Fuck AI

the software angle brings up an interesting point because in my sector there is no ai use at all. letting ai do embedded work isn't really possible right now because the dataset is too small to train on. there are niches of art like this too.

My sector is web development, and there's a TON of AI exposure there right now (which is not surprising since web companies and web developers alike have always been some of the most 'trend-chasey' in tech). I'm not all that confident I can predict how software development will change, but right now my gut tells me that the industry will both shrink and "stratify" into a couple of separate classes.

One class will be analogous to the "senior engineer" of today. This will be a role you'll go to college to learn, and you'll continue to get prestige pay and benefits for doing it. There won't be many of these positions available and they will either work creating new AI systems, work on systems where AI code generation is impossible, or they'll be supervising the other class of developers.

This other class will be more akin to a skilled "trade" like plumber or electrician — both in terms of compensation and in education required. These workers will mostly use AI to produce code that's substandard but cheap, and a senior engineer will do the required clean-up to make it production-ready. Unlike today, these junior devs won't have a promotion track up to the senior level. The relationship will be more akin to the relationship between doctors and nurses, I think. There will be more of these positions available (but still fewer than that number of junior dev jobs today), the pay will be lower and the turnover will probably be higher since they'll get all the stress of crunch and mismanagement without any of the perks the seniors enjoy. They'll also be viewed and treated as disposable by management. I think there will be a lot of cross pollination between this group and QA, which will experience a lot of the same issues. In fact, this role and QA may just merge into one.

But I'm also just a random guy talking out of his ass on the Internet, so who fucking knows.