But [LLM assisted programming] does make me wonder whether the adoption of these tools will lead to a form of de-skilling. Not even that programmers will be less skilled, but that the job will drift from the perception and dynamics of a skilled trade to an unskilled trade, with the attendant change - decrease - in pay. Instead of hiring a team of engineers who try to write something of quality and try to load the mental model of what they're building into their heads, companies will just hire a lot of prompt engineers and, who knows, generate 5 versions of the application and A/B test them all across their users.
Recent articles
- First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's general agent - 12th January 2026
- My answers to the questions I posed about porting open source code with LLMs - 11th January 2026
- Fly's new Sprites.dev addresses both developer sandboxes and API sandboxes at the same time - 9th January 2026