The logger analogy is a misunderstanding of what people with a degree in CS do. Most become software engineers. They're not loggers, they're architects who occasionally have to cut their own logs.

They've spent decades reducing the amount of time they have to spend logging only to be continually outpaced by the growth of demand from businesses and complexity of the end product. I don't think we've reached a peak there yet, if anything the capabilities of AI are opening up even more demand for even more software.

But, ultimately, coding is only a fraction of the job and any halfway decent CS program teaches programming as a means to practice computer science and software engineering. Even when an AI gets to the point that it can produce solid code from the English language, it has a ways to go before replacing a software engineer.

One thing that's for sure: tons of business owners will get richer and pay fewer workers. I think we're going to have to face a reckoning as we reach the limits of what capitalism can sustain. But it's also unpredictable because AI opens up new opportunities for everyone else as well.

Oh, I think it will cause a reduction in jobs - at least compared to if it had not existed. So did interpreted languages, shell scripting, web frameworks, code-generation templates, the dot-com bust, and the 2008 recession.

Some folks are convinced that reduction is happening this year. I've written my share of LLMs and ML code, and I assure you it will not be next year.

The hallucination problem is being dramatically downplayed by the sales people, but reality tends to sort that stuff out.

Over the longer term, there's a feeling among developers that this job is going to both stop sucking so badly, and stop paying so well. I also believe that is coming. But not this year or next.

If anything, we look forward to quite a bit of additional pain and money to clean up after all the all-in-on-day-one AI mistakes being made right now.

After that mess is sorted, a few of us should be able to retire, and a bunch of the rest can switch to part time.

Edit: A key thing folks don't recognize about the in-progress AI revolution is that programming isn't a slow job, before the AI.

Programming is a minefield of preventable mistakes, botched deployments, subtle mistakes, outright security nightmare mistakes, and misunderstood user requests.

The programmer shortage is not because we're all tired of typing so many lines of code, or even of copy/pasting from Stack Overflow, and we just need more of us to do all that lovely typing and pasting.

The programmer shortage is because this job is a minefield of stressful surprises, and we have a high attrition rate.

AI can and will help. But anyone betting on AI as a full replacement in the short run is woefully ignorant of the steep challenges faced by the entire field of programming.

Code created by a LLM still needs to be interpreted and understood by a human so it can be made useful in a software development context. So yeah the article is exaggerating the impact of AI for coding I think, in my opinion it will become yet another tool at a developer’s disposal to speed up their work