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by aster0id 613 days ago
If AI agents do get better than human SWEs, they'll also get better than their human counterparts at other jobs - including being an entrepreneur.

When people call out the doom of SWE careers at the hands of AI, they seem to think that only SWE careers will be affected, which seems weirdly biased to me. If AI comes for our jobs, it'll come for everyone's jobs. And if that is the case, economics/capitalism as it exists today doesn't make any sense anymore.

2 comments

I'm not sure I agree. LLMs are great coders, because we have a lot of training data to make next token prediction work well for writing software programs.

A mistake to make here is to conflate 'AI' with some non sensual dream of 'AGI'.

LLMs are able to do a lot of what a swe does and if nothing else that just means we need less SWEs.

It absolutely still makes sense. It just won’t be so great for the humans.
In which case there will be massive social upheaval, which won't be good for the newly minted god-CEOs. They are incentivized to share the spoils of infinite productivity. What good is being a god of a world in flames?