[pianoben]

They aren't trying to replace us in earnest, yet. They are using the threat to beat down wages, and to more generally tilt the power balance further in favor of ~capital~ employers.

"Replacement" is smoke and mirrors at this point; anyone who seriously tries it will quickly fail, with today's technology.

[cogman10]

It's very similar to offshoring.

We currently have an offshore dev team that is frankly just a money pit. Still, the C levels keep trying to make us use them and it's never been successful. Our offshore devs are simply incompetent because we hired for cheap and not quality.

[rented_mule]

I've been at a company that did hire overseas for competence. It was still very difficult, primarily because of the communication bottleneck imposed by timezone differences. At times, we had significant parts of these remote teams move to the US, and they were great contributors once they were in the same timezone. Low latency communication is a big deal.

Teams across communication divides like this must own their own piece of the system with a small, well-designed, well-documented interface. Conway's Law is in extreme force in these situations and must be respected if there is to be meaningful success.

I think you're right that LLMs have similar issues. There are no timezone issues, but communication is still very difficult on anything that isn't completely concrete. I think this is part of why they can be good on 1-10 line snippets, but get much worse if you try to get to dozens or hundreds of lines of code that aren't filled with boilerplate and redundancies. Taking that drudgery off our hands (where we can't eliminate it) is a real productivity win, but it's a far cry from replacing us.