay off, or skip hiring, a junior or senior developer. There is a line near the beginning of Dune that goes something like this: "there was a time when men handed their thinking over to machines in the hope of being freed, but that only allowed other men with machines to enslave them."

We need to find a new path between smartphone addiction and being dumbed down by LLMs.