If he asked me this question two years ago, I could definitely say that there will be always opportunities for him. Now it looks like it is not that easy to answer this question. We see that the coding performance of LLMs are getting better and better.
If your non-technical friend asks you and what would you suggest?
Do you see in your circle that the demand for junior developers are decreasing?
Most every single talented ECE person can easily get any software job with minimal prep. Half of the leetocde style coding questions are pointer manipulations, the other half rely on some n linked lists, both of which you get a lot of exposure to when working with low level algorithms.
Furthermore, in the scope of AI, we aren't really close to AGI, and even if we were, the power draw of compute is still quite large. There is a lot of progress to be made in making the compute more accessible to average person.
So instead of majoring in CS I majored in EE and mathematics. I did a lot of hard math and physical sciences stuff most of my peers didn't, and it still buys me an unusually large amount of latitude in the kinds of work people can trust me to take on.
If you can phrase all programming in the style of a Stack Overflow or Leetcode problem, AI will solve it easily. But that's what's slower than jumping in. A middle ground is writing tests.
It does really badly on Swift and is benchmarked on Python. So there's still blind spots. It can't do frameworks like Ren'Py either.
This is true in the way that Google Search is able to solve Leetcode problems.
GPT-4 struggles with even simple real world codebases.
It would be great if stackoverflow and/or similar companies do the developer survey in the industry.
I don't think LLM will replace software engineers anytime soon, as a whole, but removing the need for the bottom 10% is not a stretch at all. That has massive implications for salary, imo, except for the top end.
I expect the demand for junior developers to increase exponentially in the next years when the market adapts to the new AI tools as more than ever, every business will be a tech business.
The actual "code" was never the hard part to begin with.
Developing software is not going away soon. LLMs only addresses a small part of what it means to develop software.
Re LLMs: most people responding here seem to assume there will be zero progress in ML after today. I don’t understand why. It’s likely we will get gpt-5 later this year, followed by Opus 3.5 and Ultra 1.5. I expect all three to be significantly better at coding than current models. Again, all three are expected within the next 6 months. Next gen after that (gpt-6 level): 2025-2026. Again, I don’t see any reasons not to expect further improvements. At that point (2026 at the latest) it will be strange to pay humans to write code, at least in the typical way we view SWE role today.
Yes, GPT5 will do a lot of damage, as it will be the first model replacing actual human coders. But GPT6 should be able to fix most of the issues. During this transition period I expect human senior developers mostly doing code reviews.
The insane lure of gob-smacking amounts of money that got thrown around the tech industry in the past decade with FAANGS unfortunately brought in a lot of people who really weren't passionate about computer science in the first place.
By way of contrast, compare your average software developer with an electrical/mechanical engineer. Just as challenging an industry (if not MORE SO in a lot of ways), and yet the pay is usually a fraction of what a software dev can make. Nobody becomes an EE for the money.
