> You just need to be making those decisions and gaining experience from them.
The important part that everyone glosses over is the "gaining experience" part.
The experience you gained writing code lead to you being tech lead / team lead /architect.
The experience you get from those roles, including "helping people get unstuck", makes you valuable because there are people involved, not just technology. IOW, that is different to the experience you get from prompting.
We have yet to see how valuable the experience from prompting will be. At this point the prompters are just guessing that their skills won't atrophy, and that their new experience won't be at the same level as vibe-coders who can't spell "Python".
As a fairly senior person myself, and an occasional user of LLMs, and someone who has tried CC in recent months, the experience I got from LLMs, while not nothing, was not recognised by me as valuable in any way - it basically put me at the same skill level as a vibe-coder.
OTOH, the experience I got mentoring very junior engineers the month before that I recognised as instantly valuable; at the end of it I had learned new strategies for dealing with people, growing them, etc.
The only "experience" you get with LLM is "put another coin into the slot and pull the lever again".
> different to the experience you get from prompting
In my experience no. The agents get trapped by the exact programming pitfalls a junior would. The LLM is basically a 16 year old who read a given languages For Dummies book cover to cover 3-4x and has the syntax down but understands little about actually programming especially once you run into any real complexity. However 100% of those limitations can be overcome by proper architecture, testing, specification / requirements analysis (which is a lost art in the time of Agile but which I am a master of), and a sprinkle of technical strategic guidance. Especially the agent doesn’t understand its limitations so you need to have an eye for when it’s working on a problem that’s outside the competency its token window can produce. I could go on for 2 hours but bottom line is IMHO there’s more to it than this simple claim.
> The only "experience" you get with LLM is "put another coin into the slot and pull the lever again".
I relate it to directors on a production. It's certainly very valuable to know how to operate a camera, and especially to understand lighting, storytelling, etc. It gives you insight in how to work with the people who are actually doing these tasks. It helps you to know when someone is gaslighting you, etc.
That being said, it's kind of an insane statement to say that all a director does is pull a lever. I'm sure there are a ton of wannabe directors who try to do exactly that and proceed to fail miserably if they don't adapt quickly to reality. But having a great director is obviously a huge differentiator in output.
Do I think we'll have as many programmers in the future as we do today? Probably not. I think we're going to see a real decimation of coders, but at the same time we might (I say "might") see much greater overall production that may not otherwise exist from the less talented vibers or w/e ridiculously critical name you want. Some of that is certainly going to be interesting and maybe even radically game changing.
IMO our feelings about this are about as relevant as shaking our fist at the cosmos.
The important part that everyone glosses over is the "gaining experience" part.
The experience you gained writing code lead to you being tech lead / team lead /architect.
The experience you get from those roles, including "helping people get unstuck", makes you valuable because there are people involved, not just technology. IOW, that is different to the experience you get from prompting.
We have yet to see how valuable the experience from prompting will be. At this point the prompters are just guessing that their skills won't atrophy, and that their new experience won't be at the same level as vibe-coders who can't spell "Python".
As a fairly senior person myself, and an occasional user of LLMs, and someone who has tried CC in recent months, the experience I got from LLMs, while not nothing, was not recognised by me as valuable in any way - it basically put me at the same skill level as a vibe-coder.
OTOH, the experience I got mentoring very junior engineers the month before that I recognised as instantly valuable; at the end of it I had learned new strategies for dealing with people, growing them, etc.
The only "experience" you get with LLM is "put another coin into the slot and pull the lever again".