[orangecoffee]

The root cause if of course AI's role in loss of power on compensation (coding as a skill is no longer as valuable), and loss of power in labor vs capital.

It's hard to face this, specially for the one oasis in the job market that pays well.

[anon7725]

The contrarian bet is that being able to code (by yourself) may be more valuable in the future. It will certainly become rarer.

[Applejinx]

We shall see. My area of coding for a living is SO specialized and SO far from 'skill at literal coding' that I'm making that bet, because I don't stand to benefit from anything else: if I go for AI it will directly relegate me to sheer vibe-coding as the AI will immediately go for abstractions that are more sophisticated 'code' than I know. It'll do them wrong but I won't know the difference and won't be able to criticize them.

That's so worthless and doomed to failure that there's no point attempting it, so I do the coding my own primitive way and focus on the specialty I do.

I can tell you the risk: any sufficiently motivated AI can go after my userbase by simply lying and claiming it's doing my thing better than I am. There'll be people who can't tell the difference, so if the AI is able to leverage more marketing and resources it may well succeed.

Only defense I have is to continue to do what I do, like some artisanal box-maker able to survive because they're doing exquisite work making something you can get a cardboard version of at Home Depot for a buck seventy-eight. Then when I die, there is ONLY cardboard, assuming there aren't people learning to make artisanal boxes.