I've had quite a few conversations and read many thoughts on the subject of job security in the software industry through the years. New technologies, various crisis and crashes, just age, incoming "hordes" of less prepared developers, or whatever.

If I had to highlight the one thing all those conversations had in common it would be precisely this:

  I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart

And it never does.

> On novel work:

> Work that introduces new methods, highly creative ideas, or solutions that have not been used or experienced before. More generally, an approach that introduces an innovative strategy to solve a complex problem.

Something that I've been thinking about for the past year or so is coming to grips with the fact that the vast majority (anecdote) of software engineering work is not novel (and maybe that's okay). Few opportunities lend themselves to doing truly novel work. Other than infrastructure work and highly specialized software, pause and ask yourself when you last encountered software were you said "how the hell did they do that?" or "damn, that's nice" (for me, the most recent was Ghostty). I think much of the angst that people have when they fear for their job is coming to the realization that LLMs can do most of the "standard" work that a lot of highly compensated individuals currently do. We've built livelihoods around this and the threat of that coming to an end is genuinely frightening.

AI maximalism is making a lot of assumptions that I think are not a given

* The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace

* AI companies will have the capital continue to expand infrastructure

* there will be some kind of functioning economy if all knowledge workers are replaced

There are strong headwinds to all three of these.

Hey it may come to pass but it’s very speculative at this point. I see a lot of tech people simply overlaying the progress curve of previous tech booms which is reductive.

In my social network, there are two people impacted by LLMs. One was a security operations manager whose company reduced headcount upon introduction of some new LLM powered security tools. The other was UX designer. Both have been unemployed for 6+ months, and neither are likely to land a job in their field. The government hasn't stepped in and provided them with Universal Basic Income, and I wonder what will happen when my career is similarly impacted? Luckily I'm on the verge of retirement and should be able to support myself. However I have other friends who tried to day trade their 401k instead of work, and although back in the workforce, no longer have a nest egg. What's going to happen to them when they're inevitably put to pasture by AI?

> The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit.

No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity.

Your argument boils down to: it’s different this time.

I strongly agree with the author replies. I cannot grasp the reasonment of those who underestimate the power of these tools and their growing potential. We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.

I agree, his takes should not be dismissed lightly. I'm not sure about "demand is fixed" though. I feel like software demand has been declared saturated at least a few times.

I agree with all of it, and I think author did a really good job at actually saying what's true, it's almost like developers don't want to hear it.

I feel that OP has reach that point because he went out of the basic tooling like Claude Code (at least in its default state) and embrace multi-model, automatic reviewing, fuse, loops and so-on, when it's done right, well, failure rate to solve issues is <1%, this is exactly why you arrive to that kind of depressing thoughts afterward and it's spot-on.

Many people will disagree because they are still at the vibe coding stage, not "as much as I can prompt will be automatically done stage". Claude Code imo is deliberately not implementing the best ways for users to work, they have recently implemented Workflows but that's almost a year late, many companies are doing this since always and that's just part of basic tooling nowadays.

People talk about models and benchmarks score while genuinely I'm baffled because they seem to ignore that that same benchmark can reach 99% by levering tooling intelligently, we don't really need better models (at least for coding), we just need adoption of proper methods. The day developers will discover that they are already able to solve 300 issues in a single day with ZERO supervision in complex Rust codebases, I'm sure they'll change their mind.

Our bottleneck in our team is currently just having the mental bandwidth to type as much as possible, it's kinda sad, it is becoming all absurd.

If you are still watching the output of the model for coding tasks, I bet you haven't challenged your own methodologies, yet.

Every freelancer that switched to AI feels exactly what happened even if they can't name it.

We became for AI what our clients were for us. Some hate it, some love it.

To feel safe in life our clients needed to have an actual business. Now when we are the clients of our AI we are scared, because now we need to have an actual viable business. Economic machine that works. Because the old model of just selling our time and effort to a client no longer works, when we are the clients.

I think people are far too dismissive of just how well-suited programming is to the exact form of LLMs.

Extremely formal syntax, limited ambiguity, simple verifiable testing procedures, and colossal well-documented training sets.

I don't yet buy that the successes of coding agents will apply nearly as well to other professions. "Correct more often than not when asked a random accounting question" really isn't any indication to me that they'll get there.

>Agents used to be bad at this kind of stuff in my workplace as well, but newer models + agent-friendly documentation + AGENT.md begging agents to read the fucking docs before coding changed this landscape for us here.

Wouldn't that be true for humans as well? If you have documentation explaining a rule and you read it, you may not need to reach out to coworkers.

Otherwise I think the author's concerns are 100% valid.

Whenever someone complaints about LLMs eroding their career, I advise them to read The Profession by Isaac Asimov.

TLDR: there will be less programmers and they will be better on average.

> If the models (and harnesses) keep getting better at the same pace for the foreseeable years, we are heading to a world where the profession is commoditized to the ground. There's this talk about Jevons Paradox but I disagree. The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit.

This entire section is backwards to me.

The current state of a lot of different domains I've been in is that they tend to center around 2-3 major, generic products that all get retrofitted to fit those smaller/medium-sized businesses. Now that the economics have shifted, it makes sense for those businesses to bring on software devs to build software tailored to their problem specifically.

And you can't compare copyrighting. It's a totally different field, with different goals and different time tables.

Tax I could do to some extend but I once (for laughs) had a go at scripting up Dutch work hour laws because no one could do it in their head. This was so terrifyingly complex that I'm convinced many laws should be rewritten to make it easier to code.

The problem looks something like (not a real example): Type Z hours maximum A per day, B per week, C per month, D per year. E more hours than A is allowed every F weeks but no more than G per month and H per year. More than B is allowed... etc Minimum rest hours I per day, J per week, K per two weeks, L per month. More is allowed every 7.5 days unless it is full moon and maximum hours per day were exceeded at least 3 times in the last 82 days except from solar eclipses or if the Kings is married 12.5 years or if the employee gave birth in the last 472 hours.

My employer has software to make the schedules. It cant tell where shifting around shifts is possible but you can try do it and it will tell you why it isn't possible.

I was hoping to calculate if multiple shifts can be shifted around to facilitate someones day off. Sometimes it just cant be made to work but if people are willing and there is a hole you end up doing it anyway. (I've done a triple shift once because the coworker wanted to bring his wife to the hospital.) Employees earn undocumented days off... and then you end up with multiple schedules, the real one and the official one. Possibly extra copies depending on who knows what is really going on. This cant be the way...

Better just have modern laws that make sense in code.

You are correct that your career is changing, but it's not like AI is going to go away.

In the 1990s when crypto went to court. It was determined that really anything coming from AI is protected speech. Very few exceptions, AI cant export a few things.

So you're never seeing AI go away, which means you need to transition/adapt.

"I'm finding LLMs also competent at explaining and giving advice on other domain stuff I'm totally new to, which I have cross-checked with Legal/Product Managers and is usually right."

"Usually" is the keyword. Until it becomes "always" (counterintuitive for heuristic systems) or "almost always" some human experts will (/may?) be needed to babysit.

P.S. "_are_ usually right" since they are "LLMs". Methinks running the response through an LLM could've made it more "right".

> > This anonymous article is likely more FUD from the AI industry. "Just give up,you can't beat the machine. Please go quietly, we want to take your place and it's easier for everybody if you don't resist because you believe it's pointless"

> > So blog with single post hyping LLMs. Oh and the domain name "human-in-the-loop". Call me suspicious.

> If after reading what I just said in the reply above you still think I'm an "AI shill" or "lab shill", there's nothing I can do for you.

Yes there isn’t. Because they look indistinguishable.

Replacement Inevitability with a human face, along with all the human concern; “I am part of it and it scares me.”

> Yeah, that's what I'm doing right now. I'm one of the engineers who's constantly committing to improve our agentic tooling, I use different models to do adversarial code reviews, I keep a toolbelt of skills and prompts, etc. I have effectively become the so-called "AI-native engineer" (gosh, I hate that term).

Some CEO gloating about replacing all-knowledge-work gets skepticism, eye-rolls and resentment. Someone in the trenches having human feelings about it generates both sympathetic and ecocentric fear.

---

And maybe autor intent does not matter? The original submission was massively “popular”. It served its purpose.

> Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.

This is a particularly ignorant thing to say.

> The models will learn good engineering principles at some point.

This is just silly. It's fairly clear that the current design (by which I mean the entire concept of the deep neural network) has its limits and that they just aren't that good. We're seeing lots of other AI and software engineering brought to bear, but there's nothing 'inevitable' that means this is close.

"at some point" is so vague as to be irrelevant. Fusion might be the dominant source of electricity "at some point". Equally, AI knowing good principles could be 30 years away.

Don't assume that hard intellectual challenges are solvable on faith. Look at what's currently possible.

AI has always been a field where https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tasks.png applies heavily.

LLMs are an ideological tool for the capitalist class to finally replace their dependency on labor and its pesky demands like sick leave and a living wage. A way for capital to finally become completely self-reproducing, for power structures to cement themselves and never be challenged again.

That's why the VC and CEO crowd are so excited about it, while the average population is hesitant at best.

There is no addressing this issue without developing class consciousness.

The only two ways out of this are 1) communal ownership of the means of production, e.g. of compute or 2) technofeudalism with cleansing of the now unneeded, unproductive new underclass that only takes up resources our overlords want for themselves.

Which version do you want to see realized? It's time to make your choice.

Some food is mass-produced in factories.

It tastes bad, and poisons you slowly.

Some (less) food is produced on farms and kitchens.

It tastes good, and keeps you healthy.

I don't really care who/what wrote the code. I don't even really care about the code at all. What I care about is the end product.

The problem is not "code quality" the problem is that billionaire sociopaths have removed human judgement (and human morality) from the dev loop. This started long before AI.

Coders are hyperfocused on style and missing the substance. We are entering a world where rich bastards can produce evil software without any checks whatsoever.

At least when humans were required to write the code, they had to find and retain unscrupulous humans. Now they're completely unfettered, and we're soon going to learn the precise shape of the digital prisons they're constructing.

> * The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace

Frontier AI is already good enough to be very useful for engineering. It's too costly for many places where it could be useful today.

The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at least 10x over the next 18-24 months.

And likely again in the following 18-24 months.

At the same time, the cost per watt is going to down ~25%, and at the same time speed will increase (also valuable since time is money).

Others have commented on the rate of AI improvement. It doesn't need to be current rate for it to be an even more serious problem in the very near future. That's irrespective of prior booms.

Regarding AI companies having capital to expand infrastructure; this is largely irrelevant. The cat is out of the bag, and you can already make serious gains by finetuning to local problems on a desktop machine. There is enough hardware out there to run these things en masse; it's more a question of power. Regardless, this stuff will always keep progressing, regardless of who is doing it.

Regarding the economy, it may be largely irrelevant if we, the people, don't do something very soon. The wheel keeps spinning as long as there are productive workers; it's just that those workers are being replaced by machines. The last year has increasingly demonstrated that you don't need normal people to buy your stuff to remain afloat. You can just keep selling amongst your rich friends while the masses starve, as long as _something_ is still producing what the wealthy want, and enough systems are in place to protect them.

AI/LLMs have been dramatically improving for 7+ years. There's now a lot more funding to support continued improvement. You're correct this is an "assumption", but continued improvement at the same pace (or faster) for the next 3+ years is just extrapolating a trend. Believing we've hit the top today is based on nothing at all. Continued improvement is much more likely.

> The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace

I guess this is trivially true if you say "maximalism" (hell, the maximalists think it will speed up as the AI becomes a super-AI-researcher), but as long as the rate of change is positive and not miniscule, it's hard to predict what 2035 looks like in software development.

These things are very hard to quantify, but making the progress that happened from Jan 2025-December 2025 repeat twice in 10 years would be enough for me to say I couldn't predict the day-to-day of a software engineer in 2035.

The outside world doesn't even care that things work, they care that it looks like it works long enough. Investors don't care that it's snake oil, as long as they're not left holding the bag.

AI is really good at making things that look like they work.

This is a steelman of your argument.

> We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.

Until they go wrong because they are not good inside.

This is true. I have artist friends that are boycotting any company using AI art for their flyers/ads.

I looked at some examples and couldn't tell the difference.

The outside world itself will stop working if we replace labor with LLMs.

Mass unemployment equals riots equals an end to the status quo.

Here is another scenario. You mobilize your local community or even country to choose option 1, communal ownership. Then another country or region follows path 2. If option 2 is more productive (maybe because you redirected productivity gains towards wellbeing instead of more compute) you are toast, you now have a sort of Cold War scenario where eventually the technofeudalists will have the upper hand and could outcompete or destroy the technocommunalists or whatever you want to call them.

Note that I am not shitting on the idea of option 1 at all, in fact personally I would very much like to see it succeed. I just think this is more of a global issue than a local one.

The AI boosters imagine they'll be annointed and rewarded by their new overlords.

That's why they're obsessed (to the point of psychosis) with "mastering" the new technique.

That's why they're all building a "harness".

What they don't realize is that the ironworker still ends up in chains.

IMHO that is the most likely of the many dystopian robots-replace-humans scenario:

The AI-enhanced become more and more AI-integrated and internally AI-fused and they don't even realize they eventually are not humans at all.

The non-AI underclass just hasn't got enough access to resources to survive long term and dies out with a whimper.

> 1) communal ownership of the means of production, e.g. of compute

As every communist, you forget about economics of such a system. How would you prevent concentration of capital in this system? Planned economy? Planned by whom?

I attribute the excitement of the VC and CEO cast to the same underlying motive, but I think there are at least several other ways all this could play out:

- the Cul-de-Sac: AI progress flattens as scaling data and compute, RL and algorithmic improvements hit diminishing returns.

- democratization: LLMs decentralize, mirroring the shift from mainframes to personal computers.

- AI creates new jobs and thus new dependencies for the capitalist class

- Any combination of the above.

> It's time to make your choice

Clearly you feel you've made yours, so what are you doing differently now to what you did before?

You should read Nick Land, you've only went half-way with the argument.

The capitalist class doesn't control Capital, Capital controls the capitalist class.