Comment by jr3592

I think technically building this stuff is now easier for the masses. But knowing what to build, how to describe it, how to test it, figuring out how to understand the users -- that's the hard part, always was and I'll be employed doing that for a couple more years at least. But after that, I see this all going towards building for agents, building for users will be a thing of the past. Then I think its not as easy for people to relate to that, probably want a machine designing for other machines. UX and taste don't really matter much at that point.

You're not crazy. I think there's still room for the top 5% of devs working on genuinely hard technical problems.. but I don't see a bright future for the rest.

There’s going to be a lot of chaos at some point but I think that “hybrid builders” (scientists, sales people, product developers, etc). true specialists, and new opportunities in hw/robotics/training/ will soak up a lot of talent, and be rewarding to work in. Feels very sadly k-shaped.

Software engineering on one end is going to be more like finance or medicine where the cost of poor performance is actually higher than the risk that they wont be worth what you pay them (ie there isn’t any amount of pay where it’s worth it to hire them). Then on the other it’ll be like knowing how to use PowerPoint. All the new tech categories have too many bottlenecks and challenges beyond just producing code to consolidate like that.

Salaries won't fall, they'll go up. The number of roles is what'll fall. SWE is going to become a giant game of musical chairs, and people who can't find a seat will get pushed into human facing roles ("product" / "technical sales" / "customer support" ).

No. Saas hedge is to offer solid api + mcp for agents to use whilst still maintaining their own products alongside. That's it, that's the whole thing.

Are you going to trust a vendor who has been running for years with your business critical operations or brad_69's awesome saas skills and agents? Do you think these businesses are going to shift their whole product to be in Altman's walled garden when they don't need to?

In a corporate environment the ability to code does not substitute a decent software engineer.

Nah. Website builders have been around for a long time in various forms. This isn't much different.

I've said it before but I'll repeat it here until someone changes my mind: jobs in IT are safe until using AI gets its equivalent of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". Until there can be financial and legal responsibility for when things go bad, people are going to be needed. Once it's so good AI labs will be happy to accept liability, it's game over. It was never about code quality.

Slapping up a slop website is no threat to professional tech folk.

When they have full DevOps, with multiple environments for testing, compliance with security best practices, can do database updates and data migrations, move the app smoothly between different platforms, streamline costs, and scale to at least hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users without crashing and burning... then go ahead and worry. We aren't anywhere near that.

On the other hand, if you are purely a coder, and cannot run a project that does all of the above... maybe start your worrying earlier.

Coding is probably solved. Honestly it’s probably going to be 5 years of runtime starting now depending on industry lag and uptake.

A team I was managing spent a whole year converting government forms into a web app. It took a while and there was a lot of discussion with the end users and a bunch of back and forth (keep in mind this is government software with a lot of onerous legal requirements). Then about 4 months ago, we just fed Codex the forms, along with the UI design and the legal requirements and it spat it out in 1 hour. Was it perfect? No. But our iterative loop became make the web app, show it to end users and then incorporate feedback and completely cut out the UX team, product etc. We were able to complete the conversion in 2 weeks with one guy (something like 150+ government forms/applications). For most simple to medium corporate development work it’s basically over.