A reply to "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career, and I don't know what to do"
If you didn't yet, I would recommend you first read this article before mine.
I read a piece this week by an engineer with ten years in fintech, watching his career get hollowed out by language models. It is honest and a little heartbreaking, and I do not think he is wrong about what he describes. But I think his list of what makes an engineer valuable is missing a few things, and they happen to be the hardest for a model in a box to reach.
His argument rests on three pillars that used to make a software engineer hard to replace, and he watches each one get absorbed by the models.
The first is domain knowledge: ten years learning payment systems, ledger accounting and PCI compliance, now promptable, because a model can synthesize all of it from its training data faster than he can apply it.
