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alexgieg • today at 8:45 AM • 0 replies • view on HN

Long term the tendency is even lower salaries.

Right now AI still isn't autonomous enough to do all of the work itself, so it needs developers to carefully manage it to do what it must.

If things remained like this, then sure, there'd be a point when "AI-management for area X" would become a profession on its own, similar to how similar processes happened multiple times in the past, and that would result in a new balance.

But AI won't remain like that. The end-goal is that a high level executive coils type on, Claude v25 something like:

"Update all my legacy codebase to the most recent everything. Make sure it works perfectly and doesn't break compatibility with anything. Also, while you're at it, these DOCX our customers sent list new features they'd like, so implement it all while you're at it."

And come back in the morning with it all executed perfectly. Which definitely isn't a recipe for human developers to start earning any better.

Human earning ceiling will be how much it'll cost for AI to do it at the same quality and efficiency level. If you charge less than that you'll have work, but not otherwise.