There's no serious sources about people wanting to fire 100% of [insert title here] for LLMs. It's more about reducing head-count by leveraging LLMs as a productivity multiplier.
I haven't heard of companies successfully doing that at scale though.
Has there been any company that has laid off even a nontrivial amount of programmers and replaced them with AI? Here I mean, where developers at said company actually say the process works and is established, and the staff cuts weren't happening anyway.
I know there are CEOs that make bold claims about this (E.g. Klarna) but I don't really assign any value to that until I hear from people on the floor.
If you have a small non-tech company with a website you pay a freelance programmer to maintain you should seriously consider replacing your programmer with AI.
I work for a company which among other things provides technical support for a number of small tech-oriented businesses and we have lot of problems right now with clients trying to do things on their own with the help of AI.
In our case the complexity of some of these projects and the limited ability of AI means that they're typically creating more bugs and tech debt for us to fix and are not really saving themselves any time – and this is certainly going to be true at the moment for any large project. However, if you're paying programmers just to manage the content of a few small websites it probably begins to make sense to use AI instead.
This still implies that the person who is currently paying freelance programmers is 1) good with LLMs 2) knows some html and js 3) can deploy the updated website.
You're probably right that these people still need some baseline technical skills currently, but I'm really not assuming anything here – this is something we've seen multiple of our clients do in recent months.
It's funny you say they need to be able to deploy the update to be honest because we had a client just last week email a collect of code snippets to us which they created with the help of AI.
This is the problem we have though because we're not just building simple websites which we can hand clients FTP creds for. The best we can do is advise them to learn Git and raise a PR which we can review and deploy ourselves.
