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Mm this is my experience as well, but I'm not particularly worried about software engineering a whole.

If anything this example shows that these cli tools give regular devs much higher leverage.

There's a lot of software labor that is like, go to the lowest cost country, hire some mediocre people there and then hire some US guy to manage them.

That's the biggest target of this stuff, because now that US guy can just get equal or hight code in both quality and output without the coordination cost.

But unless we get to the point where you can do what I call "hypercode" I don't think we'll see SWEs as a whole category die.

Just like we don't understand assembly but still need technical skills when things go wrong, there's always value in low level technical skills.

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> If anything this example shows that these cli tools give regular devs much higher leverage.

This is also my take. When the printing press came out, I bet there were scribes who thought, "holy shit, there goes my job!" But I bet there were other scribes who thought, "holy shit, I don't have to do this by hand any more?!"

It's one thing when something like weaving or farming gets automated. We have a finite need for clothes and food. Our desire for software is essentially infinite, or at least, it's not clear we have anywhere close to enough of it. The constraint has always been time and budget. Those constraints are loosening now. And you can't tell me that when I am able to wield a tool that makes me 10X more productive that that somehow diminishes my value.

The mechanization and scaling up of farming caused a tectonic shift from rural residents moving to cities to take on factory jobs as well as office and retail jobs. We saw this in China until very recently, since they had a bit of a slow start causing delayed full-scale industrialisation.

So a lot of people will end up doing something different. Some of it will be menial and be shit, and some of it will be high level. New hierarchies and industries will form. Hard to predict the details, but history gives us good parallels.

What diminishes your value is that suddenly everybody can (in theory anyway) do this work. There’s a push at my company to start letting designers do their own llm-assisted merge requests to front end projects. So now CEOs are greedily rubbing their hands together thinking maybe everybody but the plumber can be a “developer” now. I think it remains to be seen whether that’s true, but in the meantime it’s going to make getting and keeping a well-paying developer gig difficult.

There was a previous edit that made reference to the water usage of AI datacenter that I'm responding to.

If AI datacenters' hungry need for energy gets us to nuclear power, which gets us the energy to run desalination plants as the lakes dry up because the Earth is warming, hopefully we won't die of thirst.

> When the printing press came out, I bet there were scribes who thought, "holy shit, there goes my job!" But I bet there were other scribes who thought, "holy shit, I don't have to do this by hand any more?!"

I don't understand this argument. Surely the skill set involved in being a scribe isn't the same as being a printer, and possibly the the personality that makes a good scribe doesn't translate to being a good printer.

So I imagine many of the scribes lost their income, and other people made money on printing. Good for the folks who make it in the new profession, sucks for those who got shafted. How many scribes transitioned successfully to printers?

Genuinely asking, I don't know.

The question I've been wondering is..

I think for a while people have been talking about the fact that as all development tools have gotten better - the idea that a developer is a person who turns requirements into code is dead. You have to be able to operate at a higher level, be able to do some level of work to also develop requirements, work to figure out how to make two pieces of software work together, etc.

But the point is Obviously at an extreme end 1 CTO can't run google and probably not say 1 PM or Engineer per product, but what is the mental load people can now take on. Google may start hiring less engineers (or maybe what happens is it becomes more cuthroat, hire the same number of engineers but keep them much more shortly, brutal up or out.

But essentially we're talking about complexity and mental load - And so maybe it's essentially the same number of teams because teams exist because they're the right size, but teams are a lot smaller.

In my experience, unless the US guy came from Stanford or some other similar place, there are plenty of mediocre US guys in software development.