While “any” is a bit much, I do anticipate a rather dramatic decline.

One is that there are a large chunk of programming jobs that I do think LLM can displace. Think of those dumb unimaginative mobile games that bleed out a few dollars a week from folks. I think LLM has a good chance at cranking those out. If you’ve seen companies that have utterly trivial yet somehow subtly unique internal applications, LLMs can probably crank out a lot of those to. There’s a lot of stupid trivial stuff that has been done a million times before that still gets done by people.

Another is that a lot of software teams have overhired anyway. Business folk think more developers mean better results, so they want to hire up to success, as long as their funding permits. This isn’t how programming really works, but explanations that fewer people can do more than more people in some cases can’t crack through how counter-intuitive that is. AI offers a rationalization for a lot of those folks to finally arrive at the efficient conclusion.

Finally, the software industry has significantly converted transactional purchases to subscription. With perpetual license, you needed to provide some value to drive that customer who bought from you 5 years ago a reason to upgrade. Now with subscription models, you just have to coast and keep the lights on for those customers. Often with effective lock-in of the customers data to make it extra hard or impossible for them to jump to a competitor, even if competitors could reverse-engineer your proprietary formats, the customer might not even be able to download their actual data files. So a company that acheived “good enough” with subscription might severely curtail investment because it makes no difference to their bottom line if they are delivering awesome new capability or just same old same old. Anticipate a log of stagnation as they shuffle around things like design language to give a feeling of progress while things just kinda plateau out.