I wouldn't call myself an expert, but my gut tells me we're close to a local maximum when it comes to the core capabilities of LLMs. I might be wrong of course. If I'm right, I don't know when or if we'll get out of that. But it seems the work of putting LLMs to good use is gonna continue for the next years regardless. I imagine hybrid systems between traditional deterministic IDE features and LLMs could become way more powerful than what we have today. I think for the foreseeable future, any system that's supposed to be reliable and well understood (most software, I hope) will require people willing and capable to understand it, that's in my mind the core thing programmers are and will continue to be needed for. But anyway: I do expect less programmers will be needed if demand remains constant.

As for demand, that's difficult to predict. I'd argue a lot of software being written today doesn't really need to be written. Lots of weird ideas were being tried because the money was there, pursuing ever new hypes, with an entire sub industry building ever more specialised tools fueling all this. And with all that growth, ever more programmers have been thrown at dysfunctional organisations to get a little more work done. My gut tells me that we'll see less of that in the next years, but I feel even less competent to predict where the market will go than where the tech will go.

So long story short, I guess we'll still need programmers until there's a major leap towards GAI, but less than today.