I think there’s an actual barrier. I’ve seen it, especially since the (until recently) brisk market for programmers was sucking people out of traditional engineering.
It’s puzzling because programming seems so easy and fun. And even before LLM’s, we had StackOverflow after all.
But for some reason a lot of people just hit a wall when they try to learn programming, and we don’t know why. The “CS 101” course at colleges has extremely high attrition.
A minor secondary effect may have been that if you were not a software developer, your boss didn’t want to see you programming.
CS programs have high attrition rates because programming or "coding" has been touted as easy money for a couple few decades now. When people find out it's not so easy, they bail. Holding a few layers of abstractions in your head is not something that everyone does easily.
Just as keeping most of the structure of a 4-novel-long story in your head is not something everyone can do, hence why being a successful author is not something that everyone can do. Start telling everyone that being a novelist is easy money, though, and you'll see Comp 101 courses filling up and the attrition rate correspondingly go through the roof.
This is literally the same for all professions, only in CS/SE it is for some unknown fucking reason considered “a problem”. Why isn’t there “replace extremely expensive doctors/lawyers with AI” movement?
Because programmers made the LLMs, and they first applied it to the problems they know, so the examples of "replacing a programmer" are abundant. Then the hype train rolled in and now it's suddenly going to replace everything, just that software engineering is the low-hanging fruit since they already have "proof" that it works in that domain.
Hint: it actually doesn't work at real depth, and why not is fairly well explained in TFA: they hype always overestimates the depth of the field. So these advances do help to make easy thing easy (in the case of LLMs because they have been trained on a billion examples of the easy stuff), but don't really end up helping with the hard things (because they really only make new things that weren't encompassed in their training by getting lucky, and because tedious things are different than hard things).
Overly optimistic people are already talking about using LLM based AI as a way to provide healthcare access in underserved (i.e. rural) areas. There's already lots of studies going on for things like using AI to identify tumors and cancers in MRI and other images.
There's national headlines every few months for lawyers getting in trouble for submitting LLM hallucinated citations in court, so lawyers are starting to do it to themselves as well.
It's early days yet, because unlike most CRUD apps, the consequences of hallucinations and outright bad calls in medicine and law are life ending. Unless the bubble pops soon, it's coming though.
Yeah. There's a barrier also for professional surfing, soccer, cinema acting, submarine soldering, cooking.
Lots of people bought thousand dollars worth of cooking books and still make food their dogs turn the noses with disgust at.
Maybe there's some fucking talent requirement to do that stuff, even if just a little bit, to the despair of all Project/Product Manager types that secretly hate and despise software engineers.
The problem was never access barriers, but the fact that people are too lazy to study even a 200-300 pages on something as simple as ruby on rails.