[rsalus]

AI usage will directly impact said margins. Moreover, for the scenario you describe, companies need to have the capability to precisely estimate the cost of a given deliverable - not something possible with current tooling + models. You're also underestimating the market trend towards vertical integration: companies are not going to be constrained by a sector or niche. They will expand to capture as much value as they can, because now their capacity to do so is partially decoupled from labor.

It will certainly be a cutthroat landscape for engineers, but companies will be building _more_ capacity, not less. In other words, the demand won't disappear for skilled technical labor, it will just move higher up the value chain.

[coldtea]

>You're also underestimating the market trend towards vertical integration: companies are not going to be constrained by a sector or niche. They will expand to capture as much value as they can, because now their capacity to do so is partially decoupled from labor.

They will still totally be, because the capacity to do so was never coupled to labor, it was coupled to domain knowledge, client network, other players dominating the market, and so on...