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It's not really telling on oneself. Like you said, the easy stuff (e.g. basic business process automation i.e. constructing simple database queries) happens to be economically high ROI right now. Something like 3d graphics or signal processing or whatever are comparatively niche and less likely to pay as well. Most jobs that people will actually pay for are actually pretty mindless. Even for the more "advanced" jobs, it's likely the domain knowledge and not the programming per se that's difficult.
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> But also, there still is a ton of programming that is fundamentally difficult. That's not going anywhere either. And LLMs are useful there too, but they're currently nowhere near replacing the expertise needed to do novel and non-trivial technical work.

Genuine question and not trying to be snarky here, I am actually curious: what fields or types of programming does this apply too? I think I've read anecdotes online about people in fields I previously (a few years ago lol) thought "oh yea an llm will never be able to help with that" and now see articles about how llm's are doing just that.

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LLMs are surprisingly bad at basic CMake, but i don't see why they should be.

Much of the truly LLM-difficult code is probably hiding in the libraries we import. Database engines, compilers, efficient data parser, control theory, signal processing, protocol implement-ions, or anything with a 12000 page German ISO standard that need to pass a $12.000 certification lab. But this also compose of such a tiny fraction of programmers or code in the world.

A-lot of my work lies in that last one... but that's also where that "code is easy, knowing what to code isn't" is the most true; because industrial standards tend to not spare any expense on the word count, while the implementation is a ~2000 row state machine. I've not yet found an LLM capable of successfully parsing this kind of specification documents, but it's possible they will reach there eventually.

But i do feel online debate do clump the software field a bit too much when AI is discussed. JavaScript compose probably 98% of all code the LLMs are trained on since it's powering every website scraped for training. As such, people in web-development seem to have far more praise to LLM capability than i'm able to give.

My personal AI experience has been very mixed in comparison, regularly making up functions of common libraries, hallucinate the description of technical terms, straight up writing un-compilable c-code, or get confused by relatively small code-bases. Useful but not majorly changing my work at the moment (pretty good at comments, test cases, or as google replacement).

Granted, I've only tried models up to Opus 4.8, and not had experience with the newest "tier" of models with Fable, Kimi K3 or GPT 5.6; but the prices on those are also starting to compete badly with my salary at the moment.

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That makes sense, great answer thank you.
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It is hardly any different from reviewing or debugging the code quality of most offshore deliveries.
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Those corporations that undertake the actually difficult bits of programming end up charging so much money, to the point that people go out of to not use them though. Splunk, Oracle Database, Spanner, Datadog, VMware. We don't live in an idealized world divorced from business and money, unfortunately, but worse, software developers are notoriously cheap and hard to sell to. If I did the hard work and made a compiler that generate code that runs 10% faster, I should have a solid business. Even Intel couldn't make a business out of icc though. So the code is the hard part but business is also the hard part and it's a miracle any of this stuff ever gets off the ground.
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