Would LLMs democratizing coding be a pyrrhic victory?

For many years now, I've considered "democratizing programming" as a major personal goal of mine. This has taken many forms - a long era of idolizing Bret Victor and a bit of following Alan Kay. The goal of making computing accessible was a big part of why I joined Observable. Years before joining Observable, I was making similar tools attempting to achieve similar goals. I taught a class on making games in computers. At Mapbox, we tried to keep a fluid boundary between engineers & non-engineers, as well as many resources to learn how to code, and many people successfully made the jump from non-coding jobs to coding jobs, and vice-versa.

But what does it really mean to "democratize programming?" It's a narrowly technical goal that its adopters imbue with their own values. Most commonly, I think the intents are:

• Programming is a beautiful experience, a way to learn, an end in itself, something that everyone should have as a way to think.
• We need more programs and we don't have enough programmers to write them. The supply/demand imbalance between the number of skilled programmers versus companies who need them has been persistent. Maybe more bootcamps or more college grads is not the solution and better tools is.
• Software should be more like programming. Modern software is inflexible and simple programming-like interfaces are the way to give users more power. For example, Photoshop macros or HyperCard-like interfaces are the way forward.
• Programming jobs are nice and it would be good if more people could access them.

Those are the intents that I can think of impromptu – maybe there are others; let me know. For me, I came to believe most strongly in the last one: it's useful to make programming jobs accessible to more people.

Basically I think that material circumstances matter more than ever: the rent is too damn high, salaries are too damn low. Despite the bootcamps churning out new programmers and every college grad choosing a CS/AI major, salaries in the tech industry are still pretty decent. It's much harder to land a job right now, but that is probably, partially, an interest-rate thing.

The salaries for societally-useful things are pretty bad! Cities pay their public defenders and teachers poverty wages. Nonprofit wages at the non-executive levels are tough. And these aren't easy jobs, and don't even earn the kind of respect they used to.

So, a big part of my hope that more people have the ability to become programmers is just that my friends can afford their rent. Maybe they can buy houses eventually, and we can all live in the same neighborhood, and maybe some folks can afford to have kids. Achieving that kind of basic financial security right now is, somehow, a novelty, a rarity, a stretch goal.

Which brings me to the… ugh… LLM thing. Everyone is so jazzed about using Cursor or Claude Workspaces and never writing code, only writing prompts. Maybe it's good. Maybe it's unavoidable. Old man yells at cloud.

But it 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.

But one of the things you learn in studying the history of politics is that power is consolidated by eliminating intermediate structures of authority, often under the banner of liberation from those authorities. In his book The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, Tocqueville gives an account of this process in the case of France in the century preceding the Revolution. He shows that the idea of “absolute sovereignty” was not an ancient concept, but an invention of the eighteenth century that was made possible by the monarch’s weakening of the “independent orders” of society—self-governing bodies such as professional guilds and universities. - The World Beyond Your Head

Will the adoption of LLMs weaken the semi-independent power of the skilled craftspeople who call themselves "programmers"? And in exchange for making it easy for anyone to become a programmer, we drastically reduce the rewards associated with that title?

Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place. - Mira Murati

Is the blasé attitude of AI executives toward the destruction of skilled jobs anything other than an attempt at weakening skilled labor and leaving roughly two levels of society intact, only executives and interchangeable laborers? Of course, you can ask what do executives do to keep their jobs, but at some point that is kind of like asking what do kings do to keep their jobs in the ancien régime: the king is the king because he's the king, not because he's the best at being the king.

Anyway, I don't want my friends to move to the suburbs because the rent is too high and the pay is too low. Who is working on this?