Comment by uejfiweun

It's counterintuitive but something becoming easier doesn't necessarily mean it becomes cheap. Programming has arguably been the easiest engineering discipline to break into by sheer force of will for the past 20+ years, and the pay scales you see are adapted to that reality already.

Empowering people to do 10 times as much as they could before means they hit 100 times the roadblocks. Again, in a lot of ways we've already lived in that reality for the past many years. On a task-by-task basis programming today is already a lot easier than it was 20 years ago, and we just grew our desires and the amount of controls and process we apply. Problems arise faster than solutions. Growing our velocity means we're going to hit a lot more problems.

I'm not saying you're wrong, so much as saying, it's not the whole story and the only possibility. A lot of people today are kept out of programming just because they don't want to do that much on a computer all day, for instance. That isn't going to change. There's still going to be skills involved in being better than other people at getting the computers to do what you want.

Also on a long term basis we may find that while we can produce entry-level coders that are basically just proxies to the AI by the bucketful that it may become very difficult to advance in skills beyond that, and those who are already over the hurdle of having been forced to learn the hard way may end up with a very difficult to overcome moat around their skills, especially if the AIs plateau for any period of time. I am concerned that we are pulling up the ladder in a way the ladder has never been pulled up before.

I think the senior devs will be fine. They're like lawyers at this point - everyone is too scared they'll screw up and will keep them around

The juniors though will radically have to upskill. The standard junior dev portfolio can be replicated by claude code in like three prompts

The game has changed and I don't think all the players are ready to handle it

Supply and demand. There will continue to be a need for engineers to manage these systems and get them to do the thing you actually want, to understand implications of design tradeoffs and help stakeholders weigh the pros and cons. Some people will be better at it than others. Companies will continue to pay high premiums for such people if their business depends on quality software.

I think the pay is going to skyrocket for senior devs within a few years, as training juniors that can graduate past pure LLM usage becomes more and more difficult.

Day after day the global quality of software and learning resources will degrade as LLM grey goo consumes every single nook and cranny of the Internet. We will soon see the first signs of pure cargo cult design patterns, conventions and schemes that LLMs made up and then regurgitated. Only people who learned before LLMs became popular will know that they are not to be followed.

People who aren't learning to program without LLMs today are getting left behind.

I think to give yourself more context you should ask about the patterns that led to SWEs having such high pay in the last 10-15 years and why it is you expected it to stay that way.

I personally think the barrier is going to get higher, not lower. And we will be back expected to do more.

> like the SWE job will still exist, but with a much lower technical barrier of entry

its opposite, now in addition to all other skills, you need skill how to handle giant codebases of viobe-coded mess using AI.