The dark truth is that tech executives have been extremely pissed off by tech workers in the 2010s leveraging their specialist knowledge into exorbitant salaries, autonomous working conditions and even political demands (remember the Google in China backlash?), and they are now using AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs in order to scare the uppity proles-craftsmen into falling in line. As Kalecki said, they value discipline in the factories more than raw profits

"we can't ship your stuff because of some material restriction or let you pick up a box with some dignity, so we destroyed your stuff"

Really? never heard of anything like this even when I was in the states. If anyone tried this anywhere in Europe the case would almost certainly end up in a parliamentary questions session.

This should be the case now for anything that is not a prototype. The job has changed from "writing code" to "shipping software". A technical lead.

As AI gets more intelligent and the tooling around it develops and organizations figure out how to get it access to the data, the level of involvement needed for software engineers will decrease. Since the cost of developing software is plummeting, the amount of software being used is going to expand greatly- that will keep the technical lead positions available longer and also create more opportunities for consultant engagements.

Although someone can use AI to rewrite every software dependency and every paid piece of software, its still not worthwhile for them for most software, especially if the price of the software is low compared to the complexity it hides.

Users of a paid software product still need a human to be responsible for it.

As you develop your skills with AI, you now have the ability to develop your own software products. So there's an opportunity to become a small business owner. You didn't want to do these non-technical roles, but now you can continue to direct AI to automate all the aspects of the business.

There was a time that I really cared about my work and about my colleagues livelihoods.

Then I realised, it’s just a job. I’ve lost jobs before. I’ve taken shitty, low paid jobs before. It’s just a job. You turn up, they pay you, then you go home to your actual life, the one that matters.

People take their jobs too seriously.

This sentence, whenever I see it, makes me chuckle now.

Surely the leopards won't eat my face. I have taste and you can't get that from a machine.

If the higher-ups don't care about the quality of your code when they compel you to tokenmaxx, what on earth gives you the impression they have a clue about your taste? It's not the AI that is going to fire you, it's that arsehole Brad who you made the grave mistake of beating too comprehensively at Catan.

All of this is to say that we have a case of “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” on steroids; Capital is going to fight like its life depends on it to stay irrationally convinced in their belief that AI can replace Labor.

Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.

In other words, would those people have kept their jobs at current interest rates if there was no AI?

I think most wouldn't and leadership would be saying something else.

As a product manager my approach and execution of my daily work has massively changed in the last half a year. It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.

Ever since LLMs took over everything I'm working or have worked on, I no longer have fun, no longer feel joy, or challenged to solve issues.

My question is, what now? What's the backup skill or job to develop next and still feel joy with it?

But I think it is important we all emphasise that this LLM-age giddiness sits squarely in those businesses where influence and product have always been their thing. It is unfortunate but, here we are. I don't believe a VP or MD or CXO is ever going to admit they were played by their peers on this one (agentic development).

The positive perhaps is the hardening of personal development, by need or necessity. LLM and agents are terrible at domain expertise still, and only until memory availability becomes abundent again (in end-user equipment), that is not going to change.

My big concern for the industry is when that happens, and anyone can build anything, but with the ability to tune to domain expertise via their own terms; this is the collapse, where no 'moat' exists at all, we are already seeing the collapse of the subscription model, and I believe pay-on-demand / purchase _is_ authentication is a tracking metric to that collapse. I forsee regulation being pushed to ensure the model however and foresee regulation on user equipment.

Larger institutions are perhaps 1-2 years lagging (for regulatory reasons) on uptake and perhaps that is the point in all this giddiness.

I do.

You don't need any sort of fancy harness as claimed.

All you need to do is type vague ideas into a text box. Then you need some UX taste to pick good concepts.

The building of the software happens trivially now. You do not need a software engineer, sorry guys.

What you need next is someone with time and patience to QA test the software and provide feedback for the AI.

I guess ideally the same person, with the UX taste.

Give it a few weeks and the product is done, without the need for a team of 5-10. All it takes is one competent human.

I know that many here vehemently disagree and raise concerns about the viability and maintainability of the software.

I believe not a single one of them has made that experience, these concerns are based on their imagination of what they think would happen. Usually they tell you that they essentially review every line of code in their projects.

This is a very good point. It's now easy to just do things, so discernment has become more valuable than ever. If you leave things to Opus 5.5, it'll just say that you need to implement every product-bloating change, and "here let me take care of that for you".

This sums it up well and will ring true no matter which side of the argument you're on.

   We're heading towards the end of the year and I still do not see how these copy-machines with "super intelligence" inside are going to replace humans. What they have done is convince those with money to spend differently on their fellow humans.

This I feel is a strong point. At least in my social-bubble, I notice that many of the vibe-coding CEO's now loose the plot on what their company actually does, and are too focused on solving just any problem any customer presents them. Whether or not that matches their actual company-strength, or their product, is then secondary.

And I miss that. I miss beeing able to say "I work for X, we do Y to solve Z".

Seems like we're now crossing into bargaining and depression.

I have empathy for those who were open minded enough not to mock those of us who were warning against this or swiftly dismissed our opinions. I hope you can now be open minded to the fact this will continue, and will extend to ALL jobs, that our society WILL dramatically change to the point of becoming unrecognizable in the not so distant future. We tend to be consistent in making the same errors when predicting the future. You just need to look into past predictions about our present time. Most people still make those errors. But once you see them you can try to avoid them, though unfortunately not making those mistakes usually leads you to seem crazy to others, which is also part of the reason those mistakes are so common.

Which all sound a bit alarmist, but it needs to break at some point where investing money will not work because there will be no payoffs.

What will break first? The people or the system.

Most were just let go. No severance, or comp packages. Just a good luck with your job search, it was nice while it lasted.

For his next gig, he worked in fisheries. His 10 years of experience at the factory didn't mater, and he started with entry level pay. This lasted some years, until some bigger company bought his employer, and merged. Lots of people had to go, him included.

Then he landed work delivering mail. Worked there for 15 years, until the postal service started downsizing due to ever decreasing volume in mail being delivered.

So his last attempt was to just go to trade school, and try some trade. 50+ years old working on a apprentice salary, once again starting at the bottom rung of the ladder.

My point is, there are many people out there that have lived this life. For every software developer that have made bank for the past 20 years, and are now faced with the reality of being made obsolete, there are probably 10 people who've gone through this multiple times, but gone from one minimum wage job to another. Going back to start every time.

It sucks for everyone. But you just have to adapt. I guess one silver lining is that when the "white collar professional jobs"-apocalypse arrives, that's when we'll finally look at things like UBI.

Time and time again, we've seen that when working class jobs disappear, it is met with some sort of aw-shucks / but-they'll-find-something-else-to-do reaction. Whereas when the middle/professional class is affected, it is seemingly a end of times sign.

This hits home. It's both a shame and infuriating what's happening in the market right now. One (unsolicited) piece of advice I would give to anyone impacted is to build their own shit. If these companies stop paying for your lunch, then eat their fucking lunch with the same gimmicks they convinced themselves are adequate to stop paying for your lunch.

I'm not just talking about the enterprise giants - build competing products , lower their margins build similar products and offer them for less. Cut out the middle-men. They might have the contract now but their operating costs are higher. In the long run they are uncompetitive.

Ultimately in the future (near? middle? far?), Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero, and who will be the buyers? Certainly not those with Capital, because the marginal cost of anything being close to zero would mean that they would not need to buy from others - they can just make their own. And those without Capital won't have the means to buy anything, even when the cost is close to zero.

Interesting times ahead?

Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?

The "it saves money" mindset is bad for everyone, distorts everything away from valuable work and investments that generate the most revenue.

(And I assume that there's a sliver of people who never went this route in the first place, and another sliver who never stopped).

I wonder when this comes from other white class jobs— process engineering, autocad drafter, electronics design.

Being replaced by a machine is different -- but still, not in a way that I can authoritatively say ought not to happen. If you could get your shirt made by a woman, or the same shirt made by a machine that costs 5% of what it would cost to pay the woman, you will pick the machine 99% of the time. Almost anyone would.

Being replaced by other people, or by a machine, is a very sad thing for the person being replaced. But I can't persuade myself that all by itself it is morally wrong in any sense.

ChatGPT can go long way designing printed circuit boards with text based KiCad. Luckily most companies stick to the expensive overengineered (for normal boards) tools like Altium. That part of workforce is safe for a while.

I am moving from electrical engineer to electrician right now. The money is the same (in Germany). I vibecoded my CRM/invoicing/protocol generation/warehouse tool by myself. Over 120 iterations with ChatGPT. And this was scary!!! A decade ago such development would cost 6 figures to develop and 5000-8000€ a year to use. Now it’s on my computer working the way I want. <100€, no need for software team.

https://ceobench.com/

I'll believe this the day an AI model can golf with an executive, or wine and dine and call hookers in an overnight business meeting. Sure, that's not every exec, but that's common enough that AI isn't going to work there.

Often, the agent will fix a problem without assessing if the fix is worth it, optimal or defective. It's fine to merge fixes like this in codebases occasionally - humans have been managing to do this and to work around this for ages. I'd like to see a software project that is purely LLM driven and doesn't devolve into chaos because of this.

The actual reality is, that it is too early to actually say where this is going to end. Either AI is going to fix what it is causing right now or not.

We are screwed either way. So is the person or prompter behind the message above.

If Ai is universal there is no need for UX, because a real personal assistant, that takes personal care of you is the only UX necessary in the end.

This part is quite "load-bearing".

I heard from someone who worked at Lovable that what most customers produce with that magical textbox is software that shouldn't go anywhere near production. Apparently the problem of thinking like an engineer is not solved by these AI tools. Most people who are not software engineers by trade are not capable of verifying what they produced, nor would they even consider needing to.

No offence, I think you might be a classic case of "senior who forgot how it feels to be junior", where after a lot work experience deva start taking their software engineering instincts for granted and forget that they are a skill that takes years to master. You can prompt an AI for a solution, you can even prompt it for ideas, but you cannot prompt it to think for you.

If all you give the machine is a vague idea, then it is unlikely that you will get what you want or need. Pure information theory. Garbage in, garbage out. You could get lucky, but luck based strategies are just frustatingly bad in the long run.

> The building of the software happens trivially now.

The building of bad software does, no doubt. I'd like to use good software and my sincere hope is that AI tech will be used to raise software quality substantially since most of what I see around me and have to use every day is just really bad, compared to what it could be if people cared.

> You do not need a software engineer, sorry guys.

For quality you do.

Yes, but this time around there may be nothing left to adapt to.

Capital is that fraction of produce set aside for future production. OpenAI is capital but not all wealth is capital. And capital isn't going anywhere - the machines will have gigafactories etc. The value of labor will plumet but present-day capital that is usable by the machines or can be scrapped and repurposed will retain value.

The value of square meter of land + mineral/sunlight rights (not capital) is likely to rise - the amount of wealth that somebody would give you for that asset would probably increase, as more wealth can be generated from it.

Individuals without wealth now will likely end up with a much lower allocation of those things which retain value (land, materials, etc) while having a much higher quantity (relative to now) of those things whose value will drop - AI tokens, electronics, entertainment, etc.

Essentially our current trajectory taken to the limit. Land expensive, food expensive, interest low, smartphone cheap.

> who will be the buyers

Imagine an impoverished and technologically backward country which has been colonized/occupied, and where the most valuable assets are exported well below market price or stolen. The people still trade their own labor for subsistence. They still produce some goods which have value in outside countries, they receive some charity, there is still tourism, their labor has some value (servitude, trafficking). AI would be the same (assuming laws hold up) - e.g. you could rent out your solar panels to OpenAI in exchange for a loaned domestic robot and a token subscription.

Mega corp will advance technology exponentially, but for the rest of us we will live in a mix of medieval life style assisted by robotic and low tech. People will exode city and go back to the countryside.

For what concern my self, I'm buying arable land, maybe in couple of years home food production will be fully automated.

They probably won't. EU is not the same economic bloc that it was up to 2004 anymore. I am not sure that there is big country in EU that is having consistent high growth. I expect in the next 15 years the western eu countries to experience the joy of living standards collapse that the eastern bloc enjoyed during the 90s. But without some of the factors that made it bearable for the east.

1. There are plenty of things being outsourced, They can be done locally.

2. There are plenty of things currently not being done by locals - like elderly care.

3. We can find new things to do.

4. We can work less.

And even if those things raise living standard somewhat, the efficiencies from AI/robots should be more than enough to compensate.

But, in a capitalistic globalized economy this isn't how things work. So we'll see some shift from that. And it will work better in countries with a more democratic socialistic leaning rather than capitalistic.

We're already starting to see that, with the recent EU trade deal with china, limiting the amount of cars china can send to Europe.

In a word, bleak.