The dev jobs won‘t go away, but they will change. Devs will be more and more like requirements engineers who need to understand the problem to then write prompts with the peoper context so that the llm can produce valuable and working code. And the next level will be to prompt llms to generate prompts for llms to produce code and solutions.
But already I hire less and less developers for smaller tasks. The things that I‘d assign to a dev in Ukraine to explore an idea, do a data transformation, make a UI for the internal company tool. I can do these things quicker with llm than trying to find a dev and explain the task.
> One person setting the objectives and the AI handling literally everything else including brainstorming issues etc, is going to be all that's needed.
A person just setting the prompt and letting the AI do all the work is not adding any additional value. Any other person can come in and perform the exact same task.
The only way to actually provide differentiation in this scenario is to either build your own models, or micromanage the outputs.
I said this in another comment but look at the leading chess engines. They are already so far above human level of play that having a human override the engines choice will nearly always lead to a worse position.
> You're not expecting it to always be right, are you?
I think another thing that gets lost in these conversations is that humans already produce things that are "wrong". That's what bugs are. AI will also sometimes create things that have bugs and that's fine so long as they do so at a rate lower than human software developers.
We already don't expect humans to write absolutely perfect software so it's unreasonable to expect that AI will do so.
I don't expect any code to be right the first time. I would imagine if it's intelligent enough to ask the right questions, research, and write an implementation, it's intelligent enough to do some debugging.
But already I hire less and less developers for smaller tasks. The things that I‘d assign to a dev in Ukraine to explore an idea, do a data transformation, make a UI for the internal company tool. I can do these things quicker with llm than trying to find a dev and explain the task.