[DrewADesign]

The supercharge bit missed an important fact: that strategy is very temporary. Getting expertise in software development takes a long time. Getting expertise in these LLM tools takes a lot less time— the combination of LLM expertise and dev expertise is the useful part. If LLMs make working developers, say, 35% more efficient, that’s going to be many thousands of people out of work, many of them being the most experienced and expensive we have. It’s not like those people are all going to give up immediately and become DoorDash drivers — they’re going to fight tooth and nail to get a job that uses their existing hard-won expertise. That means they’re going to level up their LLM knowledge, be willing to work for a LOT less money, and bring down everybody’s wages in the process. Companies don’t pay people based on the amount they bring to the company — they pay people based on the going market rate. That’s about to be a whole lot lower. So no matter how much you supercharge, you’re only buying yourself a little while until the labor market catches up. Nobody in development is safe. The entire field was so busy seeing how fast they could saw branches off of a tree that they didn’t realize they were standing on the wrong side of the cut, and the business side of the industry could not be happier about it. You’re basically working as a manufacturing engineer in the 90s US specializing in moving processes to offshore facilities. Probably felt pretty clever for a few years until they got the pink slip.

Honestly, the only hope that the dev field has is this all being so economically inefficient that the industry as we know it collapses after the VC subsidies run out, and we’re going to pivot towards much more reasonable interventions with local models and such.

[bilater]

you're being a doomer and only looking at how AI will take your job or suppress your wage. try to flip it around and see how you can do more. layoffs are coming and I have said as much in other posts but the top AI engineers will make a lot more money. ultimately they will get replaced to but in that scenario we should have reached AGI abundance.

[DrewADesign]

I’m in a trade now. I’ll be fine. I’ve got a pension.

And those AI engineers won’t be making bank for very long.

Looking at basic economics— labor supply and demand within this field— is not being a ‘doomer’, it’s just not letting boundless optimism trump rational analysis. It’s not like this is the first profession to get sucked into the air intake of the machine that replaced them.

Switching from software dev to AI engineer is an achievable lateral move, and we will have a lot of surplus software devs. Few of them will have skills that will transfer cleanly enough to keep the mortgage paid. Guess what job they’ll try to move into? Unless this turns out fundamentally different from what the big companies are implying, we’re not going to see demand that isn’t wholly satisfied by the current workforce for decades. With that much expertise desperate for a job, there’s no reasonable path to keeping wages high.

Sure there might be a few tech PhDs + MBAs at the director level that are making bank, but we’re building a system that replaces us, and the industry is not going to magically stop at this arbitrary level of replacement.