I've been programming since approximately age 8, so around 40 years. For the past few years have been focused on generative AI, agents, etc. I have built multiple agent frameworks in Node.js, Rust and now Python.
I use AI with my agent system to help me write code for projects and my agent system. The leading edge models are incredible, but still somewhat brittle. They can make some weird mistakes. And I definitely have to go back over things.
But actually given all of the necessary context they can already complete a surprising number of programming tasks with good supervision.
It is night and day beyond the capabilities that it had a couple of years ago when I built my first agentic coding tests.
The thing that people strangely still seem to not get is that these systems will continue to improve rapidly. We continue to break through barrier after barrier with new paradigms. Now we are on the inference time ramp which is going to lead to large gains in intelligence.
There are more significant gains to be had also with things like multimodality and just plain efficiency increases from ASICs.
Beyond that, new machine learning approaches such a JEPA, new hardware paradigms built on memristors, etc.
Robotics and integration of new general purpose machine learning into robots continues to improve.
In less than five years, human software engineers will not be able to compete with AI in most contexts. Not only that, they generally will hold projects back if they are involved.
Before we get to the fully general purpose AI software engineers, platform specific tools with integrated agents can already with current models be very competitive in producing customized software for specific domains.
But it's not just software engineering. It's literally every single job. Including plumbers and all of the physical labor which currently is safe but improved robotics are just a few years away.
It seems obvious to me that normal careers are just not a good plan.
Instead, think of AI and robotics as incredibly cheap labor that will be available to just about everyone. So you become an entrepreneur, or the manager of a sophisticated network of teams of robots/AI running on a blockchain. Think about how to leverage these systems to provide goods and services.