[dedup]

From the individual incentive standpoint, it's not immediately clear who would make a decision to establish such a pipeline and subject their organization to short-term competitive disadvantage. A CEO of a public company can't really say "our R&D is 2x our peers because we're building a pipeline".

What I suspect is going to happen is something like the regional pilot situation, where one toils for pennies at lower levels and then gets to comfortable compensation numbers 10-15 years later.

[ringeryless]

I suspect we will continue to have junior developers, albeit the tasks they are tasked with may change. One big issue is that it is expensive to have senior devs essentially correcting AI slop. Additionally, at current prompt pricing I suspect a junior dev is a better ROI still. A more likely result is increased expenditure due to trying to keep up with the AI hype, not a reduced team size.

I have yet to hear of a productive software development shop successfully reducing staff count due to LLM usage.

[gorbachev]

Founders at AI Slop Fixers Consulting Inc will become billionaires.

[Terr_]

I'm sure there'll be a lot of such work, but I don't think it will attract crazy investor dollars.

Millionaires, at best. :p