In the modern interpretation of the terms within the Fantasy genre a Wizard is someone with access to magic gained via dedicated investment into learning. It is an academic pursuit, they know what they’re doing and they’re limited by what they understand. A sorcerer has an innate connection to some magical source, they operate by feel and intuition. They do not need to understand what they’re really doing, they just do it.
I’ve been thinking about this division lately as a metaphor for, what else, LLMs and the usage of them by software developers. A particularly clever bunch of wizards have distilled what seems to be the entire magical communities knowledge into a golem, to which they are selling access. Anyone at all with the resources can pay for access to the golem, and for a time become a sorcerer.
So what of the wizards?
I have loved writing software since I was 15 years old. I got my first taste of the satisfaction of building things then, it hooked me and never let go. I don’t liken it to magic lightly; there is something special about crafting things “just so” and seeing the result in front of you. It has never been just about the results, the process of getting there is where the magic happens, without it there is no joy.
For those like me, this strange new world of agentic software development is therefore a frightening prospect. Would I have even chosen this career if not for the joy it brought me? And if the core of that joy is gone, replaced by a golem that can do a comparable job in a fraction of the time, what then? There are those will scoff at the assertion that the golems output is comparable. People will yell “slop!” and give examples of some shitty model doing some stupid thing when they tried to one-shot an under specified problem. I think this reaction is understandable, but frankly it reads like denial. Use a good model, give it good direction, it’ll do a pretty good job. Do a couple iterations on that, with more good direction, and you’ll get something high quality out. I don’t see any reason to think that this won’t do anything but improve over time.
I don’t know where this is going to go in the future. I don’t know if my career will still exist in 5 years time. Anybody who claims to know is trying to sell you something. What I do know, is that denying the reality staring you in the face isn’t going to do you any favours.
So here’s what I think happens to the wizards: Just as we were the ones who built the golem, I think we are still the ones best positioned to make use of its abilities, but things aren’t going to look the same as they used to. We need to move beyond the minutiae of the systems we are responsible for. We need to become domain experts as well as technical ones. We need to learn new techniques that best leverage the new tools available to us. I don’t know if that means we never look at the code; personally I find it hard to let go of that however I am fairly confident at this point that at the very least it involves not reading all the code.
My most optimistic read on the situation is that we are witnessing the birth of metamancy (magic about magic), and that I will find things to love about it as well.