I strongly agree with the author replies. I cannot grasp the reasonment of those who underestimate the power of these tools and their growing potential. We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.

I've had quite a few conversations and read many thoughts on the subject of job security in the software industry through the years. New technologies, various crisis and crashes, just age, incoming "hordes" of less prepared developers, or whatever.

If I had to highlight the one thing all those conversations had in common it would be precisely this:

  I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart

And it never does.

I agree, his takes should not be dismissed lightly. I'm not sure about "demand is fixed" though. I feel like software demand has been declared saturated at least a few times.

I agree with all of it, and I think author did a really good job at actually saying what's true, it's almost like developers don't want to hear it.

I feel that OP has reach that point because he went out of the basic tooling like Claude Code (at least in its default state) and embrace multi-model, automatic reviewing, fuse, loops and so-on, when it's done right, well, failure rate to solve issues is <1%, this is exactly why you arrive to that kind of depressing thoughts afterward and it's spot-on.

Many people will disagree because they are still at the vibe coding stage, not "as much as I can prompt will be automatically done stage". Claude Code imo is deliberately not implementing the best ways for users to work, they have recently implemented Workflows but that's almost a year late, many companies are doing this since always and that's just part of basic tooling nowadays.

People talk about models and benchmarks score while genuinely I'm baffled because they seem to ignore that that same benchmark can reach 99% by levering tooling intelligently, we don't really need better models (at least for coding), we just need adoption of proper methods. The day developers will be discover that they are already able to solve 300 issues in a single day with ZERO supervision in complex Rust codebases, I'm sure they'll change their mind.

Our bottleneck in our team is currently just having the mental bandwidth to type as much as possible, it's kinda sad, it is becoming all absurd.

If you are still watching the output of the model for coding tasks, I bet you haven't challenged your own methodologies, yet.

Your argument boils down to: it’s different this time.

LLMs are an ideological tool for the capitalist class to finally replace their dependency on labor and its pesky demands like sick leave and a living wage. A way for capital to finally become completely self-reproducing, for power structures to cement themselves and never be challenged again.

That's why the VC and CEO crowd are so excited about it, while the average population is hesitant at best.

There is no addressing this issue without developing class consciousness.

The only two ways out of this are 1) communal ownership of the means of production, e.g. of compute or 2) technofeudalism with cleansing of the now unneeded, unproductive new underclass that only takes up resources our overlords want for themselves.

Which version do you want to see realized? It's time to make your choice.

Some food is mass-produced in factories.

It tastes bad, and poisons you slowly.

Some (less) food is produced on farms and kitchens.

It tastes good, and keeps you healthy.

I don't really care who/what wrote the code. I don't even really care about the code at all. What I care about is the end product.

The problem is not "code quality" the problem is that billionaire sociopaths have removed human judgement (and human morality) from the dev loop. This started long before AI.

Coders are hyperfocused on style and missing the substance. We are entering a world where rich bastards can produce evil software without any checks whatsoever.

At least when humans were required to write the code, they had to find and retain unscrupulous humans. Now they're completely unfettered, and we're soon going to learn the precise shape of the digital prisons they're constructing.

Every freelancer that switched to AI feels exactly what happened even if they can't name it.

We became for AI what our clients were for us. Some hate it, some love it.

To feel safe in life our clients needed to have actual business. Now when we are the clients of our AI we are scared, because now we need to have an actual viable business. Economic machine that works. Because the old model of just selling our time and effort to a client no longer works, when we are the clients.

I don't entirely disagree, but as with many other posts on this topic…

> They will come for finance, biology, law, marketing, all knowledge work. That's their stated goal and they're already teasing it with "ChatGPT for Health" and similar launches. They're working on "harnesses" for other fields, it's just a matter of time before we have "Claude Finance Analyst" or something.

…

> Beg to disagree. The models will learn good engineering principles at some point.

…

> Stop and think, don't try to predict the future using (bad) past examples.

Don't try to prediction the future based on the past.

Also, here is my doomsday prediction.

Thats kind of ironic.

Heres a more thoughtful take: everything is an s curve.

Things start out fast, then they slow down.

It happens in learning, in tech, in literally everything.

The question (unanswered) is where we are in that curve.

Will they get better? Yes.

A lot better? A bit better? /shrug

> The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit.

No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity.