>e.g. front-end web development

It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want.

I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more generalist skillset is probably the best way to succeed in this new era; I'm just pointing out that LLMs don't really own any part of the stack so thoroughly that specialists in that segment will just go away.

You can't expect that timeline to continue forever. AI is a whole different beast than programming. It is in fact what programming set out to be in the 1940s: A replica of the brain. Automating programming tasks has only gotten us so far, but that timeline is probably ending now. We no longer need to automate programming because we can talk to the machine.

I think we're not too many years away from the end state of software. We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants, and the bulk of it is anywhere between garbage and outright fraud, if not actively malicious.

The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI. SWEs will be reduced to working on only the big corporate projects.

The overwhelming trend in commercial software these past few decades has been hyper-aggressive anti-customization, anti-personalization, anti-user. Commercial software has been reduced to one single happy path and if that doesn't suit your needs, then fuck off. No one is making commercial software for everyday people. Even open source is trending away from everyday users.

Soon, regular everyday people who simply need some software to solve a problem the way they want it solved will have the ability to do so. In the bast majority of those cases, the quality and correctness of said software really doesn't matter. What matters is that it's personalized, free, and isn't an invasive surveillance/advertisement platform.

"The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far."

Yeah, I don't that does not necessarily mean everyone is looking for the latest and greatest. Many businesses are still reliant on technologies like custom spreadsheets and Microsoft Access because they do exactly what they want them to do, have a fixed rate, and rarely require any additional modifications/maintenance. Once you step outside of the bubble so many of us are stuck in you'll realize that many, many people aren't interested in upgrades, but rather they just want the old shit they know to just work.

> at best you can have AI doing 90% of the work as long as an expert developer is driving things.

But that puts 90% of developers out of a job.

And I don't see why it couldn't become 99%.

Quite a few developers will likely loose their jobs. In particular the ones who don't have mental capacity to work with models - the ones who are forever junior.

The engineers who can manage large scale projects using agents will, on the other hand, probably get a hefty salary bump.

>Specifically, AI+human developer no longer outperforms AI alone. So far, all the available evidence seems to show AI as a force multiplier for developers and that for good results

Or humans are relegated to the co-processor role. The AI does 99% of the thinking and work and consults the human for the 1% it needs. Whether that extra contribution is essentially a random number generation, creativity / outside the box input, or esoteric problem solving remains to be seen.

> we might finally become productive enough to exhaust the world’s appetite for software.

I think we are past this point personally. Lots of blasphemously useless crap being built.

In every regime where we have meaningful longitudinal data about the long run outcomes of introducing technology that is superhuman at some or all of a human's job, the combination of the machine and an expert human outperforms either alone, with probably the clearest parallel structurally being chess, though this is true of all of the hard sciences and all of frontier engineering (semiconductor design).

There will never be a human who can beat Stockfish ever again, digital intelligence has simply accelerated away from human intelligence in that regime.

There is no other human alive who can beat Magnus Carlsen. Stockfish crushes Magnus.

But Magnus and Stockfish playing together crush any conceivable combination of just human or just computer. And no serious chess player would train without a computer or decline the assist if the contest mattered.

And this is in a regime where the dominance of the machine is total, structural, and permanent, far more so than any existing AI's impact on the outcome distribution of any recent development on any white-collar knowledge work include even the most sophisticated software engineering done anywhere. The demonstrated as opposed to completely conjectural lift on SWE outcomes with Claude Code (and even that's controversial, let's take the high end of the claims) is real and changes the geometry of the situation not at all.

Nor is there any apparent limit on how much arbitrarily sophisticated software the world has an appetite for, you could take someone at the absolute top of the field (I'm a big Carmack fan let's go with Carmack), and give him cutting edge AI assist, and the best program a person can write just got better. Sweet!

And this applies anywhere from junior to Carmack: however good they were, they're better now. We can build harder things. We can have extreme quality software where previously we were stuck with some Electron jank, across the board. Does anyone think Slack would lose market share if it went back to its gaming roots and was gorgeously 3D accelerated on every surface against a backend that could instant and perfectly synchronize an arbitrary workspace on a flakey cell connection and never have an outage or data loss? Or would they rapidly shred the remaining competition and become the favored tool of everyone?

In adversarial regimes like trading or drone warfare, you better believe the best hackers have arbitrary assist if you're going to play against them.

I think the thing to be hand-wringing about isn't AI, it's that capitalism no longer seems to be an adversarial regime. The worst software rivalries in the industry look more like a pillow fight than a battle of will.

And if there is any lasting reduction in headcount, it's leaders lacking ambition agreeing tacitly to not play very hard, not AI, that is to blame for that. None of the HFT shops nor amusingly the frontier labs have reduced their hiring or compensation at all. If anything, it's going up!

[dead]