I suspect humans will always be critical to programming. Improved technology won't matter if the economics isn't there.
LLMs are great as assistants. Just today, Copilot told me it's there to do the "tedious and repetitive" parts so I can focus my energy on the "interesting" parts. That's great. They do the things every programmer hates having to do. I'm more productive in the best possible way.
But ask it to do too much and it'll return error-ridden garbage filled with hallucinations, or just never finish the task. The economic case for further gains has diminished greatly while the cost of those gains rises.
Automation killed tons of manufacturing jobs, and we're seeing something similar in programming, but keep in mind that the number of people still working in manufacturing is 60% of the peak, and those jobs are much better than the ones in the 1960s and 1970s.
Sure, it's just that the era of super high paying programming jobs may be over.
And also, manufacturing jobs have greatly changed. And the effect is not even, I imagine. Some types of manufacturing jobs are just gone.
That might be the case. Perhaps it lowers the difficulty level so more people can do it and therefor puts downward pressure on wages.
Or… it still requires similar education and experience but programmers end up so much more efficient they earn _more_.
Hard to say right now.
> the era of super high paying programming jobs may be over.
Probably, but I'm not sure that had much to do with AI.
> Some types of manufacturing jobs are just gone
The manufacturing work that was automated is not exactly the kind of work people want to do. I briefly did some of that work. Briefly because it was truly awful.