I think AI is a component of the decline.

For decades, companies have operated under the misunderstanding that more software developers equals more success, despite countless works explaining that's not how it works. As a result many of these companies have employed an order of magnitude more than they probably should have and got worse results than they would have. However the fact they got subpar results with 10x a good number just convinced them that they didn't hire enough. Smaller team produce better results made zero sense.

So now the AI companies come along and give a plausible rationalization to decrease team size. Even if the LLM hypothetically does zero to provide direct value, the reduced teams start yielding better results, because of mitigating the problems of "make sure everyone is utilized, make sure these cheap unqualified offshored programmers are giving you value, communicate and plan, reach consensus along a set up people who might all have viable approaches, but devolved into arguments over which way to go".

AI gives then a rationalization to do what they should have done from the onset.

I think the post is about the state of agentic coders in 10 years, not the present.

Anthropic for starters. What they don’t realize is everyone will be switching to cyber security jobs in 10 years when every vibe coded piece of software is riddle with security vulnerabilities.

While "any" is a bit much, I do anticipate a rather dramatic decline.

One is that there are a large chunk of programming jobs that I do think LLM can displace. Think of those dumb unimaginative mobile games that bleed out a few dollars a week from folks. I think LLM has a good chance at cranking those out. If you've seen companies that have utterly trivial yet somehow subtly unique internal applications, LLMs can probably crank out a lot of those to. There's a lot of stupid trivial stuff that has been done a million times before that still gets done by people.

Another is that a lot of software teams have overhired anyway. Business folk think more developers mean better results, so they want to hire up to success, as long as their funding permits. This isn't how programming really works, but explanations that fewer people can do more than more people in some cases can't crack through how counter-intuitive that is. AI offers a rationalization for a lot of those folks to finally arrive at the efficient conclusion.

Finally, the software industry has significantly converted transactional purchases to subscription. With perpetual license, you needed to provide some value to drive that customer who bought from you 5 years ago a reason to upgrade. Now with subscription models, you just have to coast and keep the lights on for those customers. Often with effective lock-in of the customers data to make it extra hard or impossible for them to jump to a competitor, even if competitors could reverse-engineer your proprietary formats, the customer might not even be able to download their actual data files. So a company that acheived "good enough" with subscription might severely curtail investment because it makes no difference to their bottom line if they are delivering awesome new capability or just same old same old. Anticipate a log of stagnation as they shuffle around things like design language to give a feeling of progress while things just kinda plateau out.

https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg

Building trades are hell on your body and there is no goddamn way that any construction worker (Electrician, carpenter, plumber, pipefitter, mason etc) can last until SS age-- esp. as they are planning to raise it to 70.

It's two quotes. Miners don't throw coal into furnaces.

My liberal friends were saying, ‘You can’t expect them to be able to do that,’” Biden told his New Hampshire audience. "Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well, but we don't think of it that way," he said.

“Gimme a break! Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program for God’s sake.”

Part of me wants to argue this isn't a cycle of demand and is instead capitalism. The trades didn't pay poorly because there were too many people as much as people willing to work for less and the employer will pocket the difference. I admit this is extremely pedantic of me to split hairs here but people have an effective floor for how much they can work for. Coal miners weren't being told to code because there were too many coal miners but that they could never work for as little as the machines that were replacing them.

To be clear I'm not saying AI is a replacement for programmers, I'm not able to see the future here, but capitalists will attempt to to replace any labor with machines if possible.

Yes! As Heinlein wrote - "Specialization is for insects." Any human can benefit from any skill in any of the trade skills and programming, too.

In fairness, we've been complaining about university graduate computer programmers being nearly useless since as far back as when I was an almost useless university graduate computer programmer. Ha ha.

That's the key point I reckon "if coding is your thing" many people are trying to learn a complex thing they have no interest in.

They can't, this is the same shit that happened when the dipshit ceos sent dev jobs over seas to code farms. Devs lost their jobs, and the code went to shit. Then when shit started breaking, they magically rehired everyone again to spend years cleaning up the shit code. LLMs are this all over again, just quicker this time.