[DrewADesign]

> need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc

The problem is that reliable, repeatable professional-grade commercial art and design sensibilities happen in full-time careers. It’s entirely different than fine art, where intense self-exploration and experimentation are a very viable option.

These tools are exacerbating an already difficult creative job market so there’s no reasonable path to get those skills. Our creative professional pipeline is fundamentally broken.

[kev009]

The same thing is happening in software, I see the ladder pulled up and don't feel vulnerable as senior staff. If anything, we face a massive and increasing competency crisis in computing because there is a cult dumb enough to believe acceleration and doomer cases for LLMs.

[DrewADesign]

I got out of the software business after a couple decades and the market for newly graduated designers in my field collapsed in my senior year of 2024 so now I work in machining.

The last of the core industrial skilled trade workforce that came up in the 70s and 80s, before offshoring, is retiring. Offshoring left the industry with all the skilled workers they needed for decades, so a vanishingly small number of apprentices were trained. Since the seniors transferred very little knowledge, very few people still have that knowledge, and they’re scrambling to transfer all of that knowledge into a new batch of apprentices.

I think the software business is closer to a trade than an engineering profession than people care to admit, and is looking at something like that down the road a few years. In the interim, we can look to the rust belt to see how the America industry treats workers that are no longer needed. I don’t even think we need autonomous, agentic virtual developers to make that happen — a double-digit productivity boost will likely result in a double-digit job market contraction.