I think it's completely normal. Whenever automation comes knocking, people are inclined to think it's going to flatline conveniently before their job is at risk. LLMs can code now? Cool, they can't code well though can they? Oh they can code pretty well now? Cool, coding was never the hard part of SWE anyway, it's [thing we have no reason to think AI can't beat 99% of humans at at some point], etc

I think SWE as a mainstream profession is much nearer to the end than the beginning, I'm curious and quite scared about what becomes of us.

The problem is that software development contains domain independent and domain specific skills. Since information processing is domain independent, replacing software developers in general will require beating them not only in the domain independent skills, which is what the recent breakthroughs have been about, but also in every single domain dependent skill.

This makes software development AGI-complete. If you have an LLM that can write software for every domain, then for every task you assign it, it could build software that performs the assigned task and thereby solves every problem in existence.

What I'm trying to get at here is that an "SWE" is a biological machine building machine. If you have a digital machine that can build any machine, you haven't solved the first step, you've solved the final step in all of human history that ever needs to be done, whatever that means. Beyond that point, human work no longer exists, because the machines have taken over everything.

I don't think you understand. Frankly, AI is a failure if all it does is replace coders. AI needs (given its current investment levels) to conquer all forms of knowledge work. This is an example of tech/industry needing to impose itself on society, rather than society needing it.

That's how human progress works. No one can want or need it because they cannot conceptualize wanting it until someone shows that it is possible. Now, many of those wants become needs.

We can absolutely conceptualize what we want or need. I was born in 1980 in NYC. When I was a boy my father took me to a tech conference where they had a demo of ordering TV shows on demand. It was a miracle, to my young mind. Was this what I needed?

Growing up I had a friend group of misfit boys, who discovered h4ck1ng and phr34king. But we also discovered slackware Linux on 3.5" floppies. We also had to discover ASM and compiling the linux kernel in order to do anything with it. Boys with machines. That wasn't what I needed either.

Later on we did have great things with tech. Google made the world searchable in ways Altavista didn't. I remember strapping the original iPod on my arm to go for runs outside. I didn't even need a car for a while investors subsidized my Uber rides to and from the office.

Now, it seems the US is balanced on a precipice. The economy seems to have an incredible amount of money desperate to grow, but to what purpose. In my lifetime, and in my parents, and their parents before them, when the dollar becomes restless the flag goes forth. The dollar follows the flag.

And here we are at war.

You wouldn't have known about a TV had you not seen it. That is what I mean by, people generally can't conceptualize what they want or need until they see it.

Wants and needs are not the same. We are experiencing the difference in real time. AI does not give society a want or need.

My point was not about the difference, it was about the fact that average people cannot conceptualize new ideas until one person or team invents it, then the average person will want or need it.

As for AI, I and many others want it, and some even need it, in certain use cases. Speak for yourself.

I believe the idea that you (or I) might know better than the 'average people' to be incredibly conceited, arrogant, and frankly wrong. It is an attitude that gives you superiority for having achieved nothing.

I'm not sure what you're even talking about, you're putting words and an argument into my mouth which I never said.

Well then I owe you an apology. Perhaps I inferred too much about your point of view and understood too little, which is my own loss. Sorry.

I think your numbers are off. TAM for office workers is ~20T a year, of which SWE compensation is ~3T. So if they can make 3T x 10% X 5 years = 1.5T that covers their current valuations. It's not as insane as you make out, even not taking into account the other high risk areas like legal, accounting etc

Hit the nail on the head with that framing. So many articles are now coming out addressing the anxieties about adoption of a new technology, but we genuinely don’t really need it as a society.

I still wonder if we really needed the iPhone or many other things we’re told is “progress” and innovation in an arrow of time manner. The future is not set in stone and things need not play out in this manner at all. Unlike the iPhone where most were excited by its possibilities (even if they traded precious privacy in the name of convenience), there’s not a clear reason that this version of LLM driven technologies represent significant upsides than downsides.