I often find myself wondering about these things in the context of star trek... like... could Geordi actually code? Could he actually fix things? Or did the computer do all the heavy lifting. They asked "the computer" to do SO MANY things that really parallel today's direction with "AI". Even Data would ask the computer to do gobs of simulations.

Is the value in knowing how to do an operation by hand, or is the value in knowing WHICH operation to do?

That's an interesting possiblity to consider. Presumably the effect would also be compounded by the fact that there's a massive amount of training data for the incumbent languages and tools further handicapping new entrants.

However, there will be a large minority of developers who will eschew AI tools for a variety of reasons, and those folks will be the ones to build successors.

There is another lunatic possibility: the AI explosion yields an execution model and programming paradigm that renders most preexisting approaches to coding irrelevant.

We have been stuck in the procedural treadmill for decades. If anything this AI boom is the first major sign of that finally cracking.

Shouldn’t that mean any software development positions will lean more towards research? If you need new algorithms, but never need anyone to integrate them.

AI will finally rewrite everything in Rust.

> New languages and technology will be derivatives of existing tech.

This has always been true.

> There will be no React successor.

No one needs one, but you can have one by just asking the AI to write it if that's what we need.

> There will never be a browser that can run something other than JS.

Why not, just tell the AI to make it.

> And the reason for that is because in 20 years the new engineers will not know how to code anymore.

They may not need to know how to code but they should still be taught how to read and write in constructed languages like programming languages. Maybe in the future we don't use these things to write programs but if you think we're going to go the rest of history with just natural languages and leave all the precision to the AI, revisit why programming languages exist in the first place.

Somehow we have to communicate precise ideas between each other and the LLM, and constructed languages are a crucial part of how we do that. If we go back to a time before we invented these very useful things, we'll be talking past one another all day long. The LLM having the ability to write code doesn't change that we have to understand it; we just have one more entity that has to be considered in the context of writing code. e.g. sometimes the only way to get the LLM to write certain code is to feed it other code, no amount of natural language prompting will get there.

This cuts both ways. If you were an average programmer in love with FreePascal 20 years ago, you'd have to trudge in darkness, alone.

Now you can probably create a modern package manager (uv/cargo), a modern package repository (Artifactory, etc) and a lot of a modern ecosystem on top of the existing base, within a few years.

10 skilled and highly motivated programmers can probably try to do what Linus did in 1991 and they might be able to actually do it now all the way, while between 1998 and now we were basically bogged down in Windows/Linux/MacOS/Android/iOS.