Asklemmy

Programming is the most automated career in history. Functions / subroutines allow one to just reference the function instead of repeating it. Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler in 1951; compilers, assemblers, and linkers automate creating machine code. Macros, higher level languages, garbage collectors, type checkers, linters, editors, IDEs, debuggers, code generators, build systems, CI systems, test suite runners, deployment and orchestration tools etc... all automate programming and programming-adjacent tasks, and this has been going on for at least 70 years.

Programming today would be very different if we still had to wire up ROM or something like that, and even if the entire world population worked as programmers without any automation, we still wouldn't achieve as much as we do with the current programmer population + automation. So it is fair to say automation is widely used in software engineering, and greatly decreases the market for programmers relative to what it would take to achieve the same thing without automation. Programming is also far easier than if there was no automation.

However, there are more programmers than ever. It is because programming is getting easier, and automation decreases the cost of doing things and makes new things feasible. The world's demand for software functionality constantly grows.

Now, LLMs are driving the next wave of automation to the world's most automated profession. However, progress is still slow - without building massive very energy expensive models, outputs often need a lot of manual human-in-the-loop work; they are great as a typing assist to predict the next few tokens, and sometimes to spit out a common function that you might otherwise have been able to get from a library. They can often answer questions about code, quickly find things, and help you find the name of a function you know exists but can't remember the exact name for. And they can do simple tasks that involve translating from well-specified natural language into code. But in practice, trying to use them for big complicated tasks is currently often slower than just doing it without LLM assistance.

LLMs might improve, but probably not so fast that it is a step change; it will be a continuation of the same trends that have been going for 70+ years. Programming will get easier, there will be more programmers (even if they aren't called that) using tools including LLMs, and software will continue to get more advanced, as demand for more advanced features increases.