Large language models are ruining my dream job

I made my first website on Tripod, cataloging all the various GIFs of Star Trek: The Next Generation I could find while abusing my visitors via the tag. As I got older I became very interested in the user interfaces of websites, but I was almost equally fascinated by the semantics of the web and earning my Valid HTML and Valid XHTML badges from the WorldWideWeb Consortium. I grew my website into a hand-edited blog that emulated a database-driven site but lacked any such features, requiring me to manually change multiple pages with each new post. My first corporate job was working primarily on the content for a website, but I continued to learn how to make CSS improvements and tweak whatever limited access I had to the HTML. This lack of ability and lack of opportunity carried over to different roles at different companies until I landed at my current employer who allowed me to learn web development on the job and transition over from solely a web designer into a front-end web developer on a Next.js project.

Over the entirety of my time in web design and development I have maintained an interest in the quality and structure of my code, even when my knowledge was fairly limited. In fact, I think it was because I didn’t know much about JavaScript that I spent so much time learning HTML and CSS. Other developers seemed to downplay the importance of CSS and HTML in an effort to comprehend the far more complex JavaScript and its various frameworks. I understood the reasoning but I disagreed with the choice, as I found they were missing many opportunities for optimization and readability in the more basic field I was choosing.

Now LLM usage is even making the harder languages less interesting to developers who seem eager to bring about the end of the majority of their hands-on coding, threatening the credibility and interesting elements of the field for all developers. My history of obsessing over HTML semantics, fretting about accessibility, endlessly tweaking my CSS files, and building pages by hand and loving it is now being placed in the category of tasks so tiresome that a computer must consume them all. It saddens me to see developers devalue the elements of the job that make the work important to me. It’s frustrating that it took me so long to finally get into this field only to have developers start talking about moving beyond coding to learning how to talk to make requests to a chat bot.

Is it FOMO driving this push to LLM usage? Are the developers in these large companies worried that they’ll be replaced if they too don’t start using LLMs for coding? The businesses making cuts to their staffing are citing LLMs as the reason, but they’ve tended to make extreme cuts on a fairly regular basis to boost stock prices and fake out the markets. Reports seem to indicate that like many other parts of the LLM takeover of businesses, the actual loss of jobs has been overstated and distorted, and the actual productivity impact of LLMs have been less than reported. I guess that’s a small comfort for me, but the effects of LLM use feel far greater than just potential job loss: rather, it’s the loss of credibility and value in the job itself. I’m proud of my job and hate to see it lessened by my colleagues for what seems like short-term goals.

I don’t like the zealotry surrounding the affair, but if I was going to have to pick a side, I’ll stick with the creators.