For now, I can imagine a not too distant future where this is largely untrue.

LLMs are an abstraction just like machine code -> assembly -> C/JVM -> some lang -> LLMs?

At some point you stopped needing to understand the layer down because the layer you were on became so good. Yes there are always corner cases, but for the vast majority of developers/engineers out there, staying at your layer was enough to make a career out of it once your layer hit a certain maturity.

Right, but if things progress as they promised, it will require far fewer people to do the same work, which means the industry already has all the people it so need for at least a couple decades. That’s what happened with tool and die guys when offshoring kicked off, and now they’re scrambling to get apprentices because the last of the OG ones are retiring. There were decades that pretty much nobody (relative to prior eras) got trained for that work.

Consider the difference between capabilities when gpt3 was released and now - the "increasingly babysitting" is exactly right.

Knowing how to code (and more generally software engineering and other roles in software teams) is definitely still extremely useful, but is rapidly becoming less vital as a human-provided skill as models and harnesses greedily hoover up the knowledge margin.

> babysitting work would still be impossible if you didn't actually know how to code

It will be fewer and fewer people with, probably, deeper and deeper knowledge (and job security and compensation to boot).

Poet is a bad comparison. But something like low-level semiconductor physics or assembly is closer to the mark.

I think there’s potentially a future where software engineers learn how to “babysit” models instead of the details of programming. Kind of how software engineering students for the last decade at least haven’t learnt a great deal of assembly or cpu architecture. Maybe you had a unit on CPUs but it’s not central to the course.

I’m not saying I like that future, but I can imagine it.

I fear the capability of the models will quickly outpace the need for a human to validate their output. They won't be juniors for much longer.

And thats why noone should learn to code.