Glad you asked. AI empowers people who couldn't do a job before to do a job. With more supply of qualified workers, these workers compete with each other by lowering the salary they'll take.

So:

* You get paid less. * The company might pay a similar amount due to LLM costs. Although, it could be more or less as well, depending on how it works out.

A couple of years ago, I saw a story of a guy writing two articles for a website a day. The boss asked him if he wanted to transition to AI-assisted writer for less pay. He said, "No." After a couple of weeks, he got canned. He checked the website out, and it had a bunch of AI writing on it.

LLMs are there to reduce your salaries and increase the businessowner's profits. Bigger inequality in wealth, it's only going to grow more and more. Also, a ton of people fired across many different fields.

That is one possibility (that is playing out). Another one worth contrasting is the idea of AI as leverage for the worker. If you can take a regular developer and augment their output by 25%, then they have become more valuable to you and you should pay them more. Why should you pay them more? Because the market rate will price in that they provide more value now and you'll lose those workers to competitors if you don't.

That's a pretty old economic idea, and it will be interesting to see if it holds up in this instance. I have no idea how this all plays out. I do think it won't be one size fits all though.

Given that the user between your comment and mine is a 1 day old account that did not address my comment at all and instead hallucinated a response, I assume they are a bot.

I answered your question. AI-assited programmers will be paid less since more can do the same job through the use of AI assistance. In some cases, they will even can some developers if productivity goes up enough, and the team can reach business objectives with fewer people than pre-AI times. At the same time, these coders will become more and more dependent on AI, and as I'm sure you know, the API is priced so that they make more money than they lose per request. More and more usage = more and more revenue.

This pattern is only going to become more extreme year after year. I used to reject the idea that LLMs could produce useful code or debug things, but these days, we have Claude Opus and chatGPT Codex. And just around the corner, there's Claude Mythos. I believe it's ready to go out, but they are scanning OSS to give the code underneath it all a head start to fix the types of security issues Mythos can find before releasing the product. Otherwise, we could be talking an LLM jailbreak into a "scan this popular Java logging library" or "this popular OS operating system, Linux, for security flaws." If they didn't do it this way, there could have been a lot of damage to PCs, companies, government, bureaucracies, and institutions in general.

If I were to steelman your position, for now, people need to be a good dev to make the most out of the LLM ecosystem, and the skill of prompt engineering varies person to person as well. I could see an exceptional dev outputting not just more than they used to but with their improvement relative to themselves being much higher than the average improvement other devs gained. In that scenario, yeah, salaries could still increase despite the role being AI-assisted and despite the LLM tools costing these devs' company money every query. Skill varies anywhere between "vibe coder" all the way up to the highest position that still codes at your company, and familiarity with how to leverage LLMs the best can vary that widely as well.

Right now, the name of the game is making sure your LLM has a good action plan before letting it attempt to fix a bug or refactor or add a feature. Devs with more experience know what to ask Claude to do whereas a greener dev doesn't know the questions to ask, leaving Claude to guess right sometimes and wrong sometimes. Simply put, if a dev doesn't know to ask for something, there's a bigger chance the LLM won't care to do it. And if there's some nuanced, tricky aspect to the code not described to the LLM, the LLM might burn a lot of tokens to reach a bad solution. A good dev might give more clues and hunches and more context to fine-tune the prompt so that it almost definitely succeeds whereas a greener dev doesn't have intimacy with the system yet, needing tips and descriptions of subsystems themselves before they could pass it along to Claude. By this stage, people also differ in their skills with the various tools in the ecosystem. Power tools do a lot more in the hands of a seasoned handyman than in the hands of an eight-year-old after all.

However, the better LLMs get, the less differences like this will exist, and ideally, every dev will approach a similar amount of productivity. Salaries aren't reflective of how much profit a worker produces in the company (unless you are the CEO or a little below them or maybe have some stock). Supply and demand drive salary. If something nearby AGI arrives tomorrow, by definition, almost any two devs will provide similar value at which point teams will downsize, yet productivity will hold steady or increase. They will downsize to save some money since we live in a brutal world where workers have no loyalty to a company, and a company has no loyalty to its workers. Pensions are a relic from the past. After all that will happen, a large group of qualified devs will be searching for jobs, so they can remain in a home with food in it. Companies will see tons of resumes flowing in all by AI-assisted devs that can do the job.

The companies will then do two things: Offer the hired devs a transfer to AI-assisted dev for less money or else while also interviewing all the ones that all the companies fired, giving them that same AI-assisted dev salary to everyone in the picture. And they will have calculated the proper discount off the old full salary using some kind of economic equations. Then the wildcard happens: some of the ones needing work urgently start to offer their services for even less than the company is. It's a spiral downward until the salary becomes so low to the point where a dev would rather be an ex-dev doing something else that is more relaxing and also still paying them enough money to survive. No reason to do tough coding work, it'll still be tedious with stronger LLMs. Comfort and relaxation will prevail for many as they no longer feel the salary justifies doing the work.

And at the top, assuming AI costs do not exponentiate, they will be making more money than ever before since they downsized teams, slashed salaries, and got hired at even lower salaries than the slashed salaries. (There will still be a premium for knowing the systems like the back of your hand without need to ramp up before adding value, so you'll get paid more than a new hire.)