Should I stick to my programmer job in the age of LLMs?

Question

I'm 28 year old a software engineer (PHP developer) with 4 years of experience. I work at a relatively small company and we write webapps. I'm not paid exorbitantly high, and my day job is rather uninspiring on most days to be honest. But I have a decent happy life at the moment.LLMs can write decent code and their capabilities are only going to improve substantially in the future.Is there any point in me trying to improve my programming skills further?Is there any point in me staying on in this career, because I can see that sooner or later AI can do most of what I do and I'll eventually be let go. Perhaps not immediately, but maybe about 10 years from now. I don't know.By the way, I was never motivated to learn much about AI/ML etc, even in college. I was interested in hardware, programming language theory etc, but never really AI even though I'm aware it's a field that's expanding rapidly. But college is a distant memory now. And at this point even if I were to learn more about AI to maybe contribute to the field myself, I don't even know where to start and the entire discipline is now vast.Now I'm wondering if I should choose a different career. Perhaps go back to school, study business, and become the manager type? Or, I always wanted to be a commercial pilot &ndash; perhaps I should try that? Expensive path, which is all the more annoying considering I already had an expensive education in America (which to me is a foreign country) studying computer science (no pending student loans or anything now though).I'd like to hear the thoughts of the HN community. Apologies to the mods if this was the wrong place to post this question. Sorry.

gregjor · Accepted Answer

I don't worry about it, and I don't think experienced programmers should worry about it. Writing code isn't the hard part of programming, and LLMs are a long ways off from interpreting vague, incomplete, inconsistent requirements and asking questions. IDEs with auto-complete and syntax checking didn't kill my career, and LLMs at best iterate on that kind of useful but limited functionality rather than the higher-level problem solving of programming.
Suppose LLMs could write complete working code from specifications today. Do you think managers or end users could use LLMs themselves to produce code? That was supposed to happen back with COBOL and SQL and any number of no-code/low-code tools that came and went. Writing code isn't the hard part of producing software.
I do a lot of system administration, where automation in various forms has already taken over a lot of previously tedious and complicated tasks. And you know what happened? The workload increased, because no matter how point-and-click setting up a server gets I have never run into a manager or business owner who can set up a few servers with security and redundancy on their own, much less manage day-to-day admin.
Assuming the best case trajectory for LLMs (which I don't, but for the sake of argument), I think people in management, finance, law will get made redundant before that happens to programmers.
Junior programmers who can't yet produce code as well as an LLM might look at other career options, primarily upgrading their skills so they can offer more value than LLMs. That's not a high bar right now, but someone who mainly copy/pastes code and consults ChatGPT or StackOverflow now without really knowing what they're doing has made themselves redundant.