Comment by bananapub
7 days ago
> What about the accessibility of software development? Its completely vanishing for people that can not afford to pay for these agents.
what do you actually mean by this? it's clearly untrue - anyone get get a laptop and install linux on it and start bashing out code today, just as they could last week and last year and thirty years ago.
do you mean that you think at some point in the future tooling for humans to write code won't exist? or that employers won't hire human programmers? or that your pride is hurt? or you want your hobby to also be a well-paid job? or something else?
I mean that this "tooling" becomes inaccessible to people. At least the tooling that is relevant for jobs. Employers will eventually stop hiring human based on their programming competence. It'll translate into a low pay career for people who like to orchestrate agents.
I doubt it will, because there will always be a need for understanding the code, especially when it comes to things like security, certification, etc.
I mean COBOL has not been a relevant programming language for anyone coming into the field in the past 20-40 years because it's been superseded, yet there's still a significant demand for COBOL developers, because the newer generation can't or doesn't want to work with it.
Not to completely dismiss your claim, of course; I'm sure a segment of software engineering will be agent based now or in the near future. But I don't think it'll take over as comprehensively, since the previous existential crisis - outsourcing - also hasn't decimated the software engineering market.
I think it's just another floor in the creaky old tower of abstraction.
Machine code > ASM > 3GLs > 4GLs > visual programming > LLMs
etc etc etc. Thing is, the moment you go off-piste, the LLMs get a lot less useful. I think, if you want to stay closer to the metal, you've got to aim for a niche that has a small internet footprint. So... domain knowledge or esoteric programming knowledge.
One way to incorporate domain knowledge might be to become a hybrid product owner/programmer.
(This is all just opinion - I'm sure a well-argued rebuttal is possible).