[ssimpson]

I tend to agree with you. The general pattern behind "x tool came along that made work easier" isn't to fire a bunch of folks, its to make the people that are there work whatever increment of ease of work more. ie, if the tool cuts work in half, you'd be expected to do 2x more work. Automation and tools almost never "makes our lives easier", it just removes some of the lower value added work. It would be nice to live better and work less, but our overlords won't let that happen. Same output with less work by the individual isn't as good as same or more output with the same or less people.

[fragmede]

> but our overlords won't let that happen

If you have a job, working for a boss, you're trading your time for money. If you're a contractor and negotiate being paid by the project, you're being paid for results. Trading your time for money is the underlying contract. That's the fundamental nature of a job working for somebody else. You can escape that rat race if you want to.

Someone I know builds websites for clients on a contract basis, and did so without LLMs. Within his market, he knows what a $X,000 website build entails. His clients were paying that rate for a website build out prior to AI-augmented programming, and it would take a week to do that job. With help from LLMs, that same job now takes half as much time. So now he can choose to take on more clients and take home more pay, or not, and be able to take it easy.

So that option is out there, if you can make that leap. (I haven't)

[johnnyanmac]

>You can escape that rat race if you want to.

I'm working on it. But it takes money and the overlords definitely are trying to squeeze as of late.

And yes, while I don't think I'm being replaced in months or years, I can a possibility in a decade or two of the ladder being pulled up on most programming jobs. We'll either be treated as well as artists (assuming we still don't unionize) or we'll have to rely on our own abilities to generate value without corporate overlords.

[wincy]

Interesting. So it sounds like I need to get into the market and charge half as much and steal all of his customers.

These things eventually always end up as a Red Queen’s race, where you have to run as fast as you can to stay in the same place.

[fragmede]

From a game theory perspective, it is that simple. But humans are messy and have emotions and feelings and shit.

A different friend who's contractor in a non-tech area told me a client of his secretly showed him his competition's bid for the same project. The competition's bid was much higher, and the reason the client showed him that was to get my friend to raise his rates and resubmit his bid.

So you're welcome to try, but as a programmer looking into the abyss, I'm looking at the whole thing as encouragement to develop all those soft skills that I've been neglecting.