For the better part of two decades, the profession offered a combination that was difficult to find elsewhere: high salaries, generous benefits and offices whose interior designers had apparently been briefed to build playgrounds for adults.

Yeah, Imma stop you right there. That hasn’t been a thing for decades.

For now, the software-engineering bourgeoisie can enjoy the historical irony. We spent twenty years telling everyone that technology was coming for their jobs. It was probably unreasonable to expect them not to bring popcorn when it finally came for ours.

I don’t know anyone like this. Certainly I’ve never enjoyed making people unemployable, and have picked roles where that wasn’t happening, certainly not directly.

Most engineers I know will say “if I can replace what I do with a shell script, I will.”

And the story of tech has been tech people creating higher-level languages and frameworks that allow the same number of people to create more features, and faster.

Who created the automatic punch-card readers? Who created teletype interfaces to mainframes? Who created interactive video displays? PCs? GUIs? Web frameworks?

Which I don’t say to handwave-away LLMs. I’m fairly skeptical of them myself. My experience with them has been entirely negative thus far.

It’s almost a cliche that writing code is to programming what typing is to literature. And I think the garbage spewed by LLMs will bolster that argument.