This is happening to SWEs too. If you have a certain amount of experience, you are capable of critically analyzing AI output. In Big Tech parlance, these are the Senior SWEs and higher. You require little to no supervision and can work independently.

But how do you make Senior+ SWEs? By having a pipeline of juniors who get trained and mentored. That pipeline is cooked now.

There is going to be a brief period where some like Staff+ SWEs are going to make a lot of money by being AI specialists. But the flood waters are rising for everyone. Those opportunities are going to shrink.

It's eventually going to be a problem that the ecosystem has died because there's no new blood and the people there lack the experience and critical thinking to understand what's being done.

I can use AI on topics I know because I can spot the errors. LLMs lie a lot and get things wrong a lot. What happens when nobody can check the output?